Homophobia, culture, fiction and ethics- an essay about Orson Scott Card
This is a 4,400 word essay on homophobia, culture, fiction and ethics, based around discussion of the campaign to get DC to fire newly appointed Orson Scott Card as Superman writer because of his anti-gay opinions and activism.
For the background try this brief Guardian news article The only relevant point it appears to be missing is that Card denies that his Hamlet is about a gay man, stating that the paedophile character has no attractions to adults of any gender. I haven't read the book so I can't comment.
I’m not quite sure why this got written, but since it did I’m posting it here. It’s a very personal view but comments are welcome.
0.Disclaimers
I don't pretend to be an expert or even well informed on the philosophy of rights, the psychology of discrimination, American politics, gay history or comic books. I would hesitate to attribute much of this essay to my faintly remembered degree study of philosophy. This is a personal view.
I have not checked my prejudice but for those that want to do it for me I am happy to state that I am white, female, middle class, university educated, 45 years old, English, provincial, bisexual, non working due to a major mental illness, in a straight marriage, with an adult child, and I number about six Orson Scott Card novels among my reasonably extensive 1980s SF and fantasy collection. My knowledge of Superman is restricted to the feature films- I don’t read many comics.
There is much to be said about the experience of being oppressed due to sexual orientation and the right to equality under the law and in society but this essay does not deal with that, simply because I have nothing useful to add to many other informed and passionate commentators.
My interest is in the treatment of people who are, for whatever reason, on the wrong side of the arguments about fairness and equality. I have to make it clear in case there is any shadow of a doubt that I have no doubt that they are wrong. They might describe themselves as an unfairly persecuted religious minority, or the Silent Majority, or the last bastion of free speech in a world of political correctness, or simply old-fashioned but they are wrong to deny gay people their civil rights and their equal (and not different) place in society. Their particular prejudices, religious or otherwise, should never be allowed to influence policy on any equality matter. Their opinions certainly don’t entitle them to any rights over and above anyone else to have their voices heard. Nonetheless they are members of our society and our treatment of them is part of our ethics.
So if you want to know why I’m concentrating on the rights and the feelings and the potential contributions of the oppressors and not the oppressed, it’s not because I think they are more worthy of consideration in any way. They clearly aren’t. They are just one topic out of many, and one on which I might have something useful to say.
1. Is Orson Scott Card a sexist homophobe?
Yes.
Probably only as sexist as your average 61 year old Mormon, (which is possibly quite sexist indeed from our point of view) but he definitely doesn't like gay relationships and has stuck his neck out to oppose them, loudly. It's the sort of culture-based ignorance that refuses to become informed. Not admirable at all. I do not like his campaign group's ideas, methodology or language. Religious faith is not an excuse, not in twenty first century America where access to other ideas and experiences is freely available.
So DC was wrong to hire him. We all ought to boycott them until they sack him. End of story. Yes?
Not necessarily. Let's consider the reasons that people are giving.
2.
a) Homophobic people are bad.
b) We should not give bad people our money.
Let's start with b) because it's easy. If you don't want to give your money (or rather exchange your money for goods and services, because writers aren't charity cases) to OSC because you don't like his prejudices, absolutely fine. If you don't want to read anything by him because it's tainted in your mind by association, equally fine. Don't buy his books, don't read Superman. A nasty rich entrepreneur once shouted at me (in a professional context) and I've never bought anything from his business enterprises since. I doubt that he's noticed, but it makes me feel better.
And maybe somewhere down the line DC will say to Card, hey, we've noticed that when you write for Superman our sales go down, so we're going to stop hiring you. And that's absolutely fine too. Everyone has exercised their freedom of choice and the company is making a sensible commercial decision. A personal boycott is always a personal choice.
What about a)? Homophobes are bad, right?
Let me detour briefly away from Card, the vocal campaigner against gay civil liberties, and introduce you to a couple of other people. One of them is my mother, who is an educated and politically left wing woman in her 70s, and a lifelong agnostic. The other- let's call him Nigel, because that isn't his name, is a nice gentleman, and regular churchgoer, in his early 60s with a young dog who on most days accompanies me on my walk round the local field while our dogs play together and we set the world to rights. Like OSC, both these people believe that gay people have no need for or place in marriage, and that they probably aren't the ideal people to raise children. Civil partnerships are OK, marriage, no.
How they differ from Card is that they don't much care. They aren't going to write letters to their MP, or sign petitions. They aren't going to threaten civil disobedience. It won’t affect how they are going to vote. When gay marriage comes in they will not refuse to recognise their gay neighbours' marriages- that would be impolite and both of them would be mortified at the thought. They will accept that the law had changed. But I imagine both of them will still feel that it isn't quite right. And after a while as they meet married gay couples with perfectly normal children they will slowly stop feeling that way.
