Sci Fi SoundTrack

Adam Lambert of American Idol fame ruffled some feathers at the American Music Awards recently by kissing one of the (male, OMG!) dancers performing with him during his appearance.  It’s in the embedded video, a little past half-way through.  I missed it the first time I watched it.  Noticing the quick cutaway helps spot it:

It was fun and titillating when Madonna was kissing Brittney and Christina during live music performances a few years ago, at least from the commentary I saw, and lesbian kisses have become pretty standard fare on TV shows.  Adam Lambert is apparently a huge controversy and uptight socially conservative people are whining.  We definitely have a double standard, and it should be clear that this is cultural and religious, not something inherent in human behavior.  In a number of historical cultures, homosexuality and bisexuality were much more common than today.  It’s a learned response.  And our culture is still quite discriminatory at the present time.

When you approach one of these controversies head on, as Adam Lambert did, you take shit for it.  There’s a a time when it becomes appropriate to do it, and I hope we are at such a time, but it distracts from Lambert’s music, and probably cost him his chance at being the American Idol last year.  It’ll cost him some record sales, too.  Remember all the closeted gay performers?  Freddie Mercury of Queen (an obvious hint?!) comes to mind immediately, as well as dozens of other musicians and actors who have produced some of the greatest artistic works in recent years.

Because people don’t like the gays.  Or the blacks.  Or the muslims.  Or whoever.  At least they don’t like them when they step out into the open.  In every culture there’s some segment of the population that are the outcasts.

This is an issue in fiction as well as music.  I remember arguing in a critique group in the early 1990s that making a character gay in a short story probably shouldn’t be done, unless that was an essential point to the story.  I didn’t argue this point because I was a bigot or a homophobe, but simply because many potential readers would get hung up on that point to such an extent it would impact how they read the story.  Of course, it’s always something a skilled writer can get away with (e.g., Joe Haldeman’s fine short story “Feedback” that was first published in Playboy around that same time), but why risk it, unless you’re politically motivated?  It isn’t the artist’s duty to fight for every cause out there, just their own.

Science fiction, however, has some obvious ways to be sneaky here.

On the original Star Trek series they had several episodes that dealt with racism (e.g., the one with the planet full of people black on one side and white on the other — or vice versa).  Politically repressed societies such as the Soviet Union had writers who could criticize their government only through indirect means such as fiction, and especially science fiction.  Joe Haldeman, again, in his novel The Forever War, had a future full of homosexuals.  It has a shock effect on me as a kid not much exposed to such things, and by portraying this society in the distant future it was not directly threatening.

Anyway, I do feel that the time is right to have overtly gay characters in fiction without it being a central issue.  The tipping point is about here.  It might still be a little early, but it might be a few years late for many audiences.  Let the bigots start feeling that they’re in the minority.

The science fiction community is generally very inclusive.  The social conservatives, if anyone, seem to be held in scorn at conventions, and while there is “right wing” science fiction, it seems to be in the minority.  Exploring the future and aliens and issues from novel perspectives seems to be, predominantly, a liberal thing to do.  At least playing honest with such viewpoints.

Anyway, science fiction is always an appropriate way of approaching these issues whether the times and audiences call for stealth, or not.  Making Starbuck a woman on the Battlestar Galactica reboot was brilliant.  Women’s issues are not as pressing as they were a few decades ago, but showing a kickass female fighter pilot doesn’t hurt.  You still can’t do it for our existing U.S. military (or an overtly gay one), but you can in science fiction.

There is a segment of the population who are not reflective, who do not realize that some things that seem clearly right or wrong to them are culturally determined.  Science fiction is a sneak attack that can get people to look at these issues from a new perspective.  That’s a unique power, one that we should appreciate and wield when we’re so moved.