Yesterday's Myths Today and Tomorrow: Problems of Representation and Gay (In)Visibility (Critical Essay‪)‬

When, in 1996, I began formal research for my doctorate on male homosexuality and science fiction I had a number of reasons--political, pragmatic, and personal--for undertaking the project. Perhaps one of the more intellectually compelling, however, concerned the nature of sf on the one hand and the absence of any sustained examination of homosexuality in relation to it on the other. According to many accounts of the genre, science fiction is about imagining alternatives; it deals, by its very nature, in the business of speculation. It made sense therefore, I thought, to examine the genre's sexual speculations--specifically, to consider its engagement with the "alternative" sexual identity that is homosexuality. One of the things that I quickly found--surprising to my mind, given sf's concern with exploring and speculating--was that there was a relative dearth of material to work on. I knew at the outset that there was no Big Book (this indeed was one of my reasons for undertaking the work); nevertheless I expected that a fairly substantial body of relevant critical literature would exist--mapping, at least in outline, the territory I was to explore. My preliminary research, however, suggested that this wasn't the case. (1) I also found, again quite quickly, that this problem--of absence--raised itself, albeit differently, with a number of the primary sources that I collected, that is, with actual science fiction stories. What I found, very often, was that texts that had been held to be about gays or gayness did not always seem to contain them or it; at least, they didn't in any undisputable way, and sometimes not in any obvious way.