Homosexuality in Sci-Fi

[Listener]

The book I'm currently reading, Vellum, has two (or more) homosexual characters who engage in sex in the text.  That's why I was thinking about this.

Does it bother anyone?  Or are most SF readers of the mindset that, in the future, we'll accept people regardless of who they like to boink?

Also, when there are homosexual characters/arcs, especially when it's male characters, am I the only one who thinks the authors have an annoying tendency to be overly graphic?  In China Mieville's Iron Council, for example, the fact that two of the main protagonists were gay didn't bother me, but I felt the descriptions were more vivid and graphic than they would have been if the characters were not gay.  (And that's saying something, because Mieville has written some pretty graphic sex stuff in the Bas-Lag books.)

It's not the sex that bothers me, nor the participants.  I'm looking more at the authors here and how they treat the material as opposed to how they treat heterosexual sex.

[Jim]

What I would want to know is if it's important to the story or is meant to be merely titillating.

I know of certain tv shows that have presented homosexuality for obvious ratings reasons (cough***deepspacenine***cough), letting the fact that two women were going to make out leak to the geek press.

[DKT]

It's an interesting question.  Iron Council immediately leapt to my mind when I saw the subject -- before I'd even read the post.  I don't remember it very well, so I can't say how the sex between those two characters in that book relates to the sex of any other characters in that book (I can't even remember if any of the other characters had sex!).  I do remember some graphic stuff in Perdido Street Station between Isaac and Lin, as well as in the Scar between Shekel and the reMade, so I wouldn't say he writes more graphically about gay sex than straight sex.  I should point out that the two examples I've pointed out of "straight" sex are very...weird, so take that for what it's worth.  So comparing them could come off in two completley different ways.  

I haven't noticed as much of a trend in SF/F as I have in mainstream/popular literature.  Michael Chabon springs to mind.  The only other SF/F writer I can think of off the top of my head who writes it (and writes it very well IMO) is Neil Gaiman.  I'm sure there's loads of others, though.  

Does it bother me?  Not really, not when it's done well.  I've read lots of books where straight characters have very graphic sex.  The trick to me is whether it adds something to the story or whether it's just added (example: I really like reading Richard K. Morgan's stuff but I think his heroes go down on every girl they meet -- enough already).  

[DKT]

I know of certain tv shows that have presented homosexuality for obvious ratings reasons (cough***deepspacenine***cough), letting the fact that two women were going to make out leak to the geek press.

You know what bothers me about TV shows.  It's quite often we see homosexuality between women in primetime.  Fine, but I feel like we hardly ever see it between men.  I think it's because for some reason, our culture is more accepting of women being gay than we are of men.

[Jim]

I think it's because for some reason, our culture is more accepting of women being gay than we are of men.

There are sociologists working on those issues as we speak. It might be hard-wired into the brain.

[Kronikarz]

I think Russel T Davies, the writer for the new Doctor Who series, is someone who isn't afraid to show that side of human nature, him being gay and all. A few of the episodes touch on that, ie. the ones with Jack Harkness. And, I mean, Torchwood?

[BrandtPileggi]

It was pretty hard for me at the beginning of Dhalgren by Samual Delany. But you quickly get to that point where you just don't care anymore. Thank God too because that book is GREAT. I think we have a tendancy to put ourselves in the situation which, if that's not your thing, can give you heebie jeebies. After a couple scenes I stopped doing it and it no longer mattered.

[Heradel]

I think Russel T Davies, the writer for the new Doctor Who series, is someone who isn't afraid to show that side of human nature, him being gay and all. A few of the episodes touch on that, ie. the ones with Jack Harkness. And, I mean, Torchwood?

He's quoted as saying that eventually every main character will end up sleeping with every other main character in Torchwood. Which'll be fun. Doctor Who's appeal to children keeps him from really touching on a lot of sexual politics, though he does sneak it in (the Shakespeare episode).

[SFEley]

Does it bother anyone?  Or are most SF readers of the mindset that, in the future, we'll accept people regardless of who they like to boink?

I can't speak for "most SF readers," but that is my mindset.  We're already seeing it in society.  Overt sexual preference discrimination is already minimal or frowned upon in many countries and cultures -- and in many subcultures in the U.S.  (Including "geek" subcultures, which incorporate much of the science fiction audience.)

Also, when there are homosexual characters/arcs, especially when it's male characters, am I the only one who thinks the authors have an annoying tendency to be overly graphic?  In China Mieville's Iron Council, for example, the fact that two of the main protagonists were gay didn't bother me, but I felt the descriptions were more vivid and graphic than they would have been if the characters were not gay.

