This is Adel Termos pictured with one of his children. Mr. Termos sacrificed himself by tackling a suicide bomber in Beirut on Thursday.Really bad things are happening around the world. And not just the ones that your national media is obsessing over.
There Is Only One Way to Defeat ISIS “We must hold accountable our Middle Eastern “allies”—the states and bankers and political elites—who persist in funding mass murder.”
This Is the Hero Who Sacrificed His Own Life to Save Hundreds From ISIS Terrorists. “…the attacks in Paris and Beirut are only the latest in a wave of terrorism that has swept the globe in recent months. Only weeks ago, a Russian airliner was downed near Egypt’s Sharm el-Sheikh resort in what was likely a bomb attack. In July, Egyptian soldiers killed nearly 100 militants in the Sinai during skirmishes there. Meanwhile in the Turkish capital of Ankara, nearly 100 were killed in explosions.”
(Click to embiggen)Thank goodness it’s Friday. November is moving along!
NaNoWriMo is taking up a lot of my time, so I’m not doing as much online news reading as usual. Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
H.P. Lovecraft was always a terrible choice for the World Fantasy Awards. “Lovecraft wrote stories where books could usher in the end of the world. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where imagination would lead you to death and insanity. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where curiosity didn’t only kill the cat, but made the cat pray for death to a cold and uncaring universe. H.P. Lovecraft wrote stories where the only thing you’d find through the looking glass, at the back of the wardrobe, or out beyond the stars was madness, depravity, and despair.”
Mormon Church Nostalgic for Days When Homophobia Just Hurt Homos. “I’ve seen lots of painful things, but nothing so widespread, in terms of the devastation and heartbreak. I personally talked to dozens of people who are walking away. And these aren’t people with LGBT ties. These are ardent, faithful, in-the-box believing Mormons who can’t abide this,”
The Most Basic Rule Of Journalism. “Hillary Clinton and Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina and the rest will argue that Who/What/When/Where/Why/How are all “gotcha” questions, but holding them (or anyone) accountable for their assertions — by demanding proof — isn’t a “gotcha” game.”
I’m hardly the first person to write about the challenges of being a fan of problematic material. And I have written a lot about at what point a particular writer’s or artist’s beliefs and actions in real life make it difficult to enjoy their creations. Because of events at the World Fantasy Awards ceremony earlier this week, a lot of people are talking about this topic right now. Plenty of people are weighing in on the specifics there–I’m not going to talk about that.
Instead, I want to talk about how this topic came up in relationship to one of my own posts earlier this year about some of the science fiction and fantasy I love.
I had specifically written about Isaac Asimov, a Grandmaster of Science Fiction who wrote a lot of both sci fi and science fact. One of my readers correctly pointed out that while Asimov’s writing was award-worthy, his personal behavior quite often wasn’t. A self-described “dirty old man,” Asimov was known for getting handsy with women and making sexual suggestions or “jokes” in public settings. This has been excused by some by saying that he was a product of his time. Yet both Mister Rogers and Charles Schulz were born in the same decade and were therefore products of the same time, and they knew not to grope strangers without permission!
The only thing that “a product of his time” really means here is that women who complained about that kind unwanted attention got even less support and sympathy from society at that time than they do now.
So, he was a problematic person. I don’t find his writing to be particularly misogynist nor exploitive. Yes, it was mostly as sexist as any other fiction written in the 1930s-1980s. One of the most common critiques leveled against his writing in that regard is that he tended to avoid any romance in his stories altogether; which means at least wasn’t making the women prizes for the men all the time. On the other hand, he did occasionally write stories with women as protagonists, which is more than you can say about many of his male contemporaries in the genre.
Just because I’m not offended by his writing doesn’t mean that others can’t be, nor does it mean that anyone is under an obligation to like his writing.
His groping and inappropriate comments were not the only issues the previous commenter mentioned. Isaac Asimov got married when he was 20 to a woman of whom his parents approved. Isaac cheated on his wife, Gertrude, frequently, eventually causing them to separate. At which point Asimov immediately began living with one of the women he’d been having an affair with. Three years later Gertrude and Isaac finally divorced, and two weeks later Isaac married Janet O. Jeppson, the women with whom he’d been living since separating from Gertrude.
