“New Roswell Drama!â€? screamed the headline off the cover of the June 6th, 2004 edition of supermarket schlocker World Weekly News; “Gay Aliens Found In UFO Wreck! They Died in a Last Loving Embrace!â€? Gays in urban legends and unexplained phenomenon are practically nonexistent, although there have been rumors that Bigfoot may be gay …and “trueâ€? tales of homosexual ghosts are out there. But the tacky application of sexuality to such universally spooky urban myths is mostly a moot point. In the vast world of actual science fiction however, the quaint playing field for characters who are specifically gay is different, if only ever-so slightly larger; their existence is just one notch above void. The history of science fiction shows that a homosexual characters’ sexuality is often vaguely assigned or symbolized (C3-PO …and also Chewbacca?), or who’s situation is used to possibly mirror the historic struggle of gays in society (The X-Men, who later flatly cashed-in with the introduction of Northstar). This indeterminateness in the best of what the genre has to offer is hardly a *wink-wink* double entendre, it’s undoubtedly left up in the air for the sake of the the lasting quality of the stories. The best “gayâ€? anything in culture is usually made of such stuff; the work’s outsider reputation is left to the gay collective unconscious; a work’s lasting symbolic historical context and relevance is gained and widely agreed upon almost unspoken-ly, later spotlighted for the world at large after gay audiences have been paying attention underground for years. There are however more examples of overtly gay characters in science fiction, who represent a kind of rag-tag, double-outsider history. The earliest recorded example of this is a 1936 novel by Olaf Stapledon called Odd John. There are many more examples. Ghost and horror fiction also has a thin history of such characterization. The later chapters of the Star Trek television series contain a small frenzy of openly gay characters and discussion (there’s even a whole fan-created, gay-themed digital video series Star Trek: Hidden Frontier, which is in it’s 7th ’season’). As even more openly accepted social attitudes towards homosexuality in the media (I’d say since around the early 1990’s) have resulted in a glut of openly-gay characters and themes in film, television, mainstream books (and even entire cable channels) – it will be interesting to trace the lasting impact of these newer works, and what, if any, mutated strains of cult appreciation they could spawn over time.

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