Author: Dotan Dimet

[ with a big aside about King Arthur and Gay-blindness ]

One Friday a while back I got woken up by a call offering to sell me a subscription to the Hebrew edition of Popular Science. For some inexplicable reason (I thought Israel had something to do with this mag, for he had their T-Shirt, I think), I said OK, and was dragged out of bed to look for my credit card for my pains.

Fortuitously, the second issue of my subscription is the one which is all about Charlie Stross and Cory Doctrow (Or, rather more specifically, it has an article about them).
Now, since I am going to the Word Science Fiction convention, and both Stross and Doctrow will be there, I figure I could either (a) give the magazine to one of them, as a nice souvenir or (b) get both of them to sign it. The first option lets me get rid of it, the second prevents me from getting rid of it.
But it would be cool.

Speaking of WorldCon, after making a big fuss about voting for the Hugos, I discovered, at 3AM (Israel time, but still a few hours before the final July 31st deadline) that the PIN number sent to me in special e-mail, which I needed to fill in the online voting form, had been sent to my work e-mail, and therefore was inaccessible. By the next day, voting was closed. Curses.

Going back to Stross and Doctrow, whom I know about because they blog, they make a fine odd couple, and the contrast in their photos in the Pop Sci article was quite amusing: Stross, posing in a garden in a Cyberdog-style green-on-black space invaders shirt, had a shaved head but looked otherwise exactly like the shaggy UNIX geek that he appears to be online, with big beard and massive glasses. Actually the shaved head and beard combination made him look very much like a Hammas activist.

Doctrow, on the other hand, photographed in black-and-white, also wore a dark shirt (the coolest Pirates of the Caribbean shirt I saw in my life, keeping with his well-known Disney fetish) and glasses. However, the glasses were a stylish retro thin rectangular frame, his hairstyle was a neat crewcut, and he looked as neat and stylish as Stross looked tangled and unkempt. Somewhat amusingly, although he posed against a blank wall, the caption said he was photographed "in his London apartment".

It struck me on reflection that Doctrow is probably the coolest-looking person in SF, which is not really a big deal in a scene which considers Neil Gaiman’s tired "rocker" look cool (mostly because he’s got no competition in his writing weight class, I imagine). And that his whole look and style would make sense if I assumed he was Gay, which I hadn’t really, so far.

I think most people tend to do this, to think of other people whom they know little about as like themselves. So I tend to think of all men as heterosexuals. This sometimes causes me to jump through hoops interpreting things which would make a lot of sense if I had bothered to consider the Gay option.

For example, in the recent King Arthur movie, Lancelot is represented rather heavy-handedly as constantly bragging about having sex with (and making passes at) other men’s wives. I saw this as a shying-away from serious relationships, because he remained devoted in his heart to the girl that thrusts a carved horsehead into his hand in the opening sequence as he is taken from his home as a child. I saw this enduring, hopeless, unfulfilled and distant love, very economically hinted at with the smallest touches.

But reading the fifteen minute movie version (and the IMDB page for Ioan Gruffudd) made me realize that this all makes much more sense if Lancelot is Gay. This is neat, because it gives us the whole Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot triangle, except that here, instead of Lancelot stealing Guinevere from Arthur, Guinevere actually steals Arthur from Lancelot, and this makes the whole Lancelot arc even more poignant.

The point is that this demonstrates the way my interpretations are twisted by my straight-think. Now, I grew up with this, and I have a strong personal attachment to the idea of male companionship, friendship, non-sexual love, "buddy-hood" or whatever, as exhibited by Sam and Frodo, Kirk and Spock, Doug and Tony (from the Time Tunnel, heathens!), Don Quixote and Sancho, and other favorites of the Slash genre. I believe in that crap, and shouting "HoYay" about it sets my teeth on edge.

Prejudice produces imaginative explanations, but they tend to be over-elaborate as well as wrong.

I mean, look at Stross, look at Doctrow: Straight geek, Gay geek, what could be simpler?