There are people who say that Isaac continued to cheat on Janet just as he had with Gertrude. There is a very big problem with this claim: no one but Janet and Isaac knows whether his flings and dalliances after the marriage to Janet were cheating. They may have had an open relationship (which most non-monogamous couples don’t admit to, because society is even less accepting of polyamory and monogamishness than they are of philanderers).
We know that Gertrude did not agree to an open relationship, because she made that very clear on more than one occasion. Asimov was definitely in the wrong during his first marriage. So he was definitely a cheater as well as a sexual harasser during that time. But if Janet agreed to an open relationship, then it wasn’t cheating. Period.
That doesn’t negate his other failings, but we can’t presume to know what agreement Isaac and his second wife had or didn’t have, absent word directly from her.
Human relationships are messy. Society makes the mess worse, because people are expected to figure out their sexual needs and relationships with inadequate information while weighed down by gigantic amounts of societal baggage, a great deal of which is false. Thanks to myths such as the Relationship Escalator, the One True Soulmate Fairytale, and the Marriage=Adulthood Fallacy, people get married when they aren’t ready to other unprepared people who are not compatible (in many ways).
In my experience that often goes double for the kind of person who has the temperament to be a writer of any kind, and triple for those who are drawn to sf/f. Where a social awkwardness and arrested development is all too common.
People are imperfect. All people are imperfect. That means each and every one of us it imperfect. Sometimes we like things that contradict some of our own ideals. Sometimes we like people who don’t live up to all of our ideals.
Everyone is aware that their friends and loved ones are imperfect. The part we tend to overlook is: everyone who likes us does so in spite of our flaws. None of us live up to all of our own ideals all of the time, let alone live up to the ideals of our loved ones. In a relationship, we cut each other slack because we feel that other things outweigh the imperfections.
Which is where I come back to the original question. When you discover that the person who created something you love wasn’t very lovable, how much does it color your evaluation of the art or story? That’s going to vary from person to person. For me, the incredible sense of wonder I got the first time I read Asimov’s “The Last Question” is simply too big to dismiss. The sheer volume of science and history of science and a love for science that he packs into each essay in collections such as Only a Trillion, The Tragedy of the Moon, Of Time and Space and Other Things, or Quasar, Quasar Burning Bright will always make me glad we live in such an amazing universe. Whether I’m reminded of the hilarity and humanity of his mysteries, such as Murder at the ABA, or the understandability of his in-depth science books such as The Collapsing Universe and The Genetic Code, I keep thinking that if any other person had written one-tenth of what he did, they would be considered one of the greatest.
I cringe when I think of how he behaved toward women. I wish that the same brilliance which illuminated his writing had also informed his treatment of some of the people he met.
But I remain a fan of his work. And I understand if other people decide to give it a pass.
From the President Obama’s official proclamation for Veteran’s Day 2015:
The United States military is the strongest, most capable fighting force the world has ever known. The brave men and women of our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard demonstrate a resolute spirit and unmatched selflessness, and their service reminds us there are few things more American than giving of ourselves to make a difference in the lives of others. On Veterans Day, we reflect on the immeasurable burdens borne by so few in the name of so many, and we rededicate ourselves to supporting those who have worn America’s uniform and the families who stand alongside them.
Our true strength as a Nation is measured by how we take care of our veterans when they return home, and my Administration is committed to ensuring our heroes and their loved ones have every chance to share in the promise they risked their lives to defend. We have made it easier for veterans to convert their military skills to the civilian workforce, enabled more veterans and their family members to attain Federal education benefits, and expanded access to timely, quality health care for all veterans. Just as every veteran deserves the support and benefits they have earned, those who have given everything to defend our homeland deserve a place of their own to call home…
Our veterans left everything they knew and loved and served with exemplary dedication and courage so we could all know a safer America and a more just world. They have been tested in ways the rest of us may never fully understand, and it is our duty to fulfill our sacred obligation to our veterans and their families. On Veterans Day, and every day, let us show them the extraordinary gratitude they so rightly deserve, and let us recommit to pledging our full support for them in all they do.
It’s that time of year. For the last 17 years I’ve been dealing with an annual bout of depression. It usually manifests as random moodiness, occasional bouts of the irrational grumpies alternating with periods of mild melancholy. Very rarely there are even periods of free-floating rage.
