Pride and Sci-Fi

What a very gay week I've had! This last weekend was the Pride celebration, and Atlanta has one of the biggest parades and festivals in the country. A little rain and some thunder delayed the start of the parade, but my wife and I still made it out to watch about 20 minutes of the procession. Lucky for us, the route took the parade directly past our condo, so all we had to do was walk out to the gate and we watched from there.

The event was especially moving for us since we'd just seen Brokeback Mountain for the first time the day before. We hadn't made a plan to watch it the same weekend as Pride, that's just how the Netflix queue worked out. But it was certainly emotionally satisfying to be out there and help the paraders celebrate the progress the country has made, hopefully to the point where two men like Ennis and Jack would not endure the fear and suffering that they do in the film.

To top it all off, I just finished reading Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, an excellent science fiction anti-war novel that stems from the author's own experiences in Vietnam. It also, rather coincidentally, includes the evolution of human society to an all-homosexual orientation, largely a result of the effort to control Earth's runaway population growth. This turn of events leaves the protagonist, who has been off fighting the war, as nearly the sole remaining human heterosexual, a provocative twist that showcases the unique way in which science fiction can function as social commentary (the novel was written in 1975).