Heh. I didn't know the word "lesbian" either -- I think I might have learned it from Lotus?
Hm. So as regarding heterosexual sex (which was the only kind people really talked about), I was both a prude about reading about romance/sex (people kissing in books and talking about their (physical) feeeeeelings about it was all ewwwww) but also extremely curious about what this sex thing actually was, given that no one in real life was talking to me about it. So any book that was willing to go into it in a way that I could deal with (memorably, I learned the mechanics from Judith Krantz' multigenerational romance/glamour novels, but not actually from the romance parts, all of which I skipped; rather, from a bit where an adolescent is explaining the Facts of Life to her friends) was interesting to me, and Polly's having sex with her boyfriend was something that apparently fell in that category?
I didn't know anyone gay and out until... grad school? I remember a high school acquaintance coming out, which might have been when we were all in college, but I didn't know him all that well. So the whole concept of homosexuality I learned (middle-to-high-school-ish-age) from Orson Scott Card's books (Songmaster and the Memory of Earth series both have gay and/or bisexual men as characters) and House Like a Lotus. (There may have been more -- those are the ones I remember right now.) In both cases it was an author that (at the time) I would go anywhere for, and so when they portrayed homosexuality as part of the normal order of things (I mean, yeah, they didn't do it perfectly, but they did it), I was like, "Whoa, this is okay?? Well, OSC and L'Engle say it is, so it must be."
OSC (and to a lesser degree L'Engle) gets SO much flak, and some of it is deserved. (Though I will continue to assert that the majority of it is... OSC being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and this coming with a Whole Host of Stuff and Baggage that it's much harder to understand if you're not a member. But that's another rant for another day.) But it's also true that they were authors with an enormous audience and kids like me who would eat up anything they wrote, and they did choose to show us these things when the vast majority of other authors I was excited about reading didn't, and in both cases they got backlash from their more conservative readers.
I suppose my parents are more tolerant than they were in the 80's, but they are still on the homophobic side. My niece (age 6) declared recently she wanted to get married to a girl, and my mom was like "no, you shouldn't do that," and told me she didn't think my sister should expose my niece to her husband's family as much -- in particular, husband's family includes one F/F marriage. GAH. Anyway, let's just say that tolerance, much less celebration, of same-sex relationships was not one I was getting outside of fiction, so I'll always be grateful that I got it from those authors.
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Re: A lot of spoilers and a lot of wtf
Date: 2020-10-02 04:53 am (UTC)Hm. So as regarding heterosexual sex (which was the only kind people really talked about), I was both a prude about reading about romance/sex (people kissing in books and talking about their (physical) feeeeeelings about it was all ewwwww) but also extremely curious about what this sex thing actually was, given that no one in real life was talking to me about it. So any book that was willing to go into it in a way that I could deal with (memorably, I learned the mechanics from Judith Krantz' multigenerational romance/glamour novels, but not actually from the romance parts, all of which I skipped; rather, from a bit where an adolescent is explaining the Facts of Life to her friends) was interesting to me, and Polly's having sex with her boyfriend was something that apparently fell in that category?
I didn't know anyone gay and out until... grad school? I remember a high school acquaintance coming out, which might have been when we were all in college, but I didn't know him all that well. So the whole concept of homosexuality I learned (middle-to-high-school-ish-age) from Orson Scott Card's books (Songmaster and the Memory of Earth series both have gay and/or bisexual men as characters) and House Like a Lotus. (There may have been more -- those are the ones I remember right now.) In both cases it was an author that (at the time) I would go anywhere for, and so when they portrayed homosexuality as part of the normal order of things (I mean, yeah, they didn't do it perfectly, but they did it), I was like, "Whoa, this is okay?? Well, OSC and L'Engle say it is, so it must be."
OSC (and to a lesser degree L'Engle) gets SO much flak, and some of it is deserved. (Though I will continue to assert that the majority of it is... OSC being a member of the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints, and this coming with a Whole Host of Stuff and Baggage that it's much harder to understand if you're not a member. But that's another rant for another day.) But it's also true that they were authors with an enormous audience and kids like me who would eat up anything they wrote, and they did choose to show us these things when the vast majority of other authors I was excited about reading didn't, and in both cases they got backlash from their more conservative readers.
I suppose my parents are more tolerant than they were in the 80's, but they are still on the homophobic side. My niece (age 6) declared recently she wanted to get married to a girl, and my mom was like "no, you shouldn't do that," and told me she didn't think my sister should expose my niece to her husband's family as much -- in particular, husband's family includes one F/F marriage. GAH. Anyway, let's just say that tolerance, much less celebration, of same-sex relationships was not one I was getting outside of fiction, so I'll always be grateful that I got it from those authors.