Title: Traffick (sequel to TRICKS) Author: Ellen Hopkins Publisher: Margaret K. McElderry Books, November, 2015 Themes: sex trafficking of minors, tricks, homosexuality, homophobia, transphobia, family relationships, romantic relationships, abuse, Las Vegas Genre: Contemporary YA Ages: 14+ Opening: A Poem By Cody Bennet Can’t Find The courage to leap the brink, free-fall beyond the … Continue reading
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Blog: Miss Marple's Musings (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: romantic relationships, Diversity Reading Challenge 2015, TRAFFICK, sex trafficking of minors, transphobia, 2015 Diversity Reading Challenge, YA, minors, homosexuality, Book recommendation, Tricks, abuse, Las Vegas, Ellen Hopkins, family relationships, homophobia, Add a tag
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Martial adores sexy boys. He craves their kisses, all the more so if they play hard to get, "� buffed amber, a fire yellow-green with Eastern incense… That, Diadumenus, is how your kisses smell, you cruel boy. What if you gave me all of them, without holding back?" (3.65) and "I only want struggling kisses – kisses I’ve seized; I get more of a kick out of your bad temper than your good looks…" (5.46).
The post ‘I get more of a kick out of your bad temper than your good looks': Martial’s guide to getting boys appeared first on OUPblog.
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Following the Episcopal Church's 1976 decision to ordain women, Catholic leaders in America and Rome were approached by Episcopal clergy who opposed the decision and sought conversion as a result.
The post How conservative are married priests? appeared first on OUPblog.
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On his recent visit to Kenya, President Obama addressed the subject of sexual liberty. At a press conference with the Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, he spoke affectingly about the cause of gay rights, likening the plight of homosexuals to the anti-slavery and anti-segregation struggles in the United States.
The post Compassionate law: Are gay rights ever really a ‘non-issue’? appeared first on OUPblog.
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By Corinne Reczek
The growing support for same-sex marriage rights represents an important shift in the everyday lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people in the United States today. However, the continued focus on same-sex marriage in the media, by states, and by local governments, and by scholars and researchers leaves other arenas of the family lives of gay and lesbian adults reletively unexplored.
Of course, like all other Americans, gay and lesbian adults have primary relationships outside of their romantic partnerships. The adult child-parent tie is one of the most enduring and central of our social relationships, with most parents and children having weekly contact, exchanging support and love, and of course experiencing conflict. Indeed gay and lesbian adults keep in steady contact with their family of origin members–most especially parents–as they age into adulthood. Yet, we know virtually nothing about the nature of these intergenerational ties for gay and lesbian adults. While some attention has been paid to the importance parents for LGBTQ adolescents, what happens to the adult child-parent relationships of gay and lesbian adults as they age into mid- and later-life? Do they remain intact? Or are they estranged? Do adult children experience conflict or support? What do these relationships look like?
It is important to pay attention to the adult child-parent relationships of gay and lesbian adults. A child’s non-heterosexual identity has been shown to be associated with negative interactions with later-life parents; later-life parents may be especially unable to accept their gay or lesbian child because they grew up in a sociopolitical era where a gay or lesbian identity was unspeakable at best and pathological at worst. As a result, gay men and lesbian women appear to have fewer family confidants than heterosexuals, and tend to rank social support from friends as more consistent and important than support from family. Yet, gay men and lesbians do maintain contact with parents, even if parents are disapproving of children’s’ sexual identity. How, then, are these relationships negotiated and understood by adult children?
In a recent study on gay men and lesbians in long-term intimate partnerships, I show that there are specific markers of support and strain in gay and lesbian adult child-parent ties. For example, parents demonstrate their support of a gay or lesbian adult child by inclusion through language such as “in-law,” affirmations of support by joining gay rights advocacy groups, and via the integration into every day and special events in ways similar to other adult children. I also found that gay and lesbian adult children know their parents are accepting because parents rely on adult children and their partners for social support and caregiving. While providing social support to parents may be time-consuming and stressful, it is critical for parental well-being and provides an important opportunity for parents to demonstrate trust in gay and lesbian adult children.