It's odd that you say that, because I just finished The Iron Council last week and I don't remember any sex scenes.  I remember Cutter going off to have sex with a number of men, but I don't recall much if any prose being devoted to the act itself.  I'm grabbing the book and flipping through it now, and there are some references to sweaty nights together and such, but nothing anatomical that I can find.  Is there a particular scene that stands out to you?  If you can tell me when and who it involved, I'll go back and look it up to find the actual words used.

Oh, and by the way, of the primary characters, only Cutter was gay.  Judah Low was bisexual.  (His deeper relationship with Ann-Hari really bothered Cutter.)

[SFEley]

You know what bothers me about TV shows.  It's quite often we see homosexuality between women in primetime.  Fine, but I feel like we hardly ever see it between men.  I think it's because for some reason, our culture is more accepting of women being gay than we are of men.

It's because men still drive most of the viewing decisions.  Women making out with women is a turn-on to many men.  Men making out with men is a major turn-off.  (And if it turns many women on, so what?  They're not holding the remote.)

I personally believe most men are juvenile idiots unnecessarily strong in their reactions to this.  But since I don't want to be the one to get this thread moderated or moved, I'd better leave it there.  >8->

[SFEley]

I think Russel T Davies, the writer for the new Doctor Who series, is someone who isn't afraid to show that side of human nature, him being gay and all. A few of the episodes touch on that, ie. the ones with Jack Harkness. And, I mean, Torchwood?

Most people here probably already know this, but Davies was previously the creator and writer of the original version of Queer as Folk.  (One of maybe two or three UK-to-US adaptations that worked really well.  Anna and I have been watching the Showtime series and enjoying it a lot.)

[ClintMemo]

I usually find sex scenes in SF as a distraction, regardless of the participants. They just normally strike me as gratuitous, unless the scene reveals something about the characters (I Look Forward to Remembering You) or unless sex is central to the story (Lust for Learning).  Otherwise, I'd just rather the author just write the equivalent "and then they went off and boinked and it was good."

Do I sound like Fred Savage? 

A friend of mine is writing a detective novel.  He gave a rough draft to his mother to read.  She told him she liked it but that it didn't have any sex and that he'd never be able to sell it if there was no sex in it.

[raygunray]

Most people here probably already know this, but Davies was previously the creator and writer of the original version of Queer as Folk.  (One of maybe two or three UK-to-US adaptations that worked really well.  Anna and I have been watching the Showtime series and enjoying it a lot.)

My wife and I (incidentally, also named Anna) watched the entire five seasons on DVD. I was squeamish about the sex at first, then, I got used to it.  I had to fight through the "Am I Gay For Watching This?" juvenile fit, but then realized the resounding answer was "No".  I'm glad I did.  I am much more understanding toward gays.

The Brian Kenney character's observation on Gays helped me understand the gay psyche.  "We may be gay, but we're men. And men like to (bleep!) with anyone they like."  So I'd expect a gay writer depicting a sex scene to be graphic, since many straight erotica by men is graphic as well. Men are aroused by visuals and less by subtleties like women.
 
In any kind of good literature, I think sex scenes exist more to reveal the characters inner self rather than add a "money shot" to keep the reading turning pages.  It may also reveal the social mores of the characters' culture.  Sex is also a form of communication where two people can have an nonverbal exchange that even the best writer can't fully explain.

[Listener]

It's odd that you say that, because I just finished The Iron Council last week and I don't remember any sex scenes.  I remember Cutter going off to have sex with a number of men, but I don't recall much if any prose being devoted to the act itself.  I'm grabbing the book and flipping through it now, and there are some references to sweaty nights together and such, but nothing anatomical that I can find.  Is there a particular scene that stands out to you?  If you can tell me when and who it involved, I'll go back and look it up to find the actual words used.

Oh, and by the way, of the primary characters, only Cutter was gay.  Judah Low was bisexual.  (His deeper relationship with Ann-Hari really bothered Cutter.)

It's been a year or so since I read the book, so I may be thinking of another book in the technofantasy genre.  And you're right about Judah... like I said, it's been a while and a lot of books have passed through my brain since then.

[jahnke]

It's not the sex that bothers me, nor the participants.  I'm looking more at the authors here and how they treat the material as opposed to how they treat heterosexual sex.

