they may be selling, but I am not buying, no matter how huge my Penny Jordan collection was at 13. Things scarred me for life.

She was the Harlequin author I had a huge collection of too!

Her books were like crack! Patriarchy-addled, colonialist-approved crack, but crack just the same.

I can't recall an openly gay character in an OSC book, no.

I remember one. He revealed his gayness by trembling with desire when helping a (male) child character change his clothes. Don't remember if he was merely fired or executed.

I think it was in Wyrms. At any rate it was in the same novel in which a female child character revealed the depth of her evil while being raped.

Does Card actually have gay characters in his books? How does he treat them? I admit I've never read anything by him (I missed Ender's Game during those crucial high school years), but I just assumed that his books would reflect his anti-gay stance by not including any gay characters.

Yeah, I was wondering that, too.

I should never ever read OSC's opinions on anything. I try not to let it detract from my enjoyment of his fiction, but it's hard.

It pains me that he's a family friend.

Does Card actually have gay characters in his books? How does he treat them?

He was all the rage in the SF circles I frequented back in the day -- it was in NC, and he was winning all sorts of awards while living in Greensboro. I don't remember the subject coming up in his work or otherwise then.

On the other hand, I haven't read everything he wrote.

I've read (and loved) most of his early stuff (the original Ender books, the Alvin Maker trilogy back when it was still a trilogy, the Worthing Saga, a whole slew of short stories), but very little of his recent work.

I tried reading the Ender prequels, but once Petra hit puberty and realized her true mission in life was to stay at home and meekly pop out baybeez, I was too full of incoherent rage to continue any further. And I haven't had the heart to read anything he's written since.

I've read Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, the first two Alvin Maker books, and some of his pre-1990-or-so short fiction (including the short stories or novelettes that became EG and the AM works). I vaguely remember a moment or two in Ender that one could, if one wished, interpret as homosexual in the sense of one male showing affection for another -- but I doubt OSC intended it that way.

I tried reading the Ender prequels, but once Petra hit puberty and realized her true mission in life was to stay at home and meekly pop out baybeez, I was too full of incoherent rage to continue any further. And I haven't had the heart to read anything he's written since.

They weren't really prequels as the continuing stories of the other Battle School kids. But, yeah.

I read them and found them fascinating in a "near-future warfare" kind of sense, and Bean just rocks, but Petra going from "bad-ass Battle School grad" to "I jus' wanna have Beanie-Weanie's widdle babies" was baffling. That and you got the sense that OSC became kind of lost in the expanse of his global war. Tom Clancy he ain't.

You really have to pick and choose OSC's writing.

Oddly, slashdot thought his essay about JKR's lawsuit was large with the funny.