Do they hate gay people? No. Are they slightly uncomfortable around gay people? Probably. I know that feeling.I was way more than slightly uncomfortable around gay people in my first term at university, despite knowing I was bisexual. I hadn't met any before (I had, of course, but no-one was out at our school in the 1980s). They were a bit exotic, a bit alien. I didn't really knew where to look. I got over it.
It is impossible to overemphasise the changes in the last 20 years. Probably even less that that. In most UK provincial towns and small cities like the one I grew up in, like the one I live in now, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe 10, the vast majority of gay people were not out to their neighbours, their workmates, even their family. Which meant, quite simply, that most people only knew about the gay people who find it hardest to hide, to blend in. I would say that till very late in my career the only gay colleagues I knew about were male and pretty obviously (in voice and mannerism) camp. Everyone else was assumed by everyone else to be straight, and no-one told us otherwise.
Now there is nothing at all wrong with being camp. But imagine that you are 70 years old and in all your life you have identified gay people by that alone. The TV has given you the same stereotype, year after year. Suddenly, because social changes do appear to come suddenly, people are taking about gay couples raising children. Your first, and in fact your settled opinion, in the absence of anything better informed, is that the poor kids are going to get raised by men with funny voices and horribly bullied at school as a result, and that result is better avoided. It's wrong, but it's based on 50 years experience so progressing to something more accurate is going to be painfully slow. That's why many older people tend to resist gay rights; not because they are inherently less just but because their experience of recognising gay people as being people exactly like them is incredibly limited. They've lived and worked with and been friends with gay people all their lives but it's been something kept secret, something embarrassing, something, if you go back not that far, illegal. You don't go from that to "obviously just like us" easily.
No-one under 25 has any excuse for homophobia. Everyone over 40 was brought up with it. That’s a generalisation, but there’s some truth in it.
Do I think that social change should be "organic", running at the pace of the slowest? Not at all. I strongly believe that full equality, right now, should be written into our laws and our social institutions. But it's important to recognise that you can't legislate away people's experience of a different era. You can say "the law says you may not treat gay relationships as if they are different from straight ones in any respect". You can't say "the law says you may not believe that gay relationships are different from straight ones in any respect". And somewhere in the middle, between behaviour and belief, comes what you are allowed to say, particularly to say in public.
Take the recent reports about the Welsh Secretary who declared that gay couples obviously can't provide warm and safe environments to raise children. People, especially gay parents, are rightly very cross. The man is a legislator, his party leader doesn't agree, the evidence is against him, the law is against him and calls for his resignation are entirely appropriate. But an article in the Guardian called his statement "hate speech" and I'm thinking, hang on, he shares that view with most adults over 60 in this country. You can change attitudes by demonstrating they are wrong and by changing laws that entrench inequality. You can't change them by criminalising the ex-majority opinion while a great number of perfectly benign people still hold it because all you get then is misunderstanding, polarisation and social conflict.
That's a huge diversion. I'm not sure what it establishes, except maybe that working out who's a bad person is really way more complicated than giving them a survey on gay rights to complete.
Back to Card. Does he hate gay people? I don't know. He's certainly putting a great deal of effort into keeping marriage for straight couples. Clearly he has far stronger feelings about it than my mother does. Let's not give him the benefit of very much doubt. He's actively anti-gay. If you want to not buy or read anything written by a homophobe, you can be pretty sure his books are not for you.
So that covers personal boycott of his work.However people are calling for more than this. They want DC to actively and immediately fire him. It's not enough to say "I won't read his Superman because of his views". They say "Nobody should let him write Superman because of his views."
But why, exactly?
3) Allowing Card to write a comic is giving him a platform to disseminate his views.
Platform is one of those trigger words for me, bringing back memories of endless debates that I attended at the Student Union in the 80s. “No Platform” was about denying fascists a voice, and it was about making the union a safe place for those who felt threatened by the fascists’ presence and rhetoric. It banned debate with extremists. Wikipedia tells me that it is still official NUS policy.
My personal views on No Platform are that it was a mistake, albeit one made for the best of reasons. However I doubt that it actually did much harm, or good, in the long run. The people it banned were so extreme that little public interest was generated in their apparently discriminatory treatment. If it had decided to ban Christians, or Conservatives, or people who don’t think that gay people should have the right to get married, it would have been a different matter.
However there is a difference between not banning someone from all SU events and positively inviting them to come. There are definitely times, places and people for which invitations to take up a platform are not appropriate. If DC had hired Card to write a short opinion piece at the start of their comics saying what he did and didn’t like about modern society, then he would undeniably have been given a platform to disseminate anti-gay propaganda and I think most people, myself included, would think DC was behaving unreasonably and without regard to the feelings of their readers.
