How Orson Scott Card Made Me a Gay Father, Broke My Heart, and Tried to Overthrow My Country

A Story of Love and Betrayal

by Brian Frank

Dear Orson:

How could you do this to me? You've been such an important part of my life for so many years; how could it come to such an impasse between us? Surely you already know my story, yet how easily we seem to forget such things when it's convenient. So let me remind you ...

Born ten years after you, I was a child of both the Space Race and the Cold War, and seemingly became a science fiction fan while still in the womb. I'm a fairly typical fan of my generation, from a time when science fiction hadn't yet penetrated mainstream movies and television, when Star Trek was just another cancelled television series and Star Wars was just a gleam in George Lucas' eye. For me and those like me, science fiction was first and foremost about books, and your books have always held a special place in my life.

We'll always have Ender's Game, your novel about the brilliant child Ender who becomes drafted into the draconian Battle School and unwittingly becomes a genocidal war criminal in Earth's first interstellar war against aliens. I read Ender's Game while struggling through engineering school at Carnegie-Mellon University, and it resonated with me in the way that it continues to resonate with young people struggling to make their mark in the world against what can seem to be impossible odds. Then you wrote Speaker for the Dead, and I found myself deeply moved by the love story between Ender and the tragic widow Novinha on the planet Lusitania, and his decision to marry her and become a father to her family of six troubled children. Read the rest of this article.