The idea that being gay might be genetic horrifies me. I'm speaking as a happily gay man here. You see, I cut my reading teeth on "New Wave" science fiction dystopias, while living in the Born Again South, where any excuse to hate on a queer was a good excuse -- so to my mind, it's easy to jump from "people are born gay" to "being gay is a birth defect" to "let's cure them, or at least abort them as soon as we have the technology to identify them in the womb." You think that the fundamentalists won't abandon their anti-abortion rhetoric when it comes to the little queers in their bellies? Maybe they won't. Maybe. I've seen them contradict themselves too many times to believe that anything -- anything except their homophobia, that is -- means anything.
But that's just me. I'm just a pessimist.
Charlie Anders' story, "One Door Closes," covers some of the same speculative ground that my paranoiac imagination just did up there -- probing at the possible genetic basis of homosexuality, and imagining how technology might come into play in the future to manipulate same -- only with a much less, shall we say, apocalpytic result.
Have a read ...
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