Kevin Howell

The Closet Door Swings Both Ways
October 27, 2007

Less than a week after J.K. Rowling’s outing of Dumbledore we see that the closet door swings both ways as the film adaptation of David Gerrold’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Martian Child, opens in theatres with the main character changed from gay to straight.

The 2002 novel (based on a novella that won the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award and the Locus Readership Poll for best novelette of 1994) was based on Gerrold’s experience as an out gay writer (who wrote the classic “The Trouble with Tribbles” episode of Star Trek when he was just 23 years old) and his attempts to adopt an eight year old with emotional problems who had been in eight foster homes in eight years and had been abused in two of them.

In the movie, John Cusack stars as Gerrold’s alter ego, except now he’s a  straight man mourning the death of wife.  As much as I enjoy Cusack as an actor and admire his left-leaning blogs on Huffington Post, I’m getting tired of him signing on to films that change his character from gay to straight (the same thing happened when he played John Berendt in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil).

Gay screenwriter Jonathan Tolins (who produced and wrote for Showtime’s Queer As Folk) and writing partner Seth E. Bass (who co-wrote The Twilight of the Golds with Tolins) explain on Tolins’ blog that they were brought onto the project in 2000, when the novella was source material. “The sexual orientation of the narrator in the short story is never mentioned,” writes Tolins. “Early in our discussions, I brought up the question of the main character David’s personal life. Why was this single man adopting a child? I wanted to know what led him to this decision and why he wasn’t pursuing a family down a more traditional path. I thought an audience would want to know, too. We discussed several possibilities, including the notion that David could be gay. In the end, we decided to make David someone who had suffered a recent tragedy.”

Tolins and Bass worked on their pitch for more than a year before they found out that Gerrold had expanded the novella to novel length and in doing so, made his self-named character gay. “I still remember the moment I found out, sitting in David Kirschner’s den,” writes Tolins. “I banged my head with my hands and said, “Oh no! It will be just my luck. We’ll get this movie made and everyone will say we changed the character from gay to straight.””

After reading the novel, Tolins said, “To my surprise, the book did not make me wish we had written our treatment differently. David’s sexuality is rarely mentioned. He “happens to be gay” and has no romantic life to speak of.”

I have a problem with the screenwriters’s idea that they couldn’t make a film where the lead character “just happens to be gay.”  Tolins explains, “Indeed I wonder if those accusing us of “changing” David from gay to straight would have been satisfied with a movie that was strictly faithful to the novel. I suspect they might have complained that David was just another safe, neutered gay character with no romantic interest.” I think he underestimates the power a benign move like making a lead character gay (even without any romantic entanglements) could make on the general public, especially concerning the current hot-button topic of gay adoption.

A year ago, Gerrold posted his side of the story on the Internet Movie Database Web site, saying, “I argued long and hard that the picture should be about a single gay man adopting a little boy. Then I argued long and hard that at least we shouldn’t add a dead ex-wife. Just have him be a single man, period. The gay audience would get it. I lost both those arguments.”  

But, Gerrold has always seen his story as a tale to encourage people to adopt. “Given a choice—a story that argues gay issues or a story that helps the half million kids still in the foster care system find homes faster, I personally choose the latter,” he wrote. “Not because I don’t think gay issues are important; I certainly do think they’re important. (Remember, I’m the guy who wrote a gay-themed script for Star Trek: The Next Generation, then quit the show when it became apparent they had no intention of filming it. So I’m no stranger to this battle.) But at this moment in time, my personal priority is the well-being of the children. It’s part of the commitment I made when I chose to become an adoptive parent.”

It’s hard to argue between gay visibility and learning that troubled kids can bring joy to those who adopt them, but why should we have to choose? There are plenty of movies out there with presumed heterosexual heroes that have no scenes of a romantic nature, why can’t a gay hero just be gay? I guess movie producers still think viewers are less mature than readers.

Posted by Kevin Howell on October 27, 2007 | Comments (2)