Publisher Electronic Arts has taken a bit of flak lately over the fact video games let you be, or even be around, gay people in space. Said flak has mostly come from homophobic arseholes, but still, flak is flak.
It’s an argument other media has had to deal with for years and will for years to come, but the finer points of the struggle aren’t what I care about today. I only care about Charlie Brooker (former game journo and he of the amazing Gameswipe) and his latest piece for Britain’s The Guardian, called “Some people are gay in space. Get over it”.
It’s a wonderful piece, not because it tackles an issue that almost anyone can tackle (given the opposition’s weakness towards images of clashing genitalia), but because it tackles it by, in part, providing the single greatest summary of the plot of the original Star Wars I have ever seen.
They also claim “there were no LGBT characters in any of the Star Wars movies”. I don’t know which wacky re-cut version of Star Wars they’ve been watching, but I saw the original when I was about six years old and even then I was struck by how outrageously camp C3PO is. He was a gilded John Inman in space. And what about Luke Skywalker? Apart from briefly kissing his own sister, he shows no interest in women whatsoever. The first film is a tender gay parable in which Luke falls in love with Alec Guinness and gradually “comes out” as a Jedi. The final scene oozes symbolism: having penetrated the Death Star’s trench in his phallic spacecraft, he closes his eyes, submits to his true inner instinct and triumphantly blasts his X-Wing’s seed into an anus-like aperture, causing an orgasmic eruption that changes his universe for ever. It’s hard to see how they could make Star Wars any gayer, unless they gave the Millennium Falcon a handlebar moustache.
I will never watch those movies the same again. Ever.
Some people are gay in space. Get over it [The Guardian]
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