alarajrogers:

seananmcguire:

chicleeblair:

seananmcguire:

I think so much depends on a) when you were first exposed to a thing, b) how regularly you have been exposed to it after that first time, and c) whether you’re trying to pretend the thing has no issues.

I mean, you’re really asking two different things here.  “Do you think you can enjoy something that was created by a terrible person?”  Absolutely.  For one thing, we don’t all have a complete Rolodex of Every Bad Thing Anyone Has Ever Done.  I have read and watched and loved and treasured things made by people who I later found out were awful; their awfulness clearly did not render the thing completely unenjoyable to the ignorant.

“Can you continue to enjoy something that was created by a terrible person?”  Yes, although that takes a little more awareness, I think, of what’s going on, and it’s going to be very, very personal, and very, very situational.  Joss Whedon cheated on his wife and abused his power over young actresses and was kind of a terrible person.  But Buffy was still incredibly important to me as a teen, and if it comes on the TV, I’ll get through about ten minutes of most* episodes before I forget what I know and only remember what I feel, and what I feel is nostalgia and joy and yes, enjoyment.  I don’t get to erase what he did.  I will think long and hard before I do things that put more money in his personal pockets.  But I can still enjoy some of his work.

(*Most: the episodes that clearly show certain tendencies were hard to watch before I realized how personal they were for him.  I can’t deal anymore.  I just can’t.)

“Can you enjoy something that has a lot of problematic elements?”  Absolutely.  Part of this is really going to be when you were first exposed.  I know a lot of the things I read, watched, and loved as a kid are super-problematic by today’s standards, and I’m careful to review them before I recommend them to other people, but my love doesn’t necessarily die because I learn more.  Obviously, this is subjective: Revenge of the Nerds was absolutely tainted for me by the rapey aspects of the carnival, which went completely over my head as a child, while I can still handle Real Genius despite some of the casual sexism.  How problematic is too problematic is completely individual.

“Are you allowed to enjoy something that has problematic elements?”  Everything has problematic elements.  Everything.  If we can’t see them yet, we’ll see them in ten years, and maybe we’ll be horrified, but it will also be a sign that the world is getting better.  Are people going to interrogate your enjoyment of certain things?  Yeah.  There’s a reason my friends who still love Ender’s Game mostly preface that love with “I know OSC is a bigot, but this book was so important to me when I was eleven,” or something of the sort.  There’s stuff I don’t discuss enjoying because I don’t want to have the conversation.  But unless it’s hurting other people, of course you’re allowed to enjoy it.  You get to enjoy anything you want.

Sigh. Gotta love how OS is a Bigoted Cad comes up every time….

I have friends who adore him as a person.  I have friends to whom he was a mentor and a huge cheerleader when they were getting into the business.

I have a baby sister who is gay.  I have a baby sister who is, like me, more nebulously queer–Goth Betty Page and I have spent our entire lives trying to figure our shit out–but Young James Dean is gay, period.  She is a lesbian.  She loves women.  She is also, out of the three of us, the most invested in the idea of the traditional family.  She was the first (and so far, only) of us to get married, to a woman.

Orson Scott Card put his own, personal money toward making same-sex marriage illegal in the state of California, where YJD lives.  He does not live in California.  He lives in a country where States Rights are a thing, and where the people of California should be allowed to make their own choices about things.  But he decided that no, the morality of Utah mattered more than the preferences of California, and put his own, personal money toward the cause of destroying my baby sister’s marriage.

So yeah.  OSC is a bigot.  And he has, through his direct financial choices, hurt a lot of people I care about.  For many members of the QUILTBAG community, whether they are, like YJD, absolutely gay, or are, like me and GBP, interested in being allowed to love who we love who we love without censure, supporting him either financially or otherwise is a very difficult thing to do.

The thing I find so incredibly sad, and angering, about OSC is that he told us, in his fiction, over and over, that he was going to grow up to be a hardened, cruel bigot, and why.