It typically starts in September or so, and the kick off is usually when I notice that my birthday is approaching. Because a long time ago, the approach of my birthday also meant the approach of Ray’s birthday, which meant I could start planning what I was going to give him and how we were going to celebrate our birthdays.
And each year the depression usually stops sometime around the anniversary of Ray’s death, November 14. It’s never a completely clean ending. Some years I have a good cry. Some years when I don’t feel I’m getting through it or it’s just being worse than usual, I schedule a marathon of movies that will make me cry, so I induce a good cry.
This isn’t the only time of year I get sad remembering him. There’s always a moment during the decorating of the Christmas tree where I’ll start crying again, for instance. It might be when I unwrap one of his favorite ornaments, for instance. Then there’s times when one certain Christmas song as recorded by one particular artist pops up.
Last year was particularly bad. Much worse than it had been in some while. I don’t know any particular reason it was worse last year.
I had noticed that it didn’t seem to be happening this year. I wondered if maybe because last year was so bad that maybe this year I’d get a pass. But no. This morning I woke up really cranky for no reason, and then while I was picking out clothes to wear today I glanced up, saw Ray’s favorite stuffed tiger in his usual spot on a shelf above one dresser and I just about burst into tears. Every little thing that has gone wrong today (and they’ve all been quite minor annoyances, really) has either made me disproportionately angry or completely demoralized.
I have friends and loved ones who deal with chronic depression. I always feel a little guilty for even mentioning my annual issue when it seems so minor by comparison. But one of the times I said that, another friend reminded me that there’s nothing unreal about grieving. It’s not a competition. And it isn’t a zero-sum game.
Just as grieving my late partner doesn’t detract from my love for my living husband, admitting I’m not well doesn’t take anything away from other people.
It’s been said that shared grief is divided, while shared joy multiplies. I think another way to look at it is: sharing pain doesn’t really diminish the load, but the shared compassion and empathy replenishes our reserves, so the grief becomes bearable.
So, anyone who needs a hug, consider this an open offer. Because we all need a little more love.
(MemeGenerator.Net Click to embiggen)When my husband asked me yesterday if I heard about people being angry about Starbucks holiday cups, my first thought was that people were upset because it’s too soon to be doing Christmas stuff. No. The actual problem, according to one of those anti-whatever groups that like to get the rightwing so-called Christian base up in arms is that the plain red cups with a green Starbucks logo is taking the Christ out of Christmas: Christian evangelists claim Starbucks fanned ‘war on Christmas’ with minimalist holiday red coffee cups
Yep, the annual fake War on Christmas is underway!
I can totally see their point. I mean, past Starbucks holiday cups have featured such unmistakeable symbols of Christ as extremely abstract snowflakes, abstract peppermint candies, a winking snowman, a bobsledding dog, a squirrel begging for an acorn, and who can forget the jazzy Santa Claus? [/sarcasm]
The number of times that these folks have claimed that people are erasing Christ from Christmas by citing a derth of Santa Claus imagery just cracks me up every time. I wrote previously about how when I was a kid growing up in Southern Baptist churches Santa Claus was not considered a symbol of Christian Christmas at all. Oh, we weren’t forbidden from having Santas in our homes or visiting Santas in shopping malls or expecting presents from Santa. But it was very clearly part of the secular celebration, and not to be allowed in the church building itself. Specifically I wrote about the time that the Day Care associated with the church I attended as a teen-ager allowed the children to sing a song about Santa Claus as part of the annual Christmas event at the day care, and how a whole bunch of the church ladies were very upset about it: Up on the house top…
For some context, I should point out that most of the Baptist Churches I attended growing up (we moved around a lot because of my Dad’s job) also didn’t believe in having a manager scene inside the sanctuary of the church, unless it was an actual reenactment of the birth of Jesus being performed as part of the service. They might have a big light-up manger scene out on the lawn next to the church sign, but not inside the chruch, because that was iconography or idolatry!
Many of them only allowed a Christmas tree to be out in the social hall or the lobby, but not in the sanctuary because the tree was considered mostly a secular symbol, as well.
Happy Thanksgiving!Anyway, it’s silly. And it’s so silly, that when my husband and I went shopping later in the day yesterday, I had to go to Starbucks for the express purpose of getting something in the red cup.
Source: thedesmondproject.com/Homelessness-Info.html (Click to embiggen)Every minute I’m blogging is a minute I’m not adding to my NaNoWriMo word count, but some things have crossed my virtual desktop since making yesterday’s Friday Links post that I think need to be shared.