But they aren’t. They are hiring him to write stories about the Man of Steel.
Aha, I hear you say. That’s where you’re going wrong. Foolish and naive woman. All fiction is propaganda.
No it isn’t.
Some fiction contains a very clear message about the writer’s views. Some fiction contains a more subtle attempt to influence. Some fiction is simply about things the writer is interested in. George Orwell’s stories carry an umistakeable message about the evils of socialism. Sheri Tepper’s novels (the later ones) tend to major heavily on the wickedness of male dominated culture and the power of women to redeem the world. Robert Heinlein thinks that everyone ought to have a lot of sex with strangers in a free market economy where the poor and weak are appropriately marginalised as unproductive. They are three extreme examples of fiction with a message. We know it’s their message because of how they put arguments into the mouths of their characters- the arguments they approve of go to the wonderful good people, the ones they don’t get spoken by the dislikeable chaps- and because the outcomes of their stories support their contentions.
Other authors- C J Cherryh, Iain Banks to name just two from the front of my shelves- give their characters political opinions and then use the story to explore the consequences. They aren’t polemics- often I have no idea what the writer her/himself thinks. They are about politics but they aren’t themselves a political message.
Take Steven Brust, a light hearted author that I am quite fond of and is also in the front of my bookcase. He writes first person stories about an assassin who has moreorless abandoned his oppressed people in order to make it rich killing people for money among their oppressors. Sometimes this seems to be a good plan, ethically speaking. Sometimes it seems to be a bad one. I have the strong impression that Brust is far more interested in what such a character might be like than he is in convincing me to share his personal view of the ethics of assassination or cultural domination.
Where does Card lie? Here I have to make it clear that I haven’t read any of his latest works. I got bored (not offended, bored) around Shadow of the Hegemon in 2001. It is quite possible that, like Heinlein and Tepper, he has become more polemic as he gets older. This section is therefore slightly speculative. However since I get the impression that most of the Twitterati to whom I am reacting have read considerably less Card than I have, I feel entitled to at least put forward a position based on what I do know.
Hart’s Hope is a really black fairytale in which an oppressed nation is freed by a conquering hero from the reign of an evil tyrant. However the hero cements his dynastic claim to the kingship by “marrying” the tyrant’s 12 year old daughter- he rapes her in public then sends her into exile. Everything that follows from this one cruel act of political expedience is appalling. It’s a tough read but a good book.
Wyrms is also fairy tale format to start with; it is about a young girl who has been trained by her father to be a servant of the king in all ways, including spy and assassin. When her father dies she finds out that everything she was taught about herself is a lie. She is actually part of of an interspecies breeding project, and avoiding her “destiny” is going to be near impossible.
Ender’s Game is, as most people know, about a small child taken from home and trained to play computer and mock battle games with other children. But as he becomes the perfect soldier he also becomes the perfect empath, and in the end he becomes the only hope for the alien enemy’s survival. One of the key point about Ender, as with the girls in Wyrms and Hart’s Hope, is that each of the children are bred to be used for others’ purposes. The one thing they have in common is the exploration of what it’s like to be brought into existence for a purpose that you didn’t choose, may not approve of but may not be able to avoid.
Speaker for the Dead is a sequel to Ender’s Game but a completely different theme and style. Ender’s contribution to civilisation (apart from saving it) is to introduce the idea of speaking for someone who had just died; finding out everything significant about who they were and what they believed, what impact they had on the world, and then relating it formally, bad and good, to their family and communities. Speaker for the Dead is simply about doing this for one man on a frontier world; untangling his life and his relationships so that the truth about him can be told.
I imagine that if you look for it, you will find that all these books have significant traces of Card’s own biasses. I doubt if they have many positive representations of gay people. However what they are not are polemics about traditional values, the virtues of religion, the unnaturalness of gay sex, the place of women in the home or anything else that you might expect from Card’s public pronouncements. Maybe that’s what he writes now; I don’t know. But back then he had far more to say than just “this is what I believe, and you should too.”
If I were hired to write Superman I could turn it into a vehicle for pushing my views on stuff (Bisexual heroes with mental illnesses save the world from political extremism. Hurrah!). So could anyone else, whether or not their views are acceptable ones. I imagine that DC has picked Card because they believe, based on his other writing, that he’s not likely to do that. If he does, he does, and everyone will stop reading it, and DC will have egg on their collective face. But it’s not a given. He’s a fiction writer and fiction is about far more than expressing opinions about right and wrong.
