Gay and/or Lesbian Characters in Science Fiction

Bullshit. All genres are perfectly capable of challenging social conventions. Case in point: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

really?

one of the main criticisms of that book that i've seen of that book is that Heinlein wasn't big on gay male characters.

LeGuin is awesome like that.

Didn't Parasite Eve have 2 lesbian characters in it? I never played it I just remember some vague fuss when it was released.

I'd have to agree with the last sentence of that section

A lot of things Heinlein says in his books seems to get mis-interpreted that way. They assume that something a character of his says is how he feels about something, instead of just using the characters' opinions as a way of talking about them.

Towards the end of Stranger in a Strange Land, VM Smith was going to have sex with Ben Caxton to help him get over his jealousy of Smith's relationship with Gillian Boardman. And though nothing was explicitly stated, Jill and Dawn were pretty chummy at the end.

right, jill and dawn got together just fine, but mike "grokked a wrongness" in two men being together except for one part near the end.

i think the overall tone of the book (which i still totally love by the way) was very much biased towards gay women being cool and gay men being mildly icky -- not in terms of jill's view but as the bias of the writer coming through.

not that i have a problem with it, i just wanted to point out that in Stranger in a Strange Land only the women were really bi.

Well, that was just what Jill suspected, it wasn't what Mike himself said, and it was after Mike's transformation into a man, rather than a martian who didn't know what was going on, that he was down with teh buttsecks. But overall it wasn't really an issue in the book, just a couple of passing mentions, and the Mike/Ben thing. And those thoughts make sense coming from Jill as her concepts of sexuality expanded over the course of the book, like her learning to enjoy exhibitionism, and understanding Duke's enjoyment of porn. Either way you look at it though, his views were pretty progressive for a 54 year old in 1961.

If you read the wiki article on him it talks a bit more about what he wrote about gays, especially in his later work (which was full of weird couples. Mother/son, man/man's twin female clones, etc)

I haven't read either of those, so I can't comment on that.


But like i was saying earlier I've seen people try to hang a lot of things on Heinlein based on his characters' beliefs, and they never seemed to fit him when you take his whole body of work into account.

The incest stuff was kind of weird though.

oh! Forever War, by Joe Haldeman.

Beat ya to it.

I think somebody mentioned Forever War before, but I was wondering what everyone's opinion was on it.

The whole novel is high in metaphor about the changes for soldiers returning from Vietnam. Homosexuality in the novel was presented as being a government supported initiative to curb over population. Late in the novel, homosexuality leads to gender ambiguity, sexual ambiguity, then finally an asexual society.

On the other hand, the main character's mother is in a loving relationship with her "nurse/roommate." It does not seem born out of necessity (as is implied). On the other other hand, the main character is unable to handle this emotionally and leaves town.

d'oh.

i really enjoyed Forever War. hilariously, i gave up trying to describe the sexual situation in that book in a way that didn't make it sound homophobic, because the story itself never struck me as passing any particular judgment on anyone's sexuality.

Social convention =/= basic assumption. We moved on a little, somewhere back on page 1. Which is why we were talking about "forward-looking", rather than simply GLBT characters in fiction. Remember?

It's been a while since I read it but I seem to recall Dr. Adder, by J.W. Jeter had a gay encounter in it. Lots of strange sexual things in the book in any event.

Definitely. An overbred mutant chicken, IIRC...

And that would be K W Jeter