I always thought it was amazing that OSC had such a nuanced mind and could portray human motivations and frailty with such fidelity, to show that boths sides nearly always have valid points and what true grappling with morality and "what is right" looks and feels like from the inside in his writing, coupled with discovering he was strongly anti-gay in the real world.
The man who saw and extended "humanity" to insect-aliens, sentient pigs, and more, who saw the humanity in literal psychopaths (Peter), but couldn't see it in gay people, some of whom he probably personally knows? It was mind blowing to me.
He literally writes about people born with predilections they have zero control over and struggle with - the OCD people about whom your namesake was a representative. And he never thought that gay people could just be born that way?
A great case study in "the smarter you are, the more you can just use those smarts to arrive at whatever conclusion you want."
I retain immense respect and admiration for his writing even so.
I think OSC absolutely could and did see the humanity in gay people as individuals, but viewed their sexuality as a flaw -- as all of us are flawed, in various ways -- and felt it a disservice to them and to the rest of us to "encourage" that flaw by formally legalizing gay marriage. That is, his mind was nuanced enough to distinguish between the humanity of the individuals and what he saw as the harm that would be done by legalizing gay marriage.
I don't agree that legalizing gay marriage is harmful, nor do I see homosexuality as a flaw, but if you can accept that as Card's worldview (and it is very much the view of the LDS church) and also really accept that Card did believe in both "hate the sin" and "love the sinner", then I think his position makes perfect sense... though the intensity of the way he expressed it still does honestly surprise me a bit.
Yes, if you regard homosexual relations as fornication, considering them "sin" is entirely consistent with your worldview. Not all homophobia is driven by disgust...entirely.
He absolutely humanized gay people, thought of them as born that way, etc. I still remember this bit from Characters & Viewpoints, even though it's been years since I last read it:
> What if you just can't imagine yourself doing something? Then, instead of trying to think of what it would take to get you to do what your character does, think of something you actually have done that is like what the character does.
> For instance, Michael Bishop faced this problem in his brilliant 1988 novel Unicorn Mountain, in which one character. Bo, is a young homosexual who is dying of AIDS. Bo and another character are at a motel swimming pool when three muscular young men come to swim. Bo might have had any of several responses: envy at their health and strength; resentment that these boorish young heterosexual men don't have to pay a price like AIDS for their sexual activities. But what Bishop chose to show was simple lust. These three young swimmers had attractive, muscular bodies. Having AIDS hadn't stopped Bo from being a homosexual. He still looked at these young men with desire.
> I believe that Bishop, who is not a homosexual, based this scene primarily on analogy. What is it like to be a homosexual with AIDS? This question surely came up again and again as he worked on Unicorn Mountain. I think it led him to this analogy: It is very much like being a heterosexual with a fatal disease that has cut you off from having sex with anyone, but hasn't yet made you impotent or weakened your desire.
> Bishop knew what we all know, that swimsuits reveal people's bodies a great deal more than business suits do, and that nowadays swimsuits are designed to emphasize sexual attractiveness. It just happened that Bo was interested in and aroused by the men at the pool. Yet he was not affected the way a woman is usually affected when watching men in swimsuits. He was affected as heterosexual men are affected when they watch women in swimsuits.
> Complicated? Yes. And yet it led Bishop to write a quiet but startling scene that rang true—with me, at least. I did not realize that I had been asking the question: What is it like to be a homosexual? But when Bishop showed me this scene, showed his character's attitude toward these young men, I realized the question had been answered, at least in part—and that it was an important question, one that would matter to me even after the story was over, because it gave me a new way of looking at and understanding other human beings. In other words. Bishop had achieved one of the primary purposes of fiction.
It may be hard to remember - the social order that existed in the past often is - but the idea that public acceptance of homosexuality had some horrific corrosive influence on social order was once considered a strong argument. Imagine if this were true - if gay people being allowed to get married really did somehow turn us into Sodom and Gomorrah. You could love gay people as much as you liked and still think their activities should be suppressed, just as you might (say) love your mother who doomscrolls TikTok without hesitation, but support the TikTok ban because the algorithm is being manipulated by forces actively hostile to liberal democracy.
Have you seen what Janice Ian had to say about how OSC treated her when the LGBT community did nothing to help her? Have you read his stories where he has homosexual characters (Zdorab and Songmaster) who are born that way?
If you had, you would not be writing this about him.
Or maybe you would, if your goal was to hate the sinner and love the sin. But I prefer to give you the benefit of the doubt.