I should make it quite clear at this point that I am not claiming that writing good stories provides any sort of redemption or excuse for bigotry in his personal life. All I am claiming is that, in my considered opinion, those stories of his that I have read do not set out to propagate his homophobic or other distasteful views, and that they don’t do so unconsciously either except to the unavoidable extent that everyone’s writing reflects their culture and their beliefs.
If you have any sort of varied collection of fiction you will have stories by people who qualify as racist, sexist, homophobic and the rest. I can guarantee that unless you are very young and very picky your life will have been enriched by the ideas and characters produced by people who hold personal views that you would find distasteful. It doesn’t mean that you have to seek out books by such people. it doesn’t mean that their books are better than other people’s. It does mean that the idea of refusing to allow fiction by such authors to be published because you are worried that they will be primarily propaganda is deeply misguided.
4) No-one should employ bad people
There is a simpler argument, of course, and probably the one I’ve seen most, which states that DC should sack Card because they know that he’s a bad person.
Another detour. A few years ago, when I was still gainfully employed tackling tax avoidance schemes for the UK government, I had some web pages under my real name. They didn’t have much on- photos of my pets, a few bits of writing, and a link, behind a couple of pretty stiff warnings and appropriate classifications, to a bit of slash. What they didn’t have was any reference whatsoever to my employment.
I was summoned to see my boss one day. One of my colleagues(and I never found out who) had looked at these pages, read the slash and reported it to the boss. She had read the stuff herself, had rung Human Resources to find out what to do and then had called me in to Discuss It.
It was a bit of an embarrassing conversation, particularly for her. What she wanted to do was to tell me to take the stuff down, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. HR had very helpfully announced that I could have what I like on my web pages but if it got into the papers I’d be in trouble (there was a clause in my non-contract (Gov’t employees didn’t have contracts, exactly) about “bringing the Revenue into disrepute”.)
I don’t think there’s any question but that in a great many reasonable people’s minds, someone who writes violent pornography for fun is probably a Bad Person. A different sort of Bad Person from someone who hates gay people, but nevertheless definitely A Bit Not Good.
Fortunately I did not end up in front of a tribunal trying to justify my taste for blood and gay sex in order to keep my job because my boss decided in the end that it was none of her or the Revenue’s business.
The point hardly needs belabouring so I’m just going to leave that there.
5 Conclusion
I had two main points. The first is about how we classify people.
I am something of an absolutist. It was wrong that Oscar Wilde couldn’t marry Lord Alfred Douglas, had they wanted to. However I wouldn’t want to say that anyone who wasn’t championing equal marriage at the time was a bad person, because that would have been pretty much everybody. Some people were suggesting that they shouldn’t be imprisoned with hard labour for having gay sex- a radical opinion at the time. That’s obviously not enough to make you a champion of gay rights these days- you’d be hard pushed to find someone to differ, even in the Conservative party- but it was then.
Similarly we know that there are geographical differences in what might be called the public consciousness level. You wouldn’t necessarily berate campaigners who work hard and risk themselves to push to decriminalise gay sex in one country as bigoted because they aren’t yet sure about the idea of equal marriage.
It seems to be less easily recognised that we (I talk specifically about the UK here, but I imagine roughly the same goes for the States) are not a homogenous society and public consciousness is different for different groups. The most obvious recent demonstration of this is the difference between age groups when it comes to gay rights issues. If you’re saying to yourself “older people are more prejudiced, unjust, biassed” then you’re absolutely right but also missing the point. They’ve almost certainly moved much further from the starting point of what they absorbed as children towards acceptance of gay equality during their lifetime than you have.
In fifty years time we are all going to look like thoughtless uncaring bigots about something. I’ve no idea what.
Some people are truly bigoted; there is no doubt about that. Some people refuse to learn, to be educated, to accept what they see around them, to stop disliking anyone they see as “other”. You don’t have to be 61 to be one of those. Card might well be one of those people. I’m certainly not saying he isn’t. All I am saying (in a very long winded way) is that classifying everyone who doesn’t agree with you, even when they are completely and obviously wrong as being bad for that reason only makes little more sense when you do it to people from a different generation living now than it would make sense to make the same judgement about Wilde’s contemporaries.
The second point is very short. Do we want publishers to have not just the right but the obligation to politically vet our externally expressed opinions before accepting the stories we write for publication, in case we intend to sneak an unacceptable opinion in between the sex, violence, humour and careful plotting without them noticing?
No.
Do I think DC should have hired Card? To be honest I have no idea. They could have avoided a lot of trouble by not doing so, certainly. From a commercial point of view it was probably unwise.
Do I think everyone should boycott Superman? I think anyone who wants to should do so.
