DC Comics has hired Orson Scott Card, author of Ender’s Game, to write the first two issues of its new digital-first comic Adventures of Superman, prompting a boycott of the company.
Card, a devout Mormon, is strongly homophobic. In the early 1990s, he called for laws banning gay sex to stay in place, and in 2004, in an essay titled “Homosexual ‘Marriage’ and Civilization”, wrote:
The dark secret of homosexual society—the one that dares not speak its name—is how many homosexuals first entered into that world through a disturbing seduction or rape or molestation or abuse, and how many of them yearn to get out of the homosexual community and live normally.
Card put those beliefs into practice in his 2008 novella Hamlet’s Father, which features the eponymous King Hamlet as a paedophile and in which Publisher’s Weekly claims:
The focus is primarily on linking homosexuality with the life-destroying horrors of pedophilia, a focus most fans of possibly bisexual Shakespeare are unlikely to appreciate.
(Card denies that Hamlet’s Father contains any gay characters)
All of which might render Card unsuitable to write a character who is normally portrayed as the paragon of good in his world. As a result, some are calling for a boycott of Card’s book, and others for a boycott of all DC’s output. All Out, a transnational campaign for sexual equality, is organising a petition against DC comics, writing that:
We need to let DC Comics know they can’t support Orson Scott Card or his work to keep LGBT people as second-class citizens.
For a company which is happy to court LGBT audiences when it can, trumpeting its introduction of Batwoman as the first lesbian superhero to have her own solo title and reintroducing Alan Scott, the first Green Lantern, as a gay man just last year, DC’s choice to hire Card is rather hypocritical. The company is attempting to have its cake and eat it too, and fans are right to take issue with that.
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