The thing I find so incredibly sad, and angering, about OSC is that he told us, in his fiction, over and over, that he was going to grow up to be a hardened, cruel bigot, and why.
One of the themes that appears constantly in OSCâs work is that an older man, who is invested in the protection of society, abuses younger men, boys, occasionally girls, or people in general, because it is natural for young people to want freedom, but that freedom will destroy society. The older people must be cruel to shape the younger people into what they need to be. It turns up in Enderâs Game. Itâs in Wyrms. Itâs in Hartâs Hope, where a sympathetic man has to rape a 12 year old girl in order to prevent a successful rebellion against a truly evil king from collapsing, and later a father must allow his baby son to be murdered by the sonâs mother in order to save the world. Itâs in the one whose name I forget where aliens are eating people and one man volunteers to treat the people like sheep to be shorn, taking body parts as the aliens demand, in order to keep them all alive. Itâs in âUnaccompanied Sonataâ.
And over and over, the young people who wanted freedom grow up to be the ones who make the terrible choices. This is most obvious in âUnaccompanied Sonataâ, where the people who enforce that artists are not allowed to consume anyone elseâs art and cannot continue to create if they do are the artists who, after consuming the art of others, couldnât obey the law to stop creating art. After being repeatedly tortured to force them to comply, after having their ability to make art stripped from them, they eventually become the enforcers of the law.
Card is quite probably a closeted gay man in denial. I say this not because I believe this is true of homophobes in general, but because:
- his writing about gay boys and men was, up until about 15 years ago, deeply sympathetic, but still writing from the perspective that it was wrong. In âHomecomingâ he writes about the struggle of a gay man who came from a society where homosexuality was completely accepted, into a small band of 10 survivors where every man and every woman must reproduce within their assigned couples for the salvation of the human race, and how he has to make himself have sex with a woman he cares about as a friend, but does not love and is not attracted to. In âTreasonâ, a man impersonating a woman falls in love with the main character, who is physiologically intersex but identifies as male but is impersonating a woman, and while that man is a villain, the main character talks about how sweet and gentle the personâs songs are and how he is almost seduced. There is a lot of homoerotic affection shown between boys as well.
- More importantly, his stated reason for why heâs against gay marriage was that men are so much more naturally sympathetic to and understanding of other men, no man would marry a woman if he had the option to marry a man instead, and thus the human race would die out.
I mean, Iâm sorry, wut?
No straight person is capable of coming up with this logic. The nastiest and most misogynistic of het incels still understand why men, no matter how much they donât like women, would prefer to marry them than to marry other men. The only kind of person whoâs capable of believing that the only thing stopping men from marrying other men exclusively, never marrying women, is the law, is someone who is gay but so ignorant about what it means to be gay that they have convinced themselves that their feelings are natural and normal and everyone has them, but that for the protection of society itself and the future of the human race such feelings must be repressed.
So Card has been telling us all along that he is sympathetic to the feelings of gay men, that he perfectly understands why a man would want to marry a man, but he believes â because this is what heâs been taught â that gay love is a selfish indulgence that will destroy humanity. And as an older man and a pillar of the community, it is his duty to torture and, if necessary, destroy, younger people (or really any people) who donât understand this necessity and selfishly want the freedom to marry the people they genuinely love. Because thatâs what older men do. They abuse the young and the non-conforming to save humanity, even though they have compassion for the young and non-conforming because once upon a time, that was what they were, too.
So this was a man who was capable of writing about non-conformists and rejects from society â and homosexuals â with incredible compassion and empathy. But it didnât change anything. Heâs been telling us from the beginning that he believes that itâs the role of older men to force conformity or obedience on the young and non-conforming, through violence if necessary, because that is what will Save The World. Humanity depends on older men performing this role. No matter how much compassion they feel, they must be harsh and cruel or we will all die.
Imagine believing that. Imagine believing, your whole life, that itâs your destiny to grow up to be someone who crushes the dreams of the young, because the young canât be allowed to fulfill their dreams or else humanity goes extinct. Imagine loving men, but believing that your love for men, if expressed, would destroy the world, and that itâs your vital and important role as an adult to prevent men from expressing their love for each other, even though you know exactly what it feels like to wish you could express love for a man.
I feel very sorry for OSC. I also hate him, because he could have been so much better of a person than he is, and his worldview is both sickening and demonstrably untrue. Heâs allowed his Mormon programming to overcome his empathy because he has been taught to believe that it is necessary for fathers to abuse their sons. Heâs gone on record as being an abuse victim whose father was violent⊠but his writing demonstrates that his coping mechanism was to believe that his father only did it out of love and the need to protect the world. I feel so sad for the little boy he must have been once, and the young man whose writing I loved, but I despise the man he is now for not being able to break free of that programming, of not recognizing that you donât need to torture the world to save it, and in fact thatâs generally the opposite of helpful.
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