First, many weeks back I shared links to the story of Joel Andrew, an 18-year-old student who was kicked out by his parents for being gay. They didn’t just kick him out, they refused to pay for tuition at the college he was enrolled at, they refused to sign any financial aid forms (which means that legally he can’t apply for federal aid until he turns 25, yes it’s a thing), and they demanded that he stop using his last name (Andrew is not his original surname). The daughter of his dance teacher set up a GoFundMe page to raise money to pay his tuition for one semester, tons of people donated, and so on. There’s more news, and it’s good news (as much as you can get from a story like this): College Dance Student Raises $60K For Tuition After Parents Disown Him For Being Gay. Go read the linked stories.
The parents now claim that they didn’t kick him out, and didn’t demand that he stop using their last name, but I strongly suspect that’s a case of the classic, “I didn’t tell him he had to move out. I told him that if he was living under my roof who would have to stop seeing his boyfriend, stop admitting he’s gay, et cetera, et cetera.” Anyway, Joel is doing alright, now. Which is good. I want to echo Dan Savage’s comments that there are a lot of Joels out there who didn’t have someone to set up a GoFundMe page. We can help kids like Joel by donated to organizations such as the Ali Forney Center, the True Colors Fund, or the Point Foundation. There are a lot of local charities that serve the homeless, particularly homeless teens. Find one near you and help if you can.
Second: I included one link yesterday to news that the Latter Day Saints church has officially declared that gay members are no longer simply sinning, but are now apostates, and not only that, but that children of gay people in same sex relationships are banned from Baptism and serving in the church until they turn 18 and then only if they renounce their own parents. As Natasha Helfer Parker writes at Patheos: ‘…how dare we go against our own doctrines and punish the children for the “sins of their fathers?”‘ Being an apostate means that one has renounced or completely abandoned their faith and it in utter rebellion against said faith and principals. Calling being in a gay relationship ‘apostasy’ puts it on par with murder and rape, and as more than one observer as commented, the church doesn’t refuse baptism to the children of murderers nor rapists. It’s got more than a few members upset, obviously.
It would be really easy to make snarky comments. When stories like this are posted on gay news sites, there are always people chiming in with, “what gay person would want to live in {fill in name of extremely conservative state}” or “why would anyone want to belong to a religion that doesn’t welcome them?” or “all religions are B.S. anyway, so why should we care?” and so on. My answer remains the same: we don’t choose where we are born and we don’t choose which family we are born into. As children we were dependent on our families and communities of origin for the means of survival. Policies like this hurt people who cannot protect themselves. They create an atmosphere of bullying and coercion that drives children to commit suicide. And particularly in close-knit communities that encourage extended families to remain close and depend upon one another, this kind of intolerance ruins lives.
The repercussions of B.S. like this reach well past childhood or the children directly impacted. These teachings are what drives parents to kick their children who appear to be gay, lesbian, bi, or trans from their homes, for instance. The LDS church isn’t alone in this by any means. The Southern Baptists can claim that they love and respect everyone, but when in the same statement about marriage equality they say “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil” they’re saying to every queer or questioning kid growing up in their churches that they way they were born is evil. Which will lead many of them, after years of praying and doing everything in their power to stop feeling the way they do and being who they are to believing they are irredeemable and inherently unlovable. Just as the Catholic church can keep tricking reporters into repeating the claim that the church is “more welcoming to LGBT people” when that welcome is not unlike the parents I talked about earlier—you’re welcome to be told again and again that who you are is inherently disordered and you may only stay so long as you live a miserable, lonely existence constantly denying who you are.
Third: The loss of the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance is not simply a matter of one city. Nor is it as simple as hate and ignorance winning. We need to do some evaluation like this one: Why Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance Failed 80 if for no other reason that we’ve seen before that the anti-gay folks will reuse arguments that worked once again and again to take rights away. They are going to mount more campaigns just like this one to try to take away protections in jobs, housing, and so on. It isn’t a new tactic, by any means, but it’s one that can be made to work: How The Religious Right Learned To Use Bathrooms As A Weapon Against Justice
And they aren’t just using it to get anti-gay people to vote against us, they are already trying to get us to turn on each other: Homocon Petition: Drop The “T” From LGBT. It’s an anonymous petition. It is being promoted by certain gay republican jerks who have in the past argued against marriage equality and anti-discrimination laws. Scores of books can be written about why those folks actively participate in their own oppression, but make no mistake: this petition is not coming from people who have the well-being and rights of any queer person in mind. It’s called divide and conquer. If they can get us fighting among ourselves, it will be easy to not just stop the advancement of freedom, but to actually turn back the clock.