It's fashionable now to say that you can't separate the art from the artist, but I believe we can and should. Lots of artists were monsters on a personal level. How their art affects you is a separate issue.
I'm playing dirty pool here because I can't find the article I'm referencing, but a long time before "cancel culture" became a thing there was a lesbian writer who wrote (early 2000s on Livejournal, maybe?) about interviewing him. She loved his work but knew of his opinions, some seemingly harsher than mainstream LDS, and was eager to square the deeply sympathetic humanist whose novels that she read with some of the public statements that he made. And it turned out she couldn't, because his positions weren't merely political, or tied to his somewhat hysterical premonitions of the end of democracy, but actually were in part about a personal revulsion. Having identified her sexuality to him she asked him if he thought she was personally immoral, an abomination, and the short of it was that the answer was yes. Notably he never stopped being gracious and polite to her, IIRC, but there's dissonance between "gate the sin, love the sinner" and "you are an abomination, although I won't be awful to you because that's not how I roll." And like her, I re-read some of my favorites and really have trouble seeing that author of such profound sensitivity and decency as the same person whose dislike of "the homosexuals" seemingly goes well being doctrinal disagreement.
Also, if I may be extremely juvenile, I was always amused that the guy whose most influential work contained more than one scene of soaped-up teenage boys wrestling/fighting in the shower would be so opposed to The Gays, but hopefully you have a better class of reader than I.
> Maybe Card decided at some point that the price of empathy was better borne by his characters than by himself. It’s hard to hate your enemies when you understand them; it’s much easier to go through life holding on to your prejudices by keeping those with whom you disagree at arm’s length.
> I don’t recognize the Orson Scott Card I see today, but I refuse to believe that the author whose stories helped me navigate my teenage years has disappeared entirely. Others may hate him, but I’m still struggling to understand him. That’s the least I owe him for gifting me with an ethical compass when I needed one. How strange and how sad, then, that Card’s compass pointed me in one direction while he strode off in another. But maybe that’s what he had given me: a gift so sacred that even Card himself could not be allowed to understand what it meant.
You and Luke T are right, that's the one. Thanks for the link to the Grantland piece - I always took a "death of the author" perspective to resolve that dissonance, but it's not so hard to imagine that a flawed man can write of better people than he's capable of being, or a more compassionate world than what he'd envision for the real one.
Let me disclaim, it's a bad practice to engage in armchair psychiatry. But, just making a casual comment, his work contrasted with his attitudes, strikes me as having a lot of evidence for his being gay but repressing it. I can't be the first person to have thought that.
I hate the "you secretly want to fuck spiders"-style rebuttal to phobias, so I'm glad Trace didn't make it here but...I agree. It seems very, very obvious to me.
It came up in the twitter thread this article is based on, but one of Card's arguments against gay marriage was that without a social opprobrium against homosexuality, men would never hook up with women because the sexes don't understand each other's desires the way same-sex partners could, and thus the species would die out because no one would reproduce. Speaking as a straight man, no heterosexual male would think that in a million years.
I always wondered if your username was inspired by the Enderverse and it is nice to hear that it indeed is. I remember what was done to OSC and the boycotts around the Ender's Game movie, and it was "cancel culture" before we even called it that.
Yeah, I made an immediate connection between his username and Children of the Mind as well. But, I figured that was just a weird associate I had, and that "TracingWoodgrains" was probably a reference to a woodworking hobby or something.
Wow, I had the same immediate association, as well, when I first found this blog but sort of pushed it aside as it seemed too random. I have strong personal memories of that book, more visual, tactile and of scent, however, rather than of, say, any clear narrative or so.
I happened to read it as a teenager mostly holed up inside a small sleeping space in a Nordic summer cabin surrounded by nothing but mattresses, a small window letting in light almost around the clock, and each wall filled with endless grains of the plain wooden panels, still smelling of fresh woodwork and dripping sticky resin with a heady scent here and there. For some hours of the night I needed a flashlight to read, leading me occasionally to trace the woodgrains myself like the children in the book. There was something special in that reading experience, maybe partly because there was nothing much else to do, and your thoughts could wander freely. The cabin was built on a small rocky island in a big wide open lake over 100km from most marks of civilization, lacking but the barest modern amenities, impenetrable by the brushy vegetation and infested by mosquitos on moist and cloudy days, flesh-eating horse flies on sunny ones.