Do I think DC should sack him for views he expressed before the appointment without giving him a chance to write the stories they hired him for? Absolutely not.
For the background try this brief Guardian news article The only relevant point it appears to be missing is that Card denies that his Hamlet is about a gay man, stating that the paedophile character has no attractions to adults of any gender. I haven't read the book so I can't comment.
I’m not quite sure why this got written, but since it did I’m posting it here. It’s a very personal view but comments are welcome.
0.Disclaimers
I don't pretend to be an expert or even well informed on the philosophy of rights, the psychology of discrimination, American politics, gay history or comic books. I would hesitate to attribute much of this essay to my faintly remembered degree study of philosophy. This is a personal view.
I have not checked my prejudice but for those that want to do it for me I am happy to state that I am white, female, middle class, university educated, 45 years old, English, provincial, bisexual, non working due to a major mental illness, in a straight marriage, with an adult child, and I number about six Orson Scott Card novels among my reasonably extensive 1980s SF and fantasy collection. My knowledge of Superman is restricted to the feature films- I don’t read many comics.
There is much to be said about the experience of being oppressed due to sexual orientation and the right to equality under the law and in society but this essay does not deal with that, simply because I have nothing useful to add to many other informed and passionate commentators.
My interest is in the treatment of people who are, for whatever reason, on the wrong side of the arguments about fairness and equality. I have to make it clear in case there is any shadow of a doubt that I have no doubt that they are wrong. They might describe themselves as an unfairly persecuted religious minority, or the Silent Majority, or the last bastion of free speech in a world of political correctness, or simply old-fashioned but they are wrong to deny gay people their civil rights and their equal (and not different) place in society. Their particular prejudices, religious or otherwise, should never be allowed to influence policy on any equality matter. Their opinions certainly don’t entitle them to any rights over and above anyone else to have their voices heard. Nonetheless they are members of our society and our treatment of them is part of our ethics.
So if you want to know why I’m concentrating on the rights and the feelings and the potential contributions of the oppressors and not the oppressed, it’s not because I think they are more worthy of consideration in any way. They clearly aren’t. They are just one topic out of many, and one on which I might have something useful to say.
1. Is Orson Scott Card a sexist homophobe?
Yes.
Probably only as sexist as your average 61 year old Mormon, (which is possibly quite sexist indeed from our point of view) but he definitely doesn't like gay relationships and has stuck his neck out to oppose them, loudly. It's the sort of culture-based ignorance that refuses to become informed. Not admirable at all. I do not like his campaign group's ideas, methodology or language. Religious faith is not an excuse, not in twenty first century America where access to other ideas and experiences is freely available.
So DC was wrong to hire him. We all ought to boycott them until they sack him. End of story. Yes?
Not necessarily. Let's consider the reasons that people are giving.
2.
a) Homophobic people are bad.
b) We should not give bad people our money.
Let's start with b) because it's easy. If you don't want to give your money (or rather exchange your money for goods and services, because writers aren't charity cases) to OSC because you don't like his prejudices, absolutely fine. If you don't want to read anything by him because it's tainted in your mind by association, equally fine. Don't buy his books, don't read Superman. A nasty rich entrepreneur once shouted at me (in a professional context) and I've never bought anything from his business enterprises since. I doubt that he's noticed, but it makes me feel better.
And maybe somewhere down the line DC will say to Card, hey, we've noticed that when you write for Superman our sales go down, so we're going to stop hiring you. And that's absolutely fine too. Everyone has exercised their freedom of choice and the company is making a sensible commercial decision. A personal boycott is always a personal choice.
What about a)? Homophobes are bad, right?
Let me detour briefly away from Card, the vocal campaigner against gay civil liberties, and introduce you to a couple of other people. One of them is my mother, who is an educated and politically left wing woman in her 70s, and a lifelong agnostic. The other- let's call him Nigel, because that isn't his name, is a nice gentleman, and regular churchgoer, in his early 60s with a young dog who on most days accompanies me on my walk round the local field while our dogs play together and we set the world to rights. Like OSC, both these people believe that gay people have no need for or place in marriage, and that they probably aren't the ideal people to raise children. Civil partnerships are OK, marriage, no.
How they differ from Card is that they don't much care. They aren't going to write letters to their MP, or sign petitions. They aren't going to threaten civil disobedience. It won’t affect how they are going to vote. When gay marriage comes in they will not refuse to recognise their gay neighbours' marriages- that would be impolite and both of them would be mortified at the thought. They will accept that the law had changed. But I imagine both of them will still feel that it isn't quite right. And after a while as they meet married gay couples with perfectly normal children they will slowly stop feeling that way.
