O.S.C. is G.A.Y.

Shawn found out the other day that Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game was going to get the comic book treatment. Or, maybe it was a movie. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered to keep it all straight. Either way, it reminded me of OSC and my long-lost obsession with him.

I went through a phase in either junior high or high school where I read nearly every Orson Scott Card book I could find. The phase ended when I read the crappy space series that was just the story of Nephi and his family from the Book of Mormon rehashed. If we're going to start writing science fiction based on LDS stories, I'm going to write a masterpiece based on Johnny Lingo in space. Mahana will be a 10 Darlaxx woman now, rather than being purchased in cows. Oh yeah... now she's twice as hot.

One thing that always struck me as a little bizarre was that OSC had a few homoerotic themes running in different books. In Songmaster, the proponent is a castrato singer who ends up taking it up the butt from an older guy. And this wasn't just hinted at, it was drawn out in every gay detail you can imagine, and this was the sort of homoerotic writing that could make Poppy Z. Brite blush. The thing is, this is only one of his novels where homosexuality is not a major theme, but a pretty significant one.

So imagine my surprise today when I discover that he's now a huge homophobe who is championing the LDS Church to fight any form of gay rights. He's written some very interesting opinion pieces lately that try the whole "love the sinner, hate the sin" meme that always equates to a gooey Jesus coating with a hard gay-bashing center. Card maintains that he's not a homophobe, and that he loves gays. Yes. I would agree that he does love gay men. How can you write about gay sex scenes (in more than one book) and not love gay men.

Sadly, I think OSC is your average case of self-loathing gay man who has decided to suppress his orientation to elevate his faith. You see this much too often in the Utah/Idaho area, because of the strong LDS influence here. They're the guys who reek of The Gay but are the first to talk shit about out gay people. They're the ones who howl with some twisted sense of schadenfreude when they see guys like Ted Haggard get busted in gay-sex scandals. They're the guys who think everyone is as deceived as they've deceived themselves about their sexuality, even though if you get close enough, you can almost smell cock on their breath because they're so gay.

I guess I'll just go back to forgetting the existence of OSC for a while. He can get his books turned into comics, or movies, or whatever he's doing, and hopefully in a while, I'll see his profile appear on Bear411 or BearCiti, and we'll have a good chuckle over how deluded he was.