Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Or wearing budgie smugglers and getting all huffy when folks giggle immoderately. (Yes, I'm looking at you through my fingers Tony Abbott.)
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Craig Ranapia,
Got to flick myself on the ears there -- there are also plenty of straight white middle-class cis-gendered males in geekdom who do own their privileges and don't behave like entitled garbage monsters. Because being an ignorant bigot really is a lifestyle choice.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Emma Hart,
Also, as Bart says, geek texts are gayer. Not only do they deal with concepts of ‘outsiders’ a lot, but ‘mainstream’ geek stuff – Dr Who, Buffy, BSG – have LGBT characters.
To give the straight boys credit where due, Ronald Moore was (to me) impressively grown-up and respectfully engaged with criticism that BSG's GLBT representation was far from flawless. "Yeah, we fraked up not having a gay regular character on BSG - and I'm ultimately responsible for that." Well done, Ron. Wish that was the norm. And who would have thought Steven Moffat could make Doctor Who even gayer? If steampunk Silurian detective Madame Vastra (and married woman, thank you Withnail) isn't a marriage equality / lesbian icon by now I'm handing in my bloody toaster oven in disgust. :)
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Stephen R,
Interesting link. Yes, it would be nice if racism, misogyny, homophobia and all other kinds of bigoted bullshit were unknown in Geekdom. The big flaw in that theory is that geeks are human beings. And, like it or not, Anglo-American pop culture still largely comes from quarters dominated by straight white middle-class cis-gendered men -- with all the baggage that comes with it in the world we live in.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Bart Janssen,
So I have a question. Would Ender’s Game be more acceptable if OSC was dead and not activity spewing his bile?
If you find Ender’s Game a difficult piece of work, I don’t think it signifies either way. Hell, C.S. Lewis died fifty years ago, and people are still arguing about the problem of Susan. Is The Lord of the Rings a deeply reactionary (and more than a bit racist and misogynistic) tract from someone who refused to grow-up let alone accommodate himself to the 20th century? Don't think anyone's ever going to settle that one.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to TracyMac,
I have to say I do notice the entrenched sexism more.
Gods Old and New, yes. Had way too many uber-squicky conversations with chaps who see precisely nothing even slightly problematic with the horrendous treatment of rape and violence against women in things like True Blood, Game of Thrones and American Horror Story. (Though to be fair, there's also plenty of nuanced and thoughtful discussions on the subject too -- you've just got to know where to look and it's usually in places where those kinds of chaps are subject to prompt Dalek-style extermination.)
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Tim Michie,
Fans and retailers aren’t the only people upset that DC has hired very vocal gay rights denier Orson Scott Card to write the digital-first Adventures of Superman comic; artist Chris Sprouse, who was due to illustrate Card’s take specifically, has just quit the book due to the controversy.
Interestingly precise and carefully worded PR from Sprouse, though. It’s not Card himself, or DC’s judgement in hiring him, that cause the bail but “the controversy.” I can understand why it’s professionally unwise to shit where you eat – the mainstream US comics industry is an effective duopoly after all but a stronger statement would have been nice.
Still, this is another reason why companies should do proper due diligence on who they associate their brands with – and who their audiences really are. Like it or not, when you do business with a writer you’re not just leasing their “brand” but all the baggage that goes with it.
Also, DC has been under sustained criticism in recent years for its lack of diversity not only on the page but in the creative, editorial and executive staffs. Yeah, it’s really choice that Batwoman’s going to propose to her girlfriend in costume no less, but that doesn’t mitigate that you still hired someone who IRL thinks she’s going to go to hell.
Oh, and you also hired the homophobic white guy to write a high profile Superman story when you have precisely zero African-American or Hispanic writers and only three women. BTW, your most senior female editor, Vertigo head Karen Berger, is leaving at the end of the month.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Bart Janssen,
I’m torn. I loathe OSC and his opinions. Yet I still love Ender’s Game.
And that doesn’t make you, ipso facto, a drooling homophobe by association. A couple of days ago, I got into a Card-related discussion on IO9, where I made an observation in response to this:
really, my point is people have the right to have unpopular views and also have the ability to separate there personal Political and Religious rules form there works
I replied:
In the end, I still think T.S. Eliot is the greatest English language poet of the 20th century but it’s disingenuous and critically dishonest to pretend you can just squint pass his anti-Semitism or “separate” clearly anti-Semitic passages from his poetry and criticism. And, sorry, I’ve read Hamlet’s Father – I don’t think Card separates his faith-based homophobia from his work at all.
For that matter, there’s a lot of Robert Heinlein’s work I treasure still, or found really valuable formative literary experiences. I still won’t have the nauseatingly racist Farnham’s Freehold or The Day After Tomorrow in the house, or Friday where our eponymous heroine ends the book in a group marriage including a man who once raped her. Hey, he was just doing his job and she’s not the sort to bear a grudge… Ugh.
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One other thing, Red. I should note the Democratic Party at all levels doesn't exactly have a flawless record when it comes to GLBT rights. Obama had to clean up the mess of 'don't ask, don't tell' - and he took his sweet time about it -- and it would have been nice if Clinton had put up at least token resistance to DOMA. On the flip side, both Ted Olson and David Boies deserve to be remembered and honoured for their awesome bipartisan ally tag-teaming on 'Perry v. Schwarzenegger' rather than 'Bush v. Gore'.
'It's complicated' - not just a Facebook relationship status.
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Up Front: Card on the Table, in reply to Kumara Republic,
One has to wonder what exactly Card was doing in the US Democrat Party for years. Or was he just one of them in name only?
A DINO? Well, one should note the current Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is a Mormon and one whose opinion that the LDS Church’s support of Prop 8 was “a waste of resources" went down like the proverbial bucket of cold sick in some quarters. The same quarters who are not at all pleased that former Utah Governor John Huntsman has re-stated his support of marriage equality.
It's not just Mormons either. As the linked story points out, there are plenty who’d like to see Nancy Pelosi excommunicated from the Catholic Church on her pro-choice views and voting record alone.
It's way above my pay grade to deem Reid and Huntsman "real" or "good" Mormons. But I feel pretty confident saying Card's drivel is vintage homophobic fuckbaggery, even if it came from the piss-hole of an evangelical atheist.
As a general point, I’d caution about putting whole religious groups (or non-theists, for that matter) into a political or ideological box. Let’s not play their game, by their rules.
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