Do they hate gay people? No. Are they slightly uncomfortable around gay people? Probably. I know that feeling.I was way more than slightly uncomfortable around gay people in my first term at university, despite knowing I was bisexual. I hadn't met any before (I had, of course, but no-one was out at our school in the 1980s). They were a bit exotic, a bit alien. I didn't really knew where to look. I got over it.
It is impossible to overemphasise the changes in the last 20 years. Probably even less that that. In most UK provincial towns and small cities like the one I grew up in, like the one I live in now, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, maybe 10, the vast majority of gay people were not out to their neighbours, their workmates, even their family. Which meant, quite simply, that most people only knew about the gay people who find it hardest to hide, to blend in. I would say that till very late in my career the only gay colleagues I knew about were male and pretty obviously (in voice and mannerism) camp. Everyone else was assumed by everyone else to be straight, and no-one told us otherwise.
Now there is nothing at all wrong with being camp. But imagine that you are 70 years old and in all your life you have identified gay people by that alone. The TV has given you the same stereotype, year after year. Suddenly, because social changes do appear to come suddenly, people are taking about gay couples raising children. Your first, and in fact your settled opinion, in the absence of anything better informed, is that the poor kids are going to get raised by men with funny voices and horribly bullied at school as a result, and that result is better avoided. It's wrong, but it's based on 50 years experience so progressing to something more accurate is going to be painfully slow. That's why many older people tend to resist gay rights; not because they are inherently less just but because their experience of recognising gay people as being people exactly like them is incredibly limited. They've lived and worked with and been friends with gay people all their lives but it's been something kept secret, something embarrassing, something, if you go back not that far, illegal. You don't go from that to "obviously just like us" easily.
No-one under 25 has any excuse for homophobia. Everyone over 40 was brought up with it. That’s a generalisation, but there’s some truth in it.
Do I think that social change should be "organic", running at the pace of the slowest? Not at all. I strongly believe that full equality, right now, should be written into our laws and our social institutions. But it's important to recognise that you can't legislate away people's experience of a different era. You can say "the law says you may not treat gay relationships as if they are different from straight ones in any respect". You can't say "the law says you may not believe that gay relationships are different from straight ones in any respect". And somewhere in the middle, between behaviour and belief, comes what you are allowed to say, particularly to say in public.
Take the recent reports about the Welsh Secretary who declared that gay couples obviously can't provide warm and safe environments to raise children. People, especially gay parents, are rightly very cross. The man is a legislator, his party leader doesn't agree, the evidence is against him, the law is against him and calls for his resignation are entirely appropriate. But an article in the Guardian called his statement "hate speech" and I'm thinking, hang on, he shares that view with most adults over 60 in this country. You can change attitudes by demonstrating they are wrong and by changing laws that entrench inequality. You can't change them by criminalising the ex-majority opinion while a great number of perfectly benign people still hold it because all you get then is misunderstanding, polarisation and social conflict.
That's a huge diversion. I'm not sure what it establishes, except maybe that working out who's a bad person is really way more complicated than giving them a survey on gay rights to complete.
Back to Card. Does he hate gay people? I don't know. He's certainly putting a great deal of effort into keeping marriage for straight couples. Clearly he has far stronger feelings about it than my mother does. Let's not give him the benefit of very much doubt. He's actively anti-gay. If you want to not buy or read anything written by a homophobe, you can be pretty sure his books are not for you.
So that covers personal boycott of his work.However people are calling for more than this. They want DC to actively and immediately fire him. It's not enough to say "I won't read his Superman because of his views". They say "Nobody should let him write Superman because of his views."
But why, exactly?
3) Allowing Card to write a comic is giving him a platform to disseminate his views.
Platform is one of those trigger words for me, bringing back memories of endless debates that I attended at the Student Union in the 80s. “No Platform” was about denying fascists a voice, and it was about making the union a safe place for those who felt threatened by the fascists’ presence and rhetoric. It banned debate with extremists. Wikipedia tells me that it is still official NUS policy.
My personal views on No Platform are that it was a mistake, albeit one made for the best of reasons. However I doubt that it actually did much harm, or good, in the long run. The people it banned were so extreme that little public interest was generated in their apparently discriminatory treatment. If it had decided to ban Christians, or Conservatives, or people who don’t think that gay people should have the right to get married, it would have been a different matter.
However there is a difference between not banning someone from all SU events and positively inviting them to come. There are definitely times, places and people for which invitations to take up a platform are not appropriate. If DC had hired Card to write a short opinion piece at the start of their comics saying what he did and didn’t like about modern society, then he would undeniably have been given a platform to disseminate anti-gay propaganda and I think most people, myself included, would think DC was behaving unreasonably and without regard to the feelings of their readers.
