oh, and also, OSC? fuck you.

[hth]

I don't know if I could really respond better than this to the latest salvo of unhinged homophobic batshittery from Orson Scott Card.

I remember reading the Memory of Earth series in college, back when it was even harder than it is now to find even vague references to homosexuality in genre fiction. One of the main characters was a gay man who married a woman because it was required of him, and I remember thinking it was just a really intelligent, poignant treatment of a character who had made this terrible choice between two mutually exclusive types of happiness. It's weird to look back now and realize that whole arc was not, as I believed at the time, *descriptive* of what it's like to live under enforced heteronormativity, but *prescriptive.* Card doesn't hate gay people; he just hates gay people who selfishly destroy civilization by refusing to enter heterosexual marriages and breed.

Oh, and by the way, the reason Card doesn't consider himself a homophobe is that he subscribes to a very specific definition of the word, where homophobia means a fear of homosexuality that is so crippling as to interfere with one's life. Well, I sort of think he's crossed that bridge now, since he's so terrified of teh gay conspiracy to destroy everything good and pure in lif that he can't think of any other recourse than civil war. That sort of seems like it's getting in the way of being, you know, a normal human being who doesn't want to incite civil wars? Oh, and also, a lot of his former fans now wouldn't buy one of his books if it came with a lifetime's supply of cool shoes and lubricant, so it's not been a great boon to his career, either.

Also, fuck Orson Scott Card.

Comments

[evalangui.livejournal.com]

Hi there, I was just looking for your SGA fanfic (still homeless, I gather?) and well, OSC kind of broke my heart a while back when I discovered completely by accident that he was a homophobic shit. I tortured myself pretty badly trying reading his opinions to understand how his reasoning went because the guy was a great storyteller and was all for accepting ALIENS and otherness and it made ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE. I confort myself thinking that obviously he is himself pretty gay and it's trying to somehow justify how his attraction to males doesn't make him a bad Mormon or whatever because, seriously, even when he has female characters that are remotely as interesting as his male characters is always his male characters that actually *show* any kind of real emotion for each other and his het marriages are always arranged somehow and have a business deal feeling to it (sometimes the guy gets the woman's family, sometimes he gets her ideals but he never gets *her* as his "prize", she's never the point of the affair). It's a pity there's no more OSC-book based slash that's any good because it would be so great to send him something that turned his own writing against him.

Wow, really ranted at you and I didn't even read that link because I don't want to be pointlessly mad! Anyway, shutting up now :p