I’ve just been reading the Wikipedia article about Arthur C. Clarke, because I wanted to look something up, and I found some things I did not know, including the fact that he was held in such high esteem in Sri Lanka that “when fellow science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein came to visit, the Sri Lanka Air Force provided a helicopter to take them around the country“. How cool is that!
Also, this quote made me tear up:
‘In his obituary, Clarke’s friend Kerry O’Quinn wrote: “Yes, Arthur was gay … As Isaac Asimov once told me, ‘I think he simply found he preferred men.’ Arthur didn’t publicise his sexuality – that wasn’t the focus of his life – but if asked, he was open and honest.”‘
I wish that was the norm for sexuality. As in, just matter-of-fact and by-the-by and of no consequence. A minor facet of who you are.
Instead the media seems to make such a big song-and-dance if a celeb comes out as gay. Like it is in any way noteworthy. Yet, sadly, even in the 21st Century, it still is.
Apparently there was a minor scene in one of the Kelvin timeline Star Trek films where it depicts Sulu with his husband in a “by-the-by” slice-of-life scene of little consequence, which was done to honour George Takei. George kicked off about it and said they should have made a new gay character, and Simon Pegg respectfully disagreed, and said that the way it had been done normalised and honoured homosexuality as a totally normal thing, whereas a new character would have been a “token gay”.
There was a similar thing in RWBY where the team visit the sister of one of their number, who is in a loving lesbian relationship and they meet her wife, and it is literally not remarked upon or highlighted, and is just portrayed as total normal and inconsequential.