But they aren’t. They are hiring him to write stories about the Man of Steel.
Aha, I hear you say. That’s where you’re going wrong. Foolish and naive woman. All fiction is propaganda.
No it isn’t.
Some fiction contains a very clear message about the writer’s views. Some fiction contains a more subtle attempt to influence. Some fiction is simply about things the writer is interested in. George Orwell’s stories carry an umistakeable message about the evils of socialism. Sheri Tepper’s novels (the later ones) tend to major heavily on the wickedness of male dominated culture and the power of women to redeem the world. Robert Heinlein thinks that everyone ought to have a lot of sex with strangers in a free market economy where the poor and weak are appropriately marginalised as unproductive. They are three extreme examples of fiction with a message. We know it’s their message because of how they put arguments into the mouths of their characters- the arguments they approve of go to the wonderful good people, the ones they don’t get spoken by the dislikeable chaps- and because the outcomes of their stories support their contentions.
Other authors- C J Cherryh, Iain Banks to name just two from the front of my shelves- give their characters political opinions and then use the story to explore the consequences. They aren’t polemics- often I have no idea what the writer her/himself thinks. They are about politics but they aren’t themselves a political message.
Take Steven Brust, a light hearted author that I am quite fond of and is also in the front of my bookcase. He writes first person stories about an assassin who has moreorless abandoned his oppressed people in order to make it rich killing people for money among their oppressors. Sometimes this seems to be a good plan, ethically speaking. Sometimes it seems to be a bad one. I have the strong impression that Brust is far more interested in what such a character might be like than he is in convincing me to share his personal view of the ethics of assassination or cultural domination.
Where does Card lie? Here I have to make it clear that I haven’t read any of his latest works. I got bored (not offended, bored) around Shadow of the Hegemon in 2001. It is quite possible that, like Heinlein and Tepper, he has become more polemic as he gets older. This section is therefore slightly speculative. However since I get the impression that most of the Twitterati to whom I am reacting have read considerably less Card than I have, I feel entitled to at least put forward a position based on what I do know.
Hart’s Hope is a really black fairytale in which an oppressed nation is freed by a conquering hero from the reign of an evil tyrant. However the hero cements his dynastic claim to the kingship by “marrying” the tyrant’s 12 year old daughter- he rapes her in public then sends her into exile. Everything that follows from this one cruel act of political expedience is appalling. It’s a tough read but a good book.
Wyrms is also fairy tale format to start with; it is about a young girl who has been trained by her father to be a servant of the king in all ways, including spy and assassin. When her father dies she finds out that everything she was taught about herself is a lie. She is actually part of of an interspecies breeding project, and avoiding her “destiny” is going to be near impossible.
Ender’s Game is, as most people know, about a small child taken from home and trained to play computer and mock battle games with other children. But as he becomes the perfect soldier he also becomes the perfect empath, and in the end he becomes the only hope for the alien enemy’s survival. One of the key point about Ender, as with the girls in Wyrms and Hart’s Hope, is that each of the children are bred to be used for others’ purposes. The one thing they have in common is the exploration of what it’s like to be brought into existence for a purpose that you didn’t choose, may not approve of but may not be able to avoid.
Speaker for the Dead is a sequel to Ender’s Game but a completely different theme and style. Ender’s contribution to civilisation (apart from saving it) is to introduce the idea of speaking for someone who had just died; finding out everything significant about who they were and what they believed, what impact they had on the world, and then relating it formally, bad and good, to their family and communities. Speaker for the Dead is simply about doing this for one man on a frontier world; untangling his life and his relationships so that the truth about him can be told.
I imagine that if you look for it, you will find that all these books have significant traces of Card’s own biasses. I doubt if they have many positive representations of gay people. However what they are not are polemics about traditional values, the virtues of religion, the unnaturalness of gay sex, the place of women in the home or anything else that you might expect from Card’s public pronouncements. Maybe that’s what he writes now; I don’t know. But back then he had far more to say than just “this is what I believe, and you should too.”
If I were hired to write Superman I could turn it into a vehicle for pushing my views on stuff (Bisexual heroes with mental illnesses save the world from political extremism. Hurrah!). So could anyone else, whether or not their views are acceptable ones. I imagine that DC has picked Card because they believe, based on his other writing, that he’s not likely to do that. If he does, he does, and everyone will stop reading it, and DC will have egg on their collective face. But it’s not a given. He’s a fiction writer and fiction is about far more than expressing opinions about right and wrong.