One of the themes that appears constantly in OSC’s work is that an older man, who is invested in the protection of society, abuses younger men, boys, occasionally girls, or people in general, because it is natural for young people to want freedom, but that freedom will destroy society. The older people must be cruel to shape the younger people into what they need to be. It turns up in Ender’s Game. It’s in Wyrms. It’s in Hart’s Hope, where a sympathetic man has to rape a 12 year old girl in order to prevent a successful rebellion against a truly evil king from collapsing, and later a father must allow his baby son to be murdered by the son’s mother in order to save the world. It’s in the one whose name I forget where aliens are eating people and one man volunteers to treat the people like sheep to be shorn, taking body parts as the aliens demand, in order to keep them all alive. It’s in “Unaccompanied Sonata”.

And over and over, the young people who wanted freedom grow up to be the ones who make the terrible choices. This is most obvious in “Unaccompanied Sonata”, where the people who enforce that artists are not allowed to consume anyone else’s art and cannot continue to create if they do are the artists who, after consuming the art of others, couldn’t obey the law to stop creating art. After being repeatedly tortured to force them to comply, after having their ability to make art stripped from them, they eventually become the enforcers of the law.

Card is quite probably a closeted gay man in denial. I say this not because I believe this is true of homophobes in general, but because:

– his writing about gay boys and men was, up until about 15 years ago, deeply sympathetic, but still writing from the perspective that it was wrong. In “Homecoming” he writes about the struggle of a gay man who came from a society where homosexuality was completely accepted, into a small band of 10 survivors where every man and every woman must reproduce within their assigned couples for the salvation of the human race, and how he has to make himself have sex with a woman he cares about as a friend, but does not love and is not attracted to. In “Treason”, a man impersonating a woman falls in love with the main character, who is physiologically intersex but identifies as male but is impersonating a woman, and while that man is a villain, the main character talks about how sweet and gentle the person’s songs are and how he is almost seduced. There is a lot of homoerotic affection shown between boys as well.

– More importantly, his stated reason for why he’s against gay marriage was that men are so much more naturally sympathetic to and understanding of other men, no man would marry a woman if he had the option to marry a man instead, and thus the human race would die out.

I mean, I’m sorry, wut?

No straight person is capable of coming up with this logic. The nastiest and most misogynistic of het incels still understand why men, no matter how much they don’t like women, would prefer to marry them than to marry other men. The only kind of person who’s capable of believing that the only thing stopping men from marrying other men exclusively, never marrying women, is the law, is someone who is gay but so ignorant about what it means to be gay that they have convinced themselves that their feelings are natural and normal and everyone has them, but that for the protection of society itself and the future of the human race such feelings must be repressed.

So Card has been telling us all along that he is sympathetic to the feelings of gay men, that he perfectly understands why a man would want to marry a man, but he believes – because this is what he’s been taught – that gay love is a selfish indulgence that will destroy humanity. And as an older man and a pillar of the community, it is his duty to torture and, if necessary, destroy, younger people (or really any people) who don’t understand this necessity and selfishly want the freedom to marry the people they genuinely love. Because that’s what older men do. They abuse the young and the non-conforming to save humanity, even though they have compassion for the young and non-conforming because once upon a time, that was what they were, too.

So this was a man who was capable of writing about non-conformists and rejects from society – and homosexuals – with incredible compassion and empathy. But it didn’t change anything. He’s been telling us from the beginning that he believes that it’s the role of older men to force conformity or obedience on the young and non-conforming, through violence if necessary, because that is what will Save The World. Humanity depends on older men performing this role. No matter how much compassion they feel, they must be harsh and cruel or we will all die.

Imagine believing that. Imagine believing, your whole life, that it’s your destiny to grow up to be someone who crushes the dreams of the young, because the young can’t be allowed to fulfill their dreams or else humanity goes extinct. Imagine loving men, but believing that your love for men, if expressed, would destroy the world, and that it’s your vital and important role as an adult to prevent men from expressing their love for each other, even though you know exactly what it feels like to wish you could express love for a man.

I feel very sorry for OSC. I also hate him, because he could have been so much better of a person than he is, and his worldview is both sickening and demonstrably untrue. He’s allowed his Mormon programming to overcome his empathy because he has been taught to believe that it is necessary for fathers to abuse their sons. He’s gone on record as being an abuse victim whose father was violent… but his writing demonstrates that his coping mechanism was to believe that his father only did it out of love and the need to protect the world. I feel so sad for the little boy he must have been once, and the young man whose writing I loved, but I despise the man he is now for not being able to break free of that programming, of not recognizing that you don’t need to torture the world to save it, and in fact that’s generally the opposite of helpful.