The picture, of course, isn’t entirely rosy. The gay and lesbian intergenerational tie is embedded within broader institutional norms of heterosexuality and homophobia, and these broader structural constraints of homophobia and heterosexism contour these negative family interactions–with implications for both generations well-being. It appears, in the present study, that conflict is experienced in ways that are similar to when conflict is experienced in other central aspects of identity or life circumstances, such as religious values, finances, and unemployment. For example, adult children might experience significant rejection in their everyday encounters with parents and experience traumatic events of disownment by their parents. Moreover, adult children suggest that they are scared that their property may be usurped by a parent, rather than be taken care of by a partner, if something were to happen to them.
There’s hope for people who have strained relationships with their parents, however. Key moments, such as family death, illness, or injury, were described as transformative in ways that altered the structure of the adult-child-parent tie from negative to positive. Also, there has been remarkable legal and social change over the past decade, including the federal and state-level legalization of same-sex marriage and decreased public and institutional stigma against gay and lesbian identities. Given this social change, there is strong potential for changing the nature of conflictual intergenerational relationships. Clearly, the years after these social and legal changes may provide new opportunity for supportive intergenerational relationships for adult children coming of age in a new social and political era.
Dr. Corinne Reczek is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Sociology and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Ohio State University. Dr. Reczek’s research focuses on gay and lesbian families, including relationships between parents and gay and lesbian adult children, same-sex marriage, and the health of minor children in same-sex relationships. Her work was most recently published in The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological and Social Sciences, her article “The Intergenerational Relationships of Gay Men and Lesbian Women” is freely available to read now” You can find Corinne on Twitter @CorinneReczek.
The Journals of Gerontology® were the first journals on aging published in the United States. The tradition of excellence in these peer-reviewed scientific journals, established in 1946, continues today. The Journals of Gerontology, Series B® publishes within its covers the Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences.
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The post Discussing gay and lesbian adults’ relationships with their parents appeared first on OUPblog.
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By Philip Schofield
In 1814, just two hundred years ago, the radical philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) began to write on the subject of religion and sex, and thereby produced the first systematic defence of sexual liberty in the history of modern European thought. Bentham’s manuscripts have now been published for the first time in authoritative form. He pointed out that ‘regular’ sexual activity consisted in intercourse between one male and one female, within the confines of marriage, for the procreation of children. He identified the source of the view that only ‘regular’ or ‘natural’ sexual activity was morally acceptable in the Mosaic Law and in the teachings of the self-styled Apostle Paul. ‘Irregular’ sexual activity, on the other hand, had many variations: intercourse between one man and one woman, when neither of them were married, or when one of them was married, or when both of them were married, but not to each other; between two women; between two men; between one man and one woman but using parts of the body that did not lead to procreation; between a human being and an animal of another species; between a human being and an inanimate object; and between a living human and a dead one. In addition, there was the ‘solitary mode of sexual gratification’, and innumerable modes that involved more than two people. Bentham’s point was that, given that sexual gratification was for most people the most intense and the purest of all pleasures and that pleasure was a good thing (the only good thing in his view), and assuming that the activity was consensual, a massive amount of human happiness was being suppressed by preventing people, whether from the sanction of the law, religion, or public opinion, from engaging in such ‘irregular’ activities as suited their taste.
Bentham was writing at a time when homosexuals, those guilty of ‘the crime against nature’, were subject to the death penalty in England, and were in fact being executed at about the rate of two per year, and were vilified and ridiculed in the press and in literature. If an activity did not cause harm, Bentham had argued as early as the 1770s and 1780s, then it should not be subject to legal punishment, and had called for the decriminalization of homosexuality. By the mid-1810s he was prepared to link the problem not only with law, but with religion. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was taken by ‘religionists’, as Bentham called religious believers, to prove that God had issued a universal condemnation of homosexuality. Bentham pointed out that what the Bible story condemned was gang rape. Paul’s injunctions against homosexuality were also taken to be authoritative by the Church. Bentham pointed out that not only did Jesus never condemn homosexuality, but that the Gospels presented evidence that Jesus engaged in sexual activity, and that he had his male lovers — the disciple whom he loved, traditionally said to be John, and the boy, probably a male prostitute, who remained with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane after all the disciples had fled (for a more detailed account see ‘Not Paul, but Jesus’).
