Monday 2nd September 2024: Steve Silberman Eulogy

I was going to write a blog about Autscape, but that’ll have to wait until next week. Instead, on Friday, I found out that Steve Silberman had passed away unexpectedly in his sleep, just as I was going to attend a talk of a new friend I’d made this year. I was pretty broken up. I needed a cry, which I ended up doing pretty much in the middle of Autscape, a kind of community I was introduced to by proxy, through Steve Silberman’s 2015 book Neurotribes. Steve is in everything I do and wish to achieve at whatever it is I happen to be doing. This is therefore my own, very personal, eulogy.

Near the end of my Master’s, in 2016, I picked up Neurotribes from the Waterstones at Gower Street, near UCL. Because to my relationship with Harry, and their normalising my toxic ideas about autism and neurodivergence, I was brave enough to pick up this absolute chonker of a book – look at it, doorstop isn’t the word! I knew I was going to read it at some point. It took until the next year, after being fired for 6 jobs in a single year for being who I was. I read it cover to cover when I was staying with my now partner in Swansea. It was eye-opening. I’ve written about the experience in Feeling Fast and Slow. Neurotribes gave me a new perspective on who I – and my friends – were. It also gave me a peek at what we could be.

I only met Steve once, though we were in touch, in dribs and drabs, from June 2019 until about a year ago. He gave me the wonderful quote on the testimonials page and the chance to take the photo up on this page (with the amazing Jamie from Jamie & Lion, too!) and on the Activism page. I was attending Autistic UK’s The Future is Gold event in Manchester; he fancied me, I could tell. I was, despite what my body was telling me, in my early-thirties twink phase. Love me some autistic collagen. For my part, I was enthralled too – he was charismatic, joyful and sparkling.

Steve’s prose sings. His rhythms are propulsive, there is music to his writing. His endless curiosity and boundless enthusiasm pushed me on, even in the depths of his descriptions of eugenics. His humour and intentionality, his bravery, is big-picture thinking, his understanding of the beauty of the individual mind, it was all there. I had already experimented with the historiography of mental health during the last months of my MA, but Steve put it to use. Without Steve, no Professionally Autistic, no mentoring or books on the topic, no Feeling Fast and Slow, no Teeming – certainly not in the form it’s in now. I don’t know what I’d be doing today if not for Steve and his writing.

Whether Steve himself was neurodivergent or not is immaterial. I have a hypothesis that I will not ask Keith to confirm or deny. Like his apatheist perspective on an afterlife (see @WardQNormal on BlueSky), Steve was not interested in seeking out his own beautiful brain for neuroqueernesses. He knew diagnoses were social constructs, he knew their history and he knew what they were used for, particularly in the United States. He also knew that he’d found his people – Deadheads, Freak Flags, Hippies, Beatniks, Ginsberg’s lyrics and the San Francisco queer community. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the City Lights bookshop. The uptown hipsters, the hepcats, the poets. Political activists too, the antifascist left: Steve believed in an America, and a world, worth having. Also the tech innovators of the bay area – the good ones, not the ones responsible for the hellscape he righteously deplored. He knew that he didn’t need more communities for himself. He’d found his. He had many. He didn’t need more.

In the txi ride we shared to central Manchester, He spoke about his own, thankfully brief, experience of conversion therapy. He was fortunate to have parents who accepted him for who he was – a gay man. I am still an advocate against conversion therapy under whichever brand the torture is being sold as now – fuelled by Steve’s righteous fury.

When I sat on that bench, next to Steve and Alan Turing, I felt a tiny part of a history much larger than me. I hope I can do these two gay geniuses proud. Like van der Lubbe, Turing died before he could identify as neurodivergent. Like many others still, Steve passed knowing what he knew about himself, sidestepping the diagnostic question. With or without diagnoses, they are the giants on whose shoulders we stand. They are our history. Our thought and radical action build onto their foundations. I am grateful to have a moment alongside posterity.

I am outraged and frustrated on his behalf and on mine that he couldn’t see his new book ‘The Taste of Salt’ finished and on bookshelves – but I hope that enough is salvageable for writers/editors with cystic fibrosis to piece together the project he spent his last years engaged in with the same love he had for our community.

And yes, when he went to the airport, I hugged him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. I resent that I was never allowed to do that again, but am thankful for the chance he gave me.

With love, freak flag flying, in gratitude for the brief times we spent together. I wish so much love and strength to his husband Keith, his family and the millions of people whose lives he changed for the better. He made me, and so many others, feel less alone.