Sex in literature in general tends to bother me, I guess I am getting old, I used to like to read the more graphic stuff (we passed around a dog eared copy of Wifey and other like novels when I was in Jr. High) BUT stories that address the social aspects of homosexuality do interest me. Whether or not homosexuals should be a protected class, (true they are discriminated against, but so are short, ugly and fat people do they deserve legal protection as well) the looking forward at how this plays into the future fascinates me. Joe Haldeman touched upon it in "Forever War" which was somewhat interesting, sex actually was a meme in that novel, and accepted forms and practices changed dramatically as time passed. And lately some good short stories have been out with strong homosexual protagonists dealing with issues caused by homosexuality. Some are pretty far reaching like "Birth Days" by Geoff Ryman and other are the ones we find today and the rest of the story is futuristic like  "Cocoon" by Greg Egan. Speaking of Haldeman "Camouflage" had some interspecies sexual and love themes in it that I found interesting as well, it had to be somewhat explicit but there really was a point to it in the end.

Sex is clearly a prime mover for us as a species (it had damn well better be for evolution to be true.) And I think all it's forms have a place in SF, but the explicit act tends to bother me when I am reading, I feel as though I am being pandered to. BUT if someone uses it to present an interesting line of thought I am all for that.

Jer,

[Michael]

I thought it was quite interesting when Spider Robinson finished the half completed novel "Variable Star" for the late Robert Heinlein, you could definitely feel when Heinlein left the room and Robinson entered.  The gay characters certainly being the most glaring departure from a 1950's juvenile, which Variable Star otherwise was.  Evolution of society over 50 years--70% of people over 50 disapprove of gay marriage, 70% of people under 30 approve.  Time marches on. 

[Shotobouv]

If I may be so bold to add some books that have addressed sex in sci-fi.

Heinlein has on many occasions. "Friday", "I Shall Fear No Evil", "Glory Road", and "Stranger in a Strange Land". To name a few.

Frederick Pohl, "Gateway". Also addresses homosexuality.

Pohl Anderson, "The Avatar". Everyone on the ship seems to sleep with every other person on the ship.

Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness".

There are others that have written about sex or used sex as a way to enhance a story. I think the question you could ask is what does talking about sex do to the story. Does it inhance the story, is it used as filler, is the discussion of sex social commentary?

Just some thoughts.

[Roney]

The book I'm currently reading, Vellum, has two (or more) homosexual characters who engage in sex in the text.  That's why I was thinking about this.

I found the sexual content of Vellum striking, partly because it was uncommonly graphic for SF, but mostly because it was uncommonly... exuberant.  For one of the most important characters, sex is his animating force.  For him and one of the other characters, lust is the defining aspect of their relationship.  To shy away from the sex or to keep it decorously off camera would be to fail to portray these two characters accurately (and there's a structural reason why the characters are as they are that I won't discuss further).  The fact that these characters are male in their various incarnations ineluctably leads to a lot of gay sex.

By the end of Ink, I was more inclined to describe the sex as "relentless".  There's a lot of it compared to most other fiction, within the genre or without.  But then there's a lot about The Book Of All Hours that's relentless.  Similar stories are played out repeatedly in different folds of the vellum (I promise that this statement makes sense in context) so it's inevitable that the same characters are repeatedly shown having sex.  When everything in the story tends towards excess, it would be unfair to pick out the gay sex as gratuitous.

It won't surprise me if in 25 years' time this topic is barely even remarked on any more.  I'm sure different authors will differ in the quantity and explicitness of their gay sex scenes as much as they differ in their straight sex scenes (or technobabble, or depth of character development, or pacing, or any other element of their style), but there will probably be enough explicit gay sex that it won't seem particularly surprising.

Just now I can think of one obvious reason why "serious" SF authors might be writing more explicit scenes of gay sex (or cross-species sex in one of the China Mieville examples mentioned above): frequent descriptions of heterosexual sex described from a male character's POV could be seen as pandering to the traditional SF demographic of nerdy teenage (or never-grew-up) males who aren't getting enough.  You can avoid this by not writing about sex at all, but it's very limiting for an author to ignore such an important part of what it means to be alive.  Or you can write scenes that are less likely to be seen as trying to boost sales with cheap titillation.  (Not that I believe that Hal Duncan or China Mieville would let such cynical motives drive their writing.)

[BSWeichsel]

I've never had a problem with it.

But what does get me in quite a fit is when ever it comes up some one says "If there's not a reason for the character to be gay then why is he/she gay?"

Really gets under my skin. Why is a character straight? This more comes up with race then sexual orientation but still makes me want to smack some one

[jahnke]

I've never had a problem with it.