Bentham was writing after Malthus had in 1798 put forward his argument that population growth would always tend to outstrip food supply, resulting in starvation and death until an equilibrium was restored, whereupon the process would recommence. Bentham had been convinced by Malthus, but Malthus’s solution to the problem, that people should abstain from sex, was not acceptable to him. He pointed out that one advantage of non-procreative sex was that it would not add to the increase of population. Bentham also took up the theme of infanticide. He had considerable sympathy for unmarried mothers who, because of social attitudes, were ostracized and had little choice but to become prostitutes, with the inevitable descent into drink, disease, and premature death. It would be far better, argued Bentham, to destroy the child, rather than the woman. Moreover, it was kinder to kill an infant at birth than allow it to live a life of pain and suffering.
Bentham looked to ancient Greece and Rome, where certain forms of homosexual activity were not only permitted but regarded as normal, as more appropriate models for sexual morality than that which existed in modern Christian Europe. Bentham attacked the notion, still propagated by religious apologists, that homosexuality was ‘unnatural’. All that ‘unnatural’ meant, argued Bentham, was ‘not common’. The fact that something was not common was not a ground for condemning it. Neither was the fact that something was not to your taste. It was a form of tyranny to say that, because you did not like to do a particular thing, you were going to punish another person for doing it. Because you thought something was ‘disgusting’ did not mean that everyone else thought it was disgusting. You might not want to have sex with a sow, but the father of her piglets thought differently.
These writings were, for Bentham, a critical part of a much broader attack on religion and the ‘gloomy terrors’ inspired by the religious mentality. By putting forward the case for sexual liberty, he was undermining religion in one of the areas where, in his view, it was most pernicious. Bentham did not dare publish this material. He believed that his reputation would have been ruined had he done so. He died in 1832. He would have been saddened that it still retains massive relevance in today’s world.
Philip Schofield is Professor of the History of Legal and Political Thought in the Faculty of Laws, University College London, Director of the Bentham Project, and General Editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham. The latest volume in the edition, Of Sexual Irregularities, and other writings on Sexual Morality, was published on 30 January 2014. The research that led to the preparation of the volume was funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The Bentham Project is responsible for Transcribe Bentham, the prize-winning scholarly crowdsourcing initiative, where volunteers transcribe previously unread Bentham manuscripts.
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Image credit: Jeremy Bentham, aged about 80. Frontispiece to Jeremy Bentham, Principles of Legislation, edited by John Neal, Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1830. Public domain
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Blog: PW -The Beat (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Here’s my question about gay superheroes (and superhero sexuality in general)…
If one reads the old Golden Age stories of Superman or Batman (pre-1960), and assumes the main characters were gay, would it change the stories any?
How many characters are actually in relationships, or have made their orientation known in comics? Has Superboy or Supergirl stated their preference? (Perhaps Kryptonian society has a different system of courtship and gender identity. And pregnancy, as viewed by Superman’s birthing matrix.) Even if a character has stated his/her/shklir preference, could that be a ruse (such as Daken or Power Girl)? Just another secret identity to keep
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By Stanley Wells
The great actor Sir Ian McKellen, who is also well-known as a gay activist, was recently quoted in the press as saying that Shakespeare himself was probably gay. Invited to comment on this, I pointed out that there was nothing new in the idea, which for a long time has been frequently expressed especially because some of his sonnets are clearly addressed to a male. Nevertheless none are explicitly homoerotic in the manner of some of his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe, Richard Barnfield, and Michael Drayton, or for that matter of some modern poets such as W. H. Auden or Thom Gunn.
All those that are clearly addressed to or written about a young man, or “boy,” are among the first 126 to be printed in the 1609 volume. Yet Number 116, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment ….,” one of the most famous love poems in the language, is frequently read at heterosexual weddings. And other poems in the first part of the sequence – such as Number 27 – could even be love poems addressed to the poet’s wife.
Shakespeare’s most idealized sonnets fall among those that are either clearly addressed to a male, or are non-specific in their addressee. His explicitly sexual sonnets, all concerned with a woman and all among the last 26 to be printed, suggest severe psychological tension in a man who has to acknowledge his heterosexuality but who finds something distasteful about it, at least in its current manifestation. An example is Number 147, which begins:
My love is as a fever, longing still,
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th’uncertain sickly appetite to please.
None of the poems that celebrate love between the poet (whether we think of him simply as an identity assumed by Shakespeare for professional purposes or as Shakespeare speaking in his own person) and a “lovely boy” is explicitly sexual in the manner of the frankest of the “dark lady” sonnets. But many of these poems would have had, and continue to have, a special appeal to homoerotic readers. They have also met with castigation from homophobic readers for this very reason, as the history of their reception over the centuries makes abundantly clear. And a number of the sonnets addressed to a male are deeply passionate if idealized love poems which one can easily imagine being addressed to a young man with whom the poet was having a physical as well as a spiritual relationship. Consider for example Number 108:
What’s in the brain that ink may character
Which hath not figured to thee my true spirit?
What’s new to speak, what now to register,
That may express my love or my dear merit?
Nothing, sweet boy; but yet like prayers divine
I must each day say o’er the very same,
Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine,
Even as when first I hallowed thy fair name.
So that eternal love in love’s fresh case
Weighs not the dust and injury of age,
Nor gives to necessary wrinkles place,
But makes antiquity for aye his page,
Finding the first conceit of love there bred
Where time and outward form would show
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JacketFlap tags: LGBTQ, Booktalks, Banned Books Week, gay teens, Geography Club, Gay-Straight Alliance, Blogs and bloggers, Jonathan Hunt, HarperCollins, ALA, Libraries, Brent Hartinger, Books, bullying, School Library Journal, Authors, American Library Association, author interviews, homosexuality, YA Books, Add a tag
Banned Books Week goes on and today’s booktalk is GEOGRAPHY CLUB by Brent Hartinger. It was successfully banned for its homosexual content in Brent’s own hometown in 2005 – read Brent’s great post about it – and has continued to appear on the most challenged lists. In Brent’s blog post, he quotes a local parent who defended GEOGRAPHY CLUB at the time: “This is the most bogus thing I’ve heard of [...] It is about gay students. However, the most important part of the book is that it’s about bullying, outcasts, about tolerance [...] This is a really good book for any student to read.”
Generously contributing a booktalk today is the eloquent, often provocative, teacher, librarian, and blogger Jonathan Hunt (you can also visit him over at School Library Journal‘s blog Heavy Medal):
When is a Geography Club not a Geography Club? When it’s the front for a Gay-Straight Alliance, of course! Russel Middlebrook believes himself to be the only gay student at his high school, but when he makes an online connection with a job from his school, he begins to realize there may be others, too. Ultimately, seven students will come together to form the Geography Club, offering support to each other through thick and thin. Readers will fall in love with Russell – regardless of sexual orientation – because his voice just rings so true: funny, angsty, yet wise. There’s been an explosion of gay and lesbian young adult fiction in recent years, but this gem remains one of the very best.
Thanks so much, Jonathan! For more information, you can see this interview with Brent, check out Brent’s website (in particular, his information for LGBTQ kids is a wonderful resource), and follow Brent on Twitter.
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By Justyna Zajac and Michelle Rafferty
“Growth of Overt homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern”
-New York Times (headline in 1963)
The world recoiled when the gay community started receiving credit for its influence in fashion and culture, but at least, according to Christopher Reed, they were being acknowledged. In his new book Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas, Reed argues that for some time the professional art world plain ignored the gay presence.
We had the chance to speak with Reed recently at his Williams Club talk, where he laid out the tumultuous relationship between art and activism. Below we present a few of the controversial things we learned.
1.) Art that didn’t get a chance…
During the most formative years of the gay rights movement in the 70s and on through the late 80s, arts publications and professionals, and even museums like the Museum of Modern Art, ignored imagery associated with gay and lesbian identity. Imagery like the graffiti pictured below which emerged in urban areas during the 70s:
Grafitti on “The Rocks,” Lincoln Park, Chicago, mid-1990s.
According to Reed, “These sites of visual history were destroyed with no organized documentation when rising property values prompted local governments to reclaim these areas.”
2.) Censorship…
Is right for people to ban art today? Even if it’s in the imaginary town of Pawnee, Indiana? Reed surprised us with his answer, making us consider that there’s actually a worse kind of censorship. Listen below to hear what he said.
Transcript:
Censorship is an interesting question because there are overt examples of censorship like what just happened with the Hide/Seek show and the David Wojnarowicz piece, where particular politicians make a statement to their constituency by removing something that’s on exhibition. And then the kind of thing that you’re talking about where institutions simply don’t show things or don’t buy things – in the case of libraries – or don’t do things or don’t let particular people in, which often doesn’t read as censorship because people never realize what they could be seeing or could be reading, or could be going on, because the institution has already created a kind of logic in which that kind of thing doesn’t exist.
And so in a lot of ways I actually think that’s the most dangerous kind of censorship because people aren’t aware of it and they can’t make a
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By Edward Zelinsky
It is noteworthy when eight ideologically diverse justices of the U.S. Supreme Court all decide a First Amendment case the same way. Thus, Snyder v. Phelps is a noteworthy decision. The Westboro Baptist Church is well-known for its demonstrations at military funerals. Indeed, the Westboro Church, led by (and, some say, principally consisting of) the Phelps family, has the rare distinction of having been denounced by both Jon Stewart and Mike Huckabee.
Members of the Westboro Church demonstrated near the Maryland funeral of Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Snyder, killed in action in Iraq. Mr. Albert Snyder, the corporal’s father, sued the Westboro Church and its members for various torts including intentional infliction of emotional distress. Mr. Snyder prevailed in a jury trial. In invalidating the jury’s verdict, the U.S. Supreme Court, except for Justice Alito, said that the Church and its members were exercising their free speech rights in a constitutionally-protected fashion.
As the Court described the facts of the case, it is hard to disagree with this conclusion. According to those facts, the Westboro Church and its members told the local authorities of their intention to demonstrate at the time of the Snyder funeral and “complied with police instructions in staging their demonstration.” The Westboro demonstrators stayed “behind a temporary fence…approximately 1,000 feet from the church where the funeral was held.” The demonstrators went neither to the church where the funeral was held nor to the cemetery, and were nonviolent throughout their demonstration.
On these facts, the message conveyed by the Westboro Church is obnoxious (“God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11,” “Thank God for IEDs,” “Thank God for Dead Soldiers”) but constitutionally protected.
The problem is: Those were not all the facts of the case. Only Justice Alito confronted this reality. After the funeral, a member of the Westboro Church posted on the Church’s website a hate-filled message aimed specifically at the Snyder family. Among its other assertions, this website message accused Mr. and Mrs. Snyder of having “raised [Matthew] for the devil.” The Snyders, the web message continued, “taught Matthew to defy his Creator, to divorce, and to commit adultery.” Then the Snyders sent their son “to fight for the United States of Sodom, a filthy country that is in lock step with his evil, wicked, and sinful manner of life.”
Media accounts of the Court’s decision have largely ignored this web-based attack on the Snyders. Media accounts have also largely ignored the eight Justices’ acknowledgment that, if this web-based attack is considered, Westboro and its members may indeed have stepped over the line, forfeiting First Amendment protection by this vicious internet attack on the Snyder family. As Chief Justice Roberts put it in a footnote to his majority opinion, this “Internet posting may raise distinct issues in this context,” issues which the Court declined to consider because of the failure of the Snyders to press this point in their petition to the high court.
Justice Alito disagreed with his colleagues in his willingness to confront the facts of the case as they were presented to the jury: Westboro and
Blog: What to Read, What to Read... (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Ben Campbell's life is thrown into turmoil when his dad announces that he is divorcing Ben's mother, and then chooses a boyfriend! Ben is furious that his dad would destroy their family and plots revenge. If he find trouble, he is there. And he brags about it. Make the old man's life miserable. So what does his father do? Plunks him down into population 400 Normal, Montana. Let the games begin. Did I mention Ben arrives with spiked hair? A real hit in a cowboy community. Soon the plot thickens as Ben discovers that even a town of 400 has some secrets.
ENDERS' Rating: ****
Michael Harmon's Website
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Being homosexual was more accepted in the 1920s and early 1930s than in later times, although in a different way than it is today. Here, check out this video:
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By Geoffrey Greif
Can you believe the word “bromance” has now made it into the accepted lexicon through its addition to the New Oxford American Dictionary? I, for one, could not be more tickled. Imagine: men now have their own word that captures our platonic affection for each other. Will “manfriend” be far behind?
To what can we credit this? Men have always had guy friends but, until fairly recently, showing affection physically and verbally toward that guy might brand you as gay. Many years ago – think back to the 19th century and earlier – it was okay for men to share their affection for each other. Sociologist Peter Nardi notes that men would express love to each other in their letters. Abraham Lincoln, before he became president, shared his bed with his good friend, Joshua Speed. These non-sexual relationships, born in Lincoln’s case out of financial necessity and physical warmth on cold Springfield nights, became frowned upon by the late 19th century. With changing women’s roles and with blacks entering the workforce, white men were threatened. They adopted a hyper-sexualized sense of masculinity, according to sociologist Michael Kimmel, which came to exclude the physical and emotional expression of positive feelings towards another man. Freudian psychology further concretized beliefs about “normal” development which did include homosexuality. All of this fit well within the American culture’s sense of “rugged individualism” that obtains to some extent today. Many heterosexual men would not feel comfortable today sharing a bed with another man or going to an intimate French restaurant and opening a bottle of Pinot Noir. Relocate to the sports bar instead. There, men can carry out their shoulder-to-shoulder friendships as they get together with friends to “do something.” Contrast that with women’s face-to-face friendships where they feel more comfortable talking to each other without the distractions of sports.
Given this, it is interesting that the culture has grown within the last few years to allow men the freedom again of expressing their affection for each other. Movies like, “I Love You, Man” starring Paul Rudd have helped. Commercials that joke about men being close with each other also help. To my thinking, anything that allows men (and women) to express themselves more openly is a good thing. If giving a term to close male friendships is what it takes, I am for it because people with friends live longer, healthier lives.
Geoffrey Greif is Professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work and the author of Buddy System: Understanding Male Friendships.
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I liked having a NY author share how the sorrow of three teens affected their perceptions of the world and their relationships. Claire, Jasper and Peter's lives intertwine starting at a party the night prior to the twin towers attack on September 11, 2001, and gel a year later. I like the fact that Levithan shows how a traumatic experience of a city and of a nation affects individual lives. My favorite image of the book was the candle re-lighting, never letting a person's light go out.
ENDERS' Rating: Liked these characters!
David Levithan's Website
Blog: What to Read, What to Read... (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Garth has more than being short for his age as a problem: his father drowned sailing, and he is gay, but no one knows beside his mom and Lisa, Garth’s best friend. Mom is constantly tired and does not want to deal with Garth coming out, and she is afraid some looney will harm him. Then Uncle Mike, twin brother to his dad shows up to stay for a few weeks. Before Garth knows it he is involved with Mike’s money making scams. Before he knows it, Mike helps him be comfortable with himself. Before he knows it, there is trouble. Congrats to Ryan on his characterization, particularly Garth, Lisa and the dog-loving old lady! This YA novel can be enjoyed on so many levels, and a good discussion: we do trust Mike?
ENDERS Rating: Good read
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Richard Dawkins is the bestselling author of The Selfish Gene and The God Delusion. He’s also a pre-eminent scientist, the first holder of the Charles Simonyi Chair of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford, and is a fellow of New College, Oxford. Called “Darwin’s Rottweiler” by the media, he is one of the most famous advocates of Darwinian evolution. His most recent book is The Oxford Guide to Modern Science Writing, a collection of the best science writing in the last century.
This is the second in a series of podcasts we’re running from an interview with Dawkins. Last time, he talked about Watson and Crick. Now, Dawkins looks at Alan Turing, one of the fathers of the modern computer. Dawkins has included a selection from Turing’s Computing Machinery and Intelligence in his book.
Transcript after the jump.
DORIAN DEVINS: Alan Turing, another British scientist, computer mathematician…
RICHARD DAWKINS: Yes. Alan Turing. Well, one of the fathers of the modern computer. So Turing was, I suppose, the nearest British approach to the father of the modern computer, apart from [Charles] Babbage in the 19th Century. Turing was the leading code-breaker in the Second World War at the Bletchley Park code-breaking establishment, which was phenomenally successful in breaking German codes. The famous Enigma code that the Germans used—the Germans never realized that their Enigma code had been broken. And the result of breaking the Enigma code was that Allied British and American generals would sometimes get German orders more or less at the same time as German generals were getting them. So it was a most extraordinarily valuable contribution to the Allied war effort. However, Turing committed suicide after the war because he was arrested for homosexual activity, and in those days in Britain, homosexual behavior was illegal. And Turing, who should have been given a medal and a knighthood, feted as the savior of his nation, was instead arrested for homosexuality and was given a choice between a two year prison sentence or being given a course of hormone injections which would have had some kind of feminizing effect and would have made him grow breasts. He chose instead to eat an apple that he’d injected with cyanide. One of the most tragic stories in British science. He was a great mathematician, a brilliant mathematician, a brilliant philosopher, and one of his contributions was the Turing Machine. Another one was the Turing Test, the hypothetical test for whether a computer could think; the so-called Turing Test, where you have a human in one room and an entity, which might be a computer and might be another human in another room, communicating by teleprinter. And the task of the real human, the subject, is to discover whether what he’s talking to is a computer or another human. The Turing Test, if the computer passes the Turing Test, what it means is that a human can’t tell the difference between the computer and another human. And the Turing Test you very often find mentioned in philosophical works about the nature of consciousness and machine intelligence.
DEVINS: It’s quite interesting to be able to read something by him, rather than just about him too.
DAWKINS: Yes. He was a real eccentric, a very, very strange man, and as I say, his downfall and his death is one of the most tragic and actually wicked stories that I know.
>> but did Clark Kent ever date? >>
Yes, and fairly widely, over time.
There are even stories that seem to have been written to show when Clark lost his virginity (The kinda-creepy “Don’t Call Me Superboy” in DC SUPER STARS #12) and one where Lois pretty clearly stays the night.
Even with the Code being ever vigilant, it’s safe to say that Larry Niven’s theory is hooey. At least in the DC Universe.
kdb
Whoops – I missed the pre-1960 note. Both those stories were post-1970.
But yeah, even before 1960, Clark went on dates, both in his younger days and as an adult. He even gets a date with Lois in ACTION #1, as I recall, and they go out, to unprepossessing results.
@Kurt
Lori Lemaris first appeared in May of ‘59.
Freud I think, was the one who proposed that fascination/attraction towards mermaids was symbolic of either (A) a lusting for the unattainable mother, as the “good parts” of a mermaid are hidden and up for debate altogether, or (B) closeted homosexuality, again because the “good parts” are not really represented.
Just something to ponder.
Getting rid of secret identities is, as I see it, indubitably a good thing. Secret identities are obsolete, unless they’re combined with a “superhero story as morality play” approach to the stories. Marvel Editorial has tried to modernize its system somewhat (e.g., “Civil War”) but still says that humans are unaware that aliens exist. You might suppose that if a superhero’s secret I.D. was revealed, he or his friends would be killed, but that’s part of the soap opera approach to timelines: nothing meaningful happens between stories.
Batman might be a perfect example of someone whose psychological makeup has prevented him from knowing what his sexual orientation is. If he ever focused his attention on living a normal life, he might experience revelations. The same could be said of any hero whose origin and motivations are based on traumatic experiences and obsessive commitments to fighting crime. If he represses emotions and/or is emotionally immature, he doesn’t know himself.
A useful thought experiment to conduct when thinking about a superhero is to project him, say, five years into the future. What does he do with himself during that time? What relationships does he take up or end? How does he amuse himself? If hardly anything comes to mind except for battles with villains, there’s a problem. If all of his battles are supposedly heart-stopping, life-or-death situations, then they’re all meaningless. Law enforcement people, whether they’re real-life or fictional, have routine, even boring cases. The same should be true of superheroes.
If a hero is written as progressing toward an endpoint, he doesn’t have to go there quickly. The trip could take years. But knowing that he’s on a trip somewhere makes for a better reading experience than seeing him walk in circles. There will be time to explore all the aspects a person has, including his sexual identity.
SRS
If you read the Alpha Flight issues with Northstar and Aurora (7 & 8)you see in their dialogue and Northstar’s relationship with his friend that is killed by Deadly Earnest, you can see that Northstar is indeed gay. I was too young to read between the lines at the time but it was there. After 106 you could go back, re-read, and say “Aha!”
I don’t think that the fact that he’s gay matters. My first thought about Northstar has always been “what an arrogant jerk but he love’s his sister”. That’s what made him a special character to me.
People who look for gay themes will find it no matter what, its like those who look for something perverted or racial in a animated Disney movie. If you want to find it you will find even if it was a bump into another character they would say it was because of the fact he or she is gay.
Its just that comic books were meant to be fun. A place when you were young you dreamt of being a superhero and would run around with your friends playing superhero. It was an escape for the young and young at heart.
Today we have pretty much destroyed the comic book industry by trying to make the heroes grow up into the real world facing real world problems. We now have comic books mostly for adults that do not stay long collecting books. Tons of speculators who think each new next big thing will make them rich. How many flocked to the ndcu for all the number 1’s now finding they have multiple copies of a book falling in price. How many old loyal fans have left because of the ndcu and the big change in a superhero that they spent years or decades growing up with?
How many times have we seen companies try to age a character only seek a way to revert that change. Spider Man and Superman’s wedding are just a couple. By trying to age a character to please some just has never worked.
By alienating the biggest group of comic buyers and that was the younger age from 9 to 17 the comic book industry has cut off a huge chunk of fans.
Was it worth it? From over all sales I would say no. The industry now is at a point where they have to decide to cater to the few or try to do a quick fix or take a step back and really look at the industry.
Did removing the Comic Code of Authority really help boost sales or just tell more adult tales? Leave out so much of the real world and get back to telling fantasy stories because that is what a comic book truly is.
Super Heroes do not exist in the real world but heroes like police, firemen and others do. A political agenda is not a place for a comic book, you have a newspaper, blog or tv to push that. Keep pushing agenda’s and you keep pushing away fans and the ones you will have left will be the ones who only download your books for free.
I think that it varies from character to character.
The challenges of having a romantic relationship with a woman were central to a huge percentage of Superman stories. They were frequently full of seemingly intentional Freudian subtext (i.e. his absent birth mother is Lara El, or LL). Making Superman anything other than heterosexual really does make him a very different character.
The same is true for characters with rich romantic histories, like Spider-Man. I would include characters with strong, monogamous attachments in that group. Barry Allen is largely defined by Iris West. The same is true of Ray Palmer and Jean Loring, or Ralph and Sue Dibny.
Perhaps ironically, it is the “ladies men” for whom their orientation matters the least. Carol Ferris is not utterly essential to understanding Hal Jordan. No woman has ever matter to Bruce Wayne in the slightest. The same is true for Tony Stark.
I have to agree with ArrowShaft…though I have found a double entedre in that screen name :P
Very interesting question. Personally, I would argue (and agree with Dean) that the Clark-Lois-Superman triangle was absolutely essential to the character’s initial success. That was the point of identification. Without Clark, I don’t think we would have Superman today.
That being said, I would bet that anyone who has hid any kind of emotion, orientation, or secret would argue very strongly that it does matter. Either for someone telling a story or someone reading it. So though the motivations might be economic (as they certainly were in the 30s too), extending the secret ID of a superhero to include sexual orientation seems yet another reason why superheroes can still be an important means of understanding the human condition through fiction.
…then again, over on the distinguished competition, they list the pros and cons of a gay Spectre, so…yeah…..
great pics, Torsten
Silver St. Cloud mattered to Bruce Wayne, arguably, although not enough to compete with his need to fight crime without distractions.
Tony Stark is a shell of a man. You could argue that he immerses himself in technology and finance because he’s terrified of making an emotional commitment to anyone. If he were written as having a family member, either a brother or sister, to compete against and had to watch him or her live a full life, he’d be faced with a hard question: Do I admit that I’m inferior to _____, or do I address my emotional problems?
The success of WATCHMEN is evidence that superheroes can be written for adults. Villains don’t have to be megalomaniacs; all they have to do is want to control people for their own benefit. There are plenty of real-life examples of that.
SRS
I have to take issue with arrowshaft’s analysis on a couple points even though I agree that some of the problems of the superhero publishers are caused by a focus on “relevance” and “realism” instead of escapist fun.
First I don’t think that the undoing of marriages was necessary. Characters do change and I see nothing incompatible between Superman as wish fulfillment fantasy and being married. I think the undoing of Spidey’s marriage was as much as about the insistence of editors and writers that the characters should be reverted to the status quo they grew up with and then placed in amber as it does with undoing damage caused by trying to age the characters unnecessarily.
Secondly comics and agendas have always gone together. Golden Age Superman and Captain America are obvious examples. The X-Men themselves have had an agenda from the beginning promoting tolerance and exploring the evils of discrimination.
And finally I don’t think acknowledging the existence of gay people is pursuing a political agenda.
>> No woman has ever matter to Bruce Wayne in the slightest.>>
Selina Kyle comes to mind. Julie Madison. Silver St. Cloud.
>> The same is true for Tony Stark.>>
Meredith McCall. Pepper Potts. Whitney Frost. Bethany Cabe.
kdb
Vicki Vale mattered too, for about 15 minutes.
But ya know, other stereotypes could apply as well. Maybe DC has chosen the wrong character to “go gay”, or at least the wrong Lantern. If Hal Jordan is such the ladies man, what’s he trying to prove?