When I was growing up, I loved the juvenile science fiction novels of Robert Heinlein (1907-1988): originally published during the 1950s Cold War, they featured boys bonding in a rip-roaring cowboy future. Plus the Ballentine paperbacks often featured beefcake.
His adult novels were unreadable, loaded down with disgusting s*x scenes, right-wing politics, and curmudgeonly grumbles about the state of the world. But in junior high and high school, I found a universe of gay hints.
My favorites, in order:
#9: Stranger in a Strange Land (1961): A boy raised by Martians founds a hippie cult. When he learns to kiss, he offers to demonstrate on his male mentor, who refuses. But I learned that boys can kiss.
#8: Citizen of the Galaxy (1956): A rich kid is sold into slavery, but forms a buddy-bond with the guy who buys him.
#7: Time for the Stars (1956): Telepathic twins. One stays home, goes into business, gets married, has children, the whole heterosexist trajectory. The other goes into space for masculine adventures at near-light speed, so he stays a teenager forever. The symbolism is obvious.
#6: Have Space Suit-Will Travel (1958): Heinlein wasn't good at envisioning social changes in his future societies. The title is a parody of the tv series Have Gun -- Will Travel (1957-63), and the boy wins a used spacesuit in a tv jingle-writing contest. He and a girl are captured by aliens. This edition makes her look much older, but she's only 11, and there's no hetero-romance.
#5: Starship Troopers (1959). Rico trains to be a soldier in the war against the evil Communists -- um, I mean aliens. No hetero-romance. The 1997 movie starred Casper Van Dien (top photo), Patrick Muldoon (left), and Neil Patrick Harris, and gave them girlfriends.
More after the break
#4: Red Planet (1949): Two boys get lost on Mars, and have to depend on each other to survive. Also they discover that their pet "bouncer" is actually a baby Martian -- the ancient species has survived.
#3: Tunnel in the Sky (1955): In this rip-roaring future, the final exam in a high school Advanced Survival Class requires you to be zapped through a space portal to an alien planet, and survive for two weeks. But no one comes to pick them up: they're lost in space! They form a new society, with jobs and marriages and children -- but not mayor Rod. He claims that he's too busy governing the colony. Yeah, right.
#2. Space Cadet (1948): The romance between Matt and Tex was a defining moment of my childhood. Plus we get a description of them showering together.
The muscular, half-naked Hugh grows up in a small farming community, rarely venturing more than two or three decks from home, not worried about much besides crops and friends and mutie attacks. He believes his parents and the Scientists when they tell him that the universe consists of the Ship, a cylindrical cavern. The stars and planets in old books are merely fairy-tales; when the ancients spoke of the journey to "Far Centaurus." they were being metaphorical, talking about the soul's journey to enlightenment.
Then Hugh is captured by a two-headed, muscular, half-naked mutant named Joe-Jim, who convinces him that stars and planets are real, that the Ship is actually traveling through space. Civilization ended after a mutiny generations ago, and everyone forgot their true destiny.
Hugh and Joe-Jim revolt against the Ship's oppressive theocratic government, tell everyone the truth, and try to push forward to their original destination.
I was struggling to understand that my family and friends, teachers and preachers were mistaken, or deliberately lying, when they claimed that we all lived in a small heteronormative box. The trajectory of job, house, wife, kids was all that existed. A boy could not love a boy; what I was seeing on tv and reading about in boys' adventure novels were chimeras, mere friendships, or at best metaphors for the true, mature, heterosexual loves of adulthood.
There was nothing outside.
But, as Frankie Valli sang,
The adults are lying -- only real is real.
But, as Frankie Valli sang,
The adults are lying -- only real is real.
Rooster Episode 1.1: Trashy novelist at an elite college, hetero romance problems, a gay sidekick, Dunster d*ck, and the guy from "Scrubs" Mentions Heinlein
It's one of my favorite books from when I was a teenager. I don't remember where I got it from, it was a used copy but I've read it twenty times probably. Thanks for writing about it!
ReplyDeleteThe time you grew up was arguably the most heteronormative time in history. Censored were the skinny dips and circle jerks of old, to say nothing of fully recognized male couples. Imagine if we celebrated Golan Cipel with statues, maybe even a cult, like Antinous. Instead it was a secret that destroyed Jim McGreevey's career.
ReplyDeleteI grew up long before Golan Cipel made the news, but heteronormativity is still common. Few people today can claim that they are not aware of the existence of LGBT people at all, like they could in the 1970s, but that recognition takes intellectual effort. So professors ask their classes "Guys, ask your girlfriends," and this or that actress is depicted as "Every man's fantasy." They only really acknowledge the existence of gay people when someone else points it out to them.
DeleteFirst gay political scandal I could think of. Well, third, but the first two (Mark Foley and a big Democratic contributor here in California who hires young black male prostitutes and then they OD from drugs he insists they take) felt too "classic gay villain".
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