But what does get me in quite a fit is when ever it comes up some one says "If there's not a reason for the character to be gay then why is he/she gay?"

Really gets under my skin. Why is a character straight? This more comes up with race then sexual orientation but still makes me want to smack some one

My question ultimately is who cares? It would not surprise me to know that people I have everyday interactions with are straight or gay. It would surprise me to learn it though. I mean the guy I buy my bagel from in the morning, or the conductor who punches my ticket on the train or even the lady I pay the 2 dollars to park my car at the train station; I don't care if they are vegetarians, republicans, homosexuals, or even, and I hate to admit this, Chicago Bears fans, given where I live this last one is almost universally likely. But it just doesn't matter.

So it seems to me that in a lot of cases whether a character is left handed or gets off by looking at someone's feet are not important in most stories. And thus... If they need to be gay then they should be gay. If they don't need to be then let the reader decide. As an anecdote, when I was in college I had 2 favorite books I read and re-read. One of them "Street Lethal" deals with unthinking blind rage and is written by Steven Barnes, who is a black author. The hero of the story is black, as is the heroine, but I must have read that book a hundred times before I realized this. And I was only sure of it once I read the sequel to the book. So leave it to the reader to decide some things about the character. Learning Arbury Knight was black didn't really change Street Lethal for me, it did help clarify a few passages in the book I found confusing by making them black though.

I think by leaving things ambiguous you let the reader fill in the gaps. And in many cases they will discard anomalous data. If I had not found Barnes book so appropriate to how I felt I would have read it once and set it aside forever thinking Arbury was a white dude. Because all the places where black and white were used as contrast were just mentally discarded by me as unimportant. The theme that was important to me was the rage I never thought his rage was racially motivated, I mean why would I? I am a middle class white male what do I know about racism?

[jamesotron]

Personally I couldn't give a toss about the genders, orientations or even number of participants in a fictional sex act, just as long as it's well written and believable.  For example, I can't believe that Neil Stephenson's editors allowed the "sex" scene between America Shaftoe and Randall Waterhouse to stay in and bring down the overall tone of the book.  He could have written "and then they had sex in the truck" and it would have been more effective.  At least with the latest three books he's given up completely on writing sex scenes

But seriously, isn't it more important that the scene is well written and works in the context of the story than who it's participants are?

[DDog]

But seriously, isn't it more important that the scene is well written and works in the context of the story than who it's participants are?

Sometimes. Other times, readers/listeners need to see more of their own context.

It's not really analogous to Escape Pod, but there are hundreds and probably thousands of lovely little books about children and their families that are well-written and work in the context of the story etc, and this is great--but it is still a serious problem if all of these lovely little books are about white children and their white heterosexual families.

[Listener]

Personally I couldn't give a toss about the genders, orientations or even number of participants in a fictional sex act, just as long as it's well written and believable.  For example, I can't believe that Neil Stephenson's editors allowed the "sex" scene between America Shaftoe and Randall Waterhouse to stay in and bring down the overall tone of the book.  He could have written "and then they had sex in the truck" and it would have been more effective.  At least with the latest three books he's given up completely on writing sex scenes

But seriously, isn't it more important that the scene is well written and works in the context of the story than who it's participants are?

I know this is kind of OT, but as a sex scene, that was a pretty decent one.  I agree that it didn't necessarily fit perfectly in the book, but then, did the Capn Crunch chapter really fit either?  I've noticed that sometimes Stephenson will just go off on tangents for a chapter and then come back.

(I haven't read the Baroque Cycle, so I don't know if he still does.)

Anyway, speaking as someone who writes erotica, I thought it was okay on its own.

Now back to your regularly-scheduled debate.

[bolddeceiver]

I don't know that the scenes are more graphic.  I think we are more apt to notice a sex scene that we're not titilated by, either immediately at that moment or in theory.  I've heard plenty of straight men bemoaning how graphic gay scenes are (and not just here), but I've also heard gay men talk about how icky they find all the hetero sex in film and literature.  And as a bisexual I find neither to be too over-the-top most of the time.  I think this is one of those things where it's really, really hard to be objective.

[SFEley]

I know this is kind of OT, but as a sex scene, that was a pretty decent one.  I agree that it didn't necessarily fit perfectly in the book, but then, did the Capn Crunch chapter really fit either?  I've noticed that sometimes Stephenson will just go off on tangents for a chapter and then come back.

I would hazard that Cryptonomicon in particular is more about the tangents than the plot.