I should make it quite clear at this point that I am not claiming that writing good stories provides any sort of redemption or excuse for bigotry in his personal life. All I am claiming is that, in my considered opinion, those stories of his that I have read do not set out to propagate his homophobic or other distasteful views, and that they don’t do so unconsciously either except to the unavoidable extent that everyone’s writing reflects their culture and their beliefs.
If you have any sort of varied collection of fiction you will have stories by people who qualify as racist, sexist, homophobic and the rest. I can guarantee that unless you are very young and very picky your life will have been enriched by the ideas and characters produced by people who hold personal views that you would find distasteful. It doesn’t mean that you have to seek out books by such people. it doesn’t mean that their books are better than other people’s. It does mean that the idea of refusing to allow fiction by such authors to be published because you are worried that they will be primarily propaganda is deeply misguided.
4) No-one should employ bad people
There is a simpler argument, of course, and probably the one I’ve seen most, which states that DC should sack Card because they know that he’s a bad person.
Another detour. A few years ago, when I was still gainfully employed tackling tax avoidance schemes for the UK government, I had some web pages under my real name. They didn’t have much on- photos of my pets, a few bits of writing, and a link, behind a couple of pretty stiff warnings and appropriate classifications, to a bit of slash. What they didn’t have was any reference whatsoever to my employment.
I was summoned to see my boss one day. One of my colleagues(and I never found out who) had looked at these pages, read the slash and reported it to the boss. She had read the stuff herself, had rung Human Resources to find out what to do and then had called me in to Discuss It.
It was a bit of an embarrassing conversation, particularly for her. What she wanted to do was to tell me to take the stuff down, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. HR had very helpfully announced that I could have what I like on my web pages but if it got into the papers I’d be in trouble (there was a clause in my non-contract (Gov’t employees didn’t have contracts, exactly) about “bringing the Revenue into disrepute”.)
I don’t think there’s any question but that in a great many reasonable people’s minds, someone who writes violent pornography for fun is probably a Bad Person. A different sort of Bad Person from someone who hates gay people, but nevertheless definitely A Bit Not Good.
Fortunately I did not end up in front of a tribunal trying to justify my taste for blood and gay sex in order to keep my job because my boss decided in the end that it was none of her or the Revenue’s business.
The point hardly needs belabouring so I’m just going to leave that there.
5 Conclusion
I had two main points. The first is about how we classify people.
I am something of an absolutist. It was wrong that Oscar Wilde couldn’t marry Lord Alfred Douglas, had they wanted to. However I wouldn’t want to say that anyone who wasn’t championing equal marriage at the time was a bad person, because that would have been pretty much everybody. Some people were suggesting that they shouldn’t be imprisoned with hard labour for having gay sex- a radical opinion at the time. That’s obviously not enough to make you a champion of gay rights these days- you’d be hard pushed to find someone to differ, even in the Conservative party- but it was then.
Similarly we know that there are geographical differences in what might be called the public consciousness level. You wouldn’t necessarily berate campaigners who work hard and risk themselves to push to decriminalise gay sex in one country as bigoted because they aren’t yet sure about the idea of equal marriage.
It seems to be less easily recognised that we (I talk specifically about the UK here, but I imagine roughly the same goes for the States) are not a homogenous society and public consciousness is different for different groups. The most obvious recent demonstration of this is the difference between age groups when it comes to gay rights issues. If you’re saying to yourself “older people are more prejudiced, unjust, biassed” then you’re absolutely right but also missing the point. They’ve almost certainly moved much further from the starting point of what they absorbed as children towards acceptance of gay equality during their lifetime than you have.
In fifty years time we are all going to look like thoughtless uncaring bigots about something. I’ve no idea what.
Some people are truly bigoted; there is no doubt about that. Some people refuse to learn, to be educated, to accept what they see around them, to stop disliking anyone they see as “other”. You don’t have to be 61 to be one of those. Card might well be one of those people. I’m certainly not saying he isn’t. All I am saying (in a very long winded way) is that classifying everyone who doesn’t agree with you, even when they are completely and obviously wrong as being bad for that reason only makes little more sense when you do it to people from a different generation living now than it would make sense to make the same judgement about Wilde’s contemporaries.
The second point is very short. Do we want publishers to have not just the right but the obligation to politically vet our externally expressed opinions before accepting the stories we write for publication, in case we intend to sneak an unacceptable opinion in between the sex, violence, humour and careful plotting without them noticing?
No.
Do I think DC should have hired Card? To be honest I have no idea. They could have avoided a lot of trouble by not doing so, certainly. From a commercial point of view it was probably unwise.
Do I think everyone should boycott Superman? I think anyone who wants to should do so.
Do I think DC should sack him for views he expressed before the appointment without giving him a chance to write the stories they hired him for? Absolutely not.