At that point, I was totally unaware of OSC's religious background and political views, which was probably for the better, since the latter especially came as a bit of an upsetting surprise later to a vaguely left-leaning boy like me, from an ever more liberal, previously poor Northern European society where the hard-fought-for welfare state model had taken its first serious hits a few years back, soon after it was thought as finally getting “completed”, due to a prolonged and partly ill-managed economic crisis (following eg a haphazard liberalization of capital controls, the resulting “wild 80s” and then the shock from the crash of the Soviet demand for various sub-EU standard industrial stuff we were too dependent on exporting) — and where even the closest things to conservatives at that time weren't still that far from mainstream Social Democrats (who were moving right though).
I'm kind of similar to you - I grew up reading OSC, have read more of his books than almost any other author (around 60 I think?), and long considered him my favorite author. Two of his books have been incredibly influential in my life ("Ender's Game" and "The Worthing Saga"). Heck, he even introduced me to one of my other favorite authors - Brandon Sanderson - by writing about him in his newsletter and blurbing his first book.
We are different in that I'm straight, and not a Mormon.
That all said, OSC's views on homosexuality influenced me a lot as I was growing up, though I now disagree with 99% of those views. Unlike you (I think), I spent many years defending OSC in person and online every time his name came up, claiming he was wrongly maligned, that he has incredible gay characters in his books and speaks about them in a nuanced way (he does), etc.
But after many of these arguments, I was mostly convinced that I'm wrong. He not only wrote popular pieces on how homosexuality laws should be kept on the books - he was active in pretty bad groups that were acting against gay people, iirc, and
Another claim made against him, which you didn't mention, is that he is racist. I found this one pretty ridiculous at first, and still mostly do, but there are certain things that give me a lot of pause, like an article criticizing Obama, which includes claims that Obama is trying to become a dictator like the dictators of a few African countries (don't remember which). It certainly read to me, in retrospect, like he was on purpose comparing Obama to leader of African nations without any real reason other than racism.
That all said - while I don't defend him anymore, I try not to judge people only by views of theirs I disagree with. His writing is still some of the most important and influential writing in my life, and like you, I find the secular liberal humanist view he espouses to basically align with my own. That he ends up applying these values in ways I vehemently disagree with in some specific cases, doesn't mean I don't agree with him on the majority of his other views, and still consider his ideas an important and good part of my moral and intellectual core.
I've heard people argue that you shouldn't judge someone only on the basis of their worst day. Perhaps we shouldn't condemn someone based on their worst belief?
This article struck me to the core. Growing up as Mormon kid in Utah, who adored Orson Scott Card's books. I was the President of our Ward's Priest Quorum and on our Stake's Youth Council (which turned a 3 hour Sunday block of Church into 5-6 hours easily). But I left the LDS Church at 18 because I didn't feel as though I could go on a mission, sit in a concrete house in Mexico, and teach people that 2,500 years ago Israelites sailed to upstate New York and that is why Native Americans exist. I couldn't reconcile the gap historical/ scientific reality before me with dogma of the church.
As I grew older I came to realize that people much smarter and more well versed in science and history than myself were able to make that reconciliation. To me Orson Scott Card is emblematic of the leagues of very faithful Mormons I call friends and family; who are brilliant and complex thinkers and with whom I disagree vehemently about the nature of world. I am so happy those people exist though (even if in 2025 they hold the same antiquated, reprehensible beliefs about gay marriage that OSD held) and believe they shouldn't be excluded from the culture conversation because it forces it the agnostic, liberal minded thinker a serious challenge to build their intellectual house on well reasoned rock as opposed to ideological sand.
At this point I kind of believe the LDS church is a real estate company, that is seeing high growth throughout the 3rd world by sending out white sales bros from Orem, Utah, and is probably going to rule the world when the eventual apocalypse happens. (only like 75% joking). But my mom doesn't, and I really respect her ability to think and reason. The LDS church built a community in the middle a desert, that now has one of the strongest economies in the U.S., along with some of the lowest rates of single motherhood, with the best income equality of any state. There's a book that's about 1/3 longer than the New Testament that written in 2 years by a 22 year old that's been read continuously for nearly 200 years that's a keystone of life for nearly 17 million people. So maybe my mom (or all of our out-of-touch moms) have a point.
Thanks for writing this article Trace, you put into words feelings that I have never been able to express.
TLDR: Mormons are goofy and believe some awful shit but we still should probably still hear them out.
(Also my dad told me OSD was my uncle's brother-in-law, this might be bullshit you tell to a kid, but it always made me feel an extra connection to his novels.)
Thankks for writing this. I think there are a few more aspects of Card that you missed in your examination of why he got "exiled" the way he did; I wrote a similar article to this years ago, and find it interesting to see the ways we ended up in parallel vs diverging in our views of him.