NaNoWriMo is taking up a lot of my time, so I’m not doing as much online news readying as usual. Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
People were linking to some cool author maps this week. They’re generated via crowdsource. You can improve the author maps and get some recommendations by going here: the global network of discovery.
Dear Ben Carson: Actually, You Are a ‘Homophobe’ If You’re Opposed to Marriage Equality Now. “…if you’re opposed to something that is now a right of every American and has been proven in court — in the federal trial over California’s Proposition 8 — to harm no one, including children, then you do have an irrational fear of homosexuality. And certainly if you’re a medical doctor yourself and you’re opposed to something that the American Medical Association, American Psychological Association and American Psychiatric Association deem normal, natural and healthy and not harmful at all to anyone, then you have an irrational fear of homosexuality. And that is the essence of homophobia – a fear of homosexuality.”
Jason Sanford set off small internet firestorm with a series of Twitter comments that he then collected on his blog as: The fossilization of science fiction and fantasy literature. Some people were upset because they thought he was implying that the classics of sci fi were garbage, when all he actually said was that younger people are reading, watching, and playing newer works and there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s since added a follow-up to clarify his point which included this important bit of context:
A few years ago I was on a SF/F panel about bringing new readers into the genre. I mentioned that SF needed more gateway novels, at which point the other author on the panel snorted and said we don’t need new gateway novels … the Heinlein juveniles are still perfect.
That is the type of attitude which people should fear because it will kill our genre. But new readers not discovering SF/F through the classic authors you grew up on — that’s nothing to worry about.
His critique was not aimed at the classics themselves, but rather at older fans and pros who belittle younger people who first learned to love science fiction and fantasy by encountering newer works, or who lecture people who aren’t familiar with many works published 70 or more years ago, or gripe that “real” fandom is greying and dying off.
Reading the original post and some of the fallout left me feeling a bit guilty for ways that I have no doubt come across that way myself. I do react with great incredulity when a friend, regardless of age, isn’t familiar with a book, series of books, or movie that I consider a classic, for instance. I try to get people to watch some of the old movies or read the old books that I loved.
It also made me wonder about the series of posts I’ve been doing for Throwback Thursday the last 6+ months, the “more of why I love sf/f” posts. I started those posts as a personal antidote to the sturm und drang over the affair of the melancholy canines. Because I read a lot of sci fi blogs, and because I was determined to read all the Hugo-nominated works before filling out my ballot, I knew I was likely to spend a lot of time being outraged and otherwise upset about things people were saying about some types of sci fi. So I decided it would be a good idea to write a weekly post in which I would only talk about something I loved from the genre. Since I like having a regular deadline, I needed to pick a day, and it occurred to me that if I focused on works that were influential in my formative years, then I could post them on Thursdays and tag them as Throwback Thursdays.
So I gave myself that assignment.
These posts have been about things I loved in science fiction and fantasy. I’ve written about works that spoke to me in important ways when I was a kid. Many times I’ve mentioned how a particular story or movie or series gave me hints that someday, when I wasn’t a closeted queer kid living among anti-science and anti-gay evangelicals, life would get better. None of which is meant to imply that people who aren’t familiar with or don’t like any of the things I’ve written about are any less real fans than I am, nor that there is anything wrong with treasuring different authors or works.
Not that anyone probably has, but I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’m an old white guy, and what I experienced growing up is going to be very different for fans who aren’t guys, or white… or whose teen-age years are much more recent than mine.
It’s also important to realize that a lot of things that we loved when we were younger don’t always hold up when we’re older. Before I started the “more of why I love sf/f” posts, I’d written about reading some books by a favorite author from my teens and early twenties, and how difficult some of her books were for me to read, now. Some are fine, but some of them have definitely not aged well. And I felt really bad for not liking some of them as much as I did when I was younger.
Because I’m doing National Novel Writing Month (my project is to finish the revision on two of my fantasy novels) there will be a lot fewer blog posts of any kind from me. And those “more of why I love sf/f” posts take more time than others of similar length, because I research the work and author in question. Yes, I’m writing about things I loved, but in some of the cases they are books or shows I encountered before my teens, so I want to make certain I’m remembering them correctly.
I will resume the posts after November. And I will probably continue to focus on books and stories from my younger days. I mean, I averaged reading more than seven novels a week through most of middle school, for goodness sake! There is a lot of potential material to write about!
I wrote recently about why having queer characters in books, particularly science fiction, isn’t about pandering or finding a good reason to include us, but rather simply of matter of not excluding us. The real world has queer people (a lot more than most people think), and there is no good reason that fictional worlds wouldn’t have just as many of us.
There’s an interesting post going around Tumblr that gathered together this series of facts (originally tweeted by Andrew Wheeler @wheeler) about some current or recent works of fiction based on historical characters. The historical facts are verified, I’m not merely repeating. I include a bit more context on each than Wheeler was able to fit in a short series of Twitter posts:
Leonardo da Vinci was almost certainly gay, but the series Da Vinci’s Demons portrays him as (barely) bisexual who seems to be exclusively attracted to women.
Alexander the Great was gay, and was known to be gay to the extent that the greek historian Plutarch wrote extensively about the moral way Alexander behaved toward the various men he had loved. The great love of Alexander’s life was a man, Hephaestion. When Hephaestion died, Alexander mourned him for months, refusing to eat for days, and nearly killed himself. The only movies that have ever included Hephaestion doesn’t even hint at the relationship, let alone even showing them kiss.
Alan Turing, the genius who decrypted Enigma among other things during World War II, has sometimes been described as the greatest gay hero of the modern age. He was convicted of indecency (and forced to take drugs to repress his libido) because he confessed to being in a long term relationship with his boyfriend. In the recent movie which tried to portray him as a hero, he is instead caught with a male prostitute and portrayed as a loner who had no love in his life.
The epic love of Achilles and Patroculus is a keystone of the legends of the Trojan war, but in the recent movie Troy they’re portrayed as simply buddies.
John Nash, the mathematician, was sexually active with men throughout his life, getting arrested a few times for it. He was married twice, though both relationships were problematic, and it’s unclear how many of the issues in the second marriage were due to his struggles with mental illness as opposed to his frequent same sex dalliances. A Beautiful Mind omits the first marriage and child completely, and also completely erases the same sex liaisons, which due to the arrests, played a significant role in the tragedies of his real life.
This list focuses on men because Wheeler’s point was that television and movie executives are extremely squeamish about showing men being seductive or explicitly romantic or in any way physically intimate with other men. But it isn’t just “Hollywood” that has that problem.
Lots of people cite the Marvel Comics character Deadpool as an example of a bisexual character. The creators of the character frequently claim that he is bisexual, but the kindest way you can describe those claims is that they are being very bad writers by telling us rather than showing. The more accurate description is that it is a queer-baiting lie. Oh, yes, Deadpool makes all sorts of sexual jokes toward other men, and he seems to be particularly obsessed with Spiderman, but that is all we ever see in the stories: jokes. Deadpool has never ever been shown actually in a relationship with another man. He has had a lot of romantic relationships with women in the comics; loves of his life that have died tragically and so forth, but not one single man.
Slightly better is DC Comic’s John Constantine, who in the comics had at least one significant same sex romantic relationship (in additional to several opposite sex romances), and said same sex relationship was integral to the plot of one of the longer story arcs. He’s also been portrayed flirting with men, seducing other men, and so forth. All well and good. Until we get to the television series (which, alas, was canceled last year after only 13 episodes), where there isn’t even a hint of his bisexuality, and the producers and writers said off-screen that he was not bisexual.
And don’t get me started on the epic amount of queer-baiting the creator and producer of the Teen Wolf television series has been doing for six years!
So, to sum up: when we call for diversity in books and movies and television shows, we aren’t asking to be pandered to. We aren’t asking you to shoehorn something into the story. We’re asking you to be realistic. We’re asking you to write believable stories.
Appendix: This blog post, in which a writer explains why he is re-writing some really old sci fi stories by swapping genders and such as his NaNoWriMo project provides some other good points about erasure in fiction: Get Bent – Why Bother?
Font Folly 