Orson scott card anti gay
On the title page, in faded blue ballpoint pen, it's inscribed: "To Rachel - a friend of Ender. I'm not going to see Ender's Game. This isn't an uncommon experience, I think. I've had dinner at his home. It's not wrong. InCard published his most controversial anti-gay screed yet, in the Mormon Times, where he gay that gay xviseoa gay “marks the end of democracy in America,” that homosexuality was.
It would be easier if it were. As a college student, I corresponded extensively with Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game was an inestimably important touchstone -- the first and sometimes only sign I had that there was someone out there who even vaguely got it and cared enough to try to write it down.
[][] A few months later, an LGBT non-profit organization [] Geeks OUT proposed a boycott of the movie adaptation of Ender's Game, calling Card's views "anti-gay", [][] and causing the movie studio Lionsgate. I was also largely unaware of the extremity of Card's politics.
I may not have agreed with his personal beliefs -- I knew that he was an observant Mormon and at least somewhat politically conservative -- but I respected and orson respect the principle of not using fiction as a soap box, even if the author who introduced it to me has since forgotten or abandoned it.
The only time his beliefs came up in our conversations was a comment he made about fiction being a totally inappropriate venue for any kind of ideological proselytizing. This is not a revelation. The truth, of course, is that Card had been avidly homophobic since long before I knew him.
For several years, I considered him a mentor and a friend. His political reputation was much quieter back then -- most of his internet presence was concentrated around a network of online writing workshop and critique groups -- and his op-eds were published in circles I never stumbled into.
The Hypocrites of Homosexuality By Orson Scott Card from Sunstone magazine When I was an undergraduate theatre student, I was aware, and not happily so, how pervasive was the scott of the underculture of homosexuality among my friends and acquaintances.
He was incredibly generous with his time and advice, and supportive of me as an aspiring fiction writer. My opinion of Orson Scott Card's politics and his flimsy rationalizations is on record. But I've still got a paperback on my anti -- battered and worn in the way beloved books get, spine floppy, corners bent.
T ] Orson Scott Card's long history of homophobia «in addition to being one of the most critically acclaimed writers of card fiction, Card, or OSC, as he's dubbed in sci-fi circles, is also one of the most openly bigoted. I'm queer. Card is the great-great-grandson of Mormon icon Brigham Young, and his politics are deeply linked to his lifelong Mormonism.
I don't buy books he writes. I was a gifted and severely socially alienated little kid, and authors who can write really, freakishly brilliant children are extremely rare. But it's not the end; there's another part of the story that comes later, the part I don't usually mention.
I was out during that time. Ender's Game was one of my first and most precious paper mirrors. I don't watch the movies based on them. That at the same time we were talking about character development and the shapes of stories, he was railing against marriage rights for same-sex couples and insisting homosexuality was a byproduct of child abuse.
Orson Scott Card is monstrously homophobic; he's racist; he advocates violence and lobbies against fundamental human rights and equates criticism of those stances with his own hate speech. An online petition to drop the story received over 16, signatures, and DC Comics put Card's story on hold indefinitely.
Whether the rampaging extremism he's exploded into is a product of a significant change in perspective or just less tact and a larger platform, I'll never know: We fell out of touch long before, for which I'm cowardly grateful. Card's hate has come to color my experience of his fiction -- as, I think, it should.