I’m surprised you’re such a fan of Card. I’ve struggled to understand his appeal, and I’m curious how you think about it.
When I read Ender’s Game, I… hated it. It’s not simply that it ascribes, quite straightforwardly, to a highly reductive great men of history theory, but that so much of it feels unearned. The twist at the end has no real grounding, and what moral weight the book carries (beyond what’s tacked on) is choked with self-pity. The characters felt shallow, and the whole thing struck me as deeply indulgent in its portrayal of Ender’s suffering while being dismissive of most people—as though their experiences and struggles don’t really matter. It seemed an Ayn Rand book for kids.
I remember feeling genuinely baffled that the book had been recommended to me. Not just once, but many times. And I get that people read differently as kids—there are certainly books I loved then that wouldn’t hold up now—but your politics suggested to me someone who would /not/ connect with this book’s worldview.
I’m genuinely curious how you square it. What do you see in it that I might have missed, or how do you think about it differently? Did this all get addressed in the sequels?
The thread of "Ender is deeply special and that makes him important" does continue for the rest of the series, for what it's worth. As someone who liked the book a lot as a teen, I find it interesting to reflect on what it was that I liked about that. As Performative Bafflement notes, part of it is the portrayal of what it's like to be a gifted child, but I think it might be more than that. Being brilliant is literally the only reason Ender is allowed to exist. He's a hated third child, he faces social ostracism for being born, and in response he fights back so as to prove that he was worth it all along. I wonder, in hindsight, if I liked him because I felt that way, myself, as a gifted kid. I liked the fantasy of actually being able to live up to expectations, of having the abilities that would justify my many quirks and failures, of having my suffering matter.
There's something both beautiful and painful about that desire to prove your worth. Harry Potter has it, too. The Sorting Hat even explicitly notes it! It's a real Main Character kind of trait. I am trying to decide, as I write, about the extent to which it's good or bad. It's good to have ambition, but maybe it's better if that ambition comes from a place of security in a way that Ender's does not. Still, I do think that the main reason people like "Ender's Game" is because they identify with Ender in one way or another. And I think that evoking people's feelings about themselves is a worthwhile thing for literature to do.
To be clear, I think I do understand the arc of the narrative and its personal appeal, I think where I’m lost is the (potential) failure (from my view) to reckon with the implications of the story. I loved Wizard of Earthsea. It’s got the same “gifted kid has to prove himself” arc, but it’s wholly different in tone and philosophy. Card pretty explicitly states that he thinks some people are worth more than others in his own introduction to the book. The whole book goes on to be the triumph and tribulations of the chosen one, with others to be used by him as circumstances demand.
I understand being drawn to media that speaks to you personally. But I’m very uneasy with the idea that that in itself is a “good.” I suppose I framed my initial question poorly, insofar as I think I understand the appeal of the book, I was just hoping to learn that I had missed something. Or whether folks had reckoned with the philosophy behind the book they like at all.
I do think aesthetics matter. I think it matters if we hold up books like Ender’s game as paragons of what gifted kids should resonate with and mirror.
Wizard of Earthsea is a fascinating comparison. I read it as a child and felt cheated by it—what do you mean, the Chosen One just ends up needing to fix his own mistakes and grow as a person? As an adult, of course, I see that it was doing something deeply important.
I support your critiquing of Ender’s Game; I think you’re right that there are flaws here. But I think I learn more by liking the book and then reflecting critically on it than I would by only reading books of a more improving kind. It’s not so much that I mirrored this book, I think, as that it mirrored something for me. I wasn’t copying it, I was being shown something that was already there. Without that mirror, the parts of me that resonated with it would still exist, but I wouldn’t have been able to see them in the same way.
I was never an Ayn Rand type; I mostly felt my designated specialness as a burden rather than evidence of my unique importance. It’s not clear, from the book, that Ender is someone you should want to be, overall. But he’s stuck being that person and he wins at it; indeed, he wins too much.
Even as I can see why people see the Ender series as glorifying the special brilliant people at the cost of the normal folks, I think it wouldn’t be as successful and evocative as it is if it did not also lean heavily on the moral complexity of the ‘brilliant’ role. What if winning is not the same as actually doing something good? What if you’re trapped in a system that rewards you for success but doesn’t allow for friendship and humanity? The book mixes this in with the sweet taste of success against all odds, and you could complain that it’s trying to have its cake and eat it, too. Yet I think this is part of what makes it compelling.
It is one of my favorite books. For me what makes it special is that Enders personal struggle feels like mine. He wants to be moral, but also wants victory. Most people either reject the methods that achieve victