Exactly. Rowling seems like a great lady, but I found her “it was there if you were looking for it” to be an utter cop-out. If you have to look for it, then it’s pretty lousy representation (though the lack of a later romantic interest doesn’t irk me as much as it might have in other contexts; aside from Snape and Lupin, none of the teachers have their romantic lives explored at all). By that criteria, there’s probably more canonical evidence for Remus and Sirius being a couple than there is for Dumbledore’s homosexuality. Rowling didn’t have to have him swishing about Hogwarts shooting rainbow glitter from his wand, but something as plain as “I loved Grindlewald with all the intensity of any young man in his first love, almost threw the whole Muggle world into darkness for him, etc.” would have gotten the meaning across in an non-stereotypical, G-rated manner.
Back to lists…
Marvel’s Karma is part of the Astonishing X-Men team right now, along with Northstar. Northstar’s husband, Kyle Jinadu, is supporting cast.
Also at Marvel, Young Avengers is pretty much The Wiccan and Hulking Show.
One of the X-Men’s most notable villains, Mystique, is bisexual.
At Image’s Chew comic, there’s John Colby, bisexual cyborg cop.
The titular character in Mara (also from Image) is at least bisexual, possibly gay.
DC’s Batwoman is gay and currently starring in her own title. I think they also had a new bisexual character, Starling, as part of the main line-up in the relaunched Birds of Prey, but she’s dead or a villain now or something.
I knew that Delany was gay and dyslexic long before I knew that he was black.
Octavia Butler had at least one bi woman in one of her Patternmaster books.
In fact, Gethenians called a Gethenian who was always male or female a pervert.
There was at least one SF story written where the sex ratio of a spaceship crew was deliberately skewed to about a 10:1 ratio, and the captain is giving instructions to the crew about how they were going to handle the imbalance. The kicker: most of the crew members were WOMEN! GASP! This was actually pretty novel at the time of writing, I believe that I read it in the 1960s or so, when it was assumed that most women just couldn’t handle science and tech.
LeGuin’s Earthsea humans are generally dark skinned, and people with light skin and hair are considered backwards barbarians. She did that quite deliberately.
Jaqueline Litchenberg and Jean Lorrah wrote the Sime/Gen series (they have a few new books in the universe now available on Amazon). It’s actually canon that the Channels are unable to be homosexual. Actual homosexuals are rare, and the one that I recall as most prominently gay was a self-loathing killer and sadist. I spent some time in the internet fandom and participated with on-line discussions with both the authors. Litchenberg is very adamant about the sexuality. This hasn’t stopped some gay fanfiction being written in the milieu, but the creator is very firm that it is not canon.
What made some people think they were “gay” was Transfer between same-sex partners, but the Kill/Transfer is not sex, it’s a different thing, and explaining more about it would be quite the tangent to this thread.
In a Robert Sawyer trilogy, he postulates a society in which the default orientation is bisexual - just about every adult lives with an opposite sex partner during part of the month, and a same sex partner during the rest of the month.
Back in the '50s, Fredric Brown wrote EXPEDITION, where there’s a random drawing to see which thirty of that year’s space-academy graduates will be selected for the mission to Mars; female grads are outnumbered 5:1 going into the lottery, but in a statistical fluke twenty-nine women get teamed up with one man.
I think you’re right. I remember that Estraven had a partner, and they had kids together. He wasn’t a big character, and Estraven didn’t really seem to be in love with him (at least, he was still grieving for his lost love and this didn’t compare). But when he was exiled, his partner offered to go with him, and Estraven refused but gave him all his life savings instead, so there was some kind of commitment there.
And the Gethenian fairy tales/legends/whatever included love stories that seemed to indicate that they do form pair bonds. I believe the phrase was “I swear kemmerring with you”.
While we’re talking about aliens with such different concepts of gender that labels like “gay” and “straight” are kind of meaningless (but it’s still cool to think about from an LGBT perspective), there’s also The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov. The race in question has three sexes: Rational, Parental and Emotional. Rationals and Parentals use ‘he’ pronouns, Emotionals use ‘she’. The sexual/romantic relationships they form are triads. From a human perspective, it’s almost like they’re all bi, but from their own, being attracted to both the other sexes is the default.
Even better–thanks for the info! I just updated Wikipedia, and found out that our library doesn’t have this book. If I’d known about it 24 hours ago, I would’ve added it to my book order. Will keep an eye out for it!
To be fair, Seven of Nine is enough to turn anyone’s head, no matter what their sex or sexuality is normally.
Also, in the Star Trek books, there is a two-volume series called Dark Passions, by Susan Wright. It focuses on the female characters in the Mirror Universe, many of which are bi/lesbian. Especially the Kira Nerys character, “The Intendant.”
Well yeah. I mean we see her fiancé and her romance with Irish holodeck guy and that tricky alien dude, so clearly she’s not gay. But it’s possible she had that one dalliance…
Oh, dear. Shades of McCaffrey’s dragonriders of Pern, where she insisted that green and blue dragonriders are always and only homosexuals – greens always passive partners (with one woman green rider exception). And bronze dragonriders are always and only male heterosexuals. I don’t recall what prescribed roles she had for brown dragonriders.
Also, I’m pretty sure none of the green or blue dragonriders were ever “main” characters. Although there’s been a lot more of those books since her son took over writing, so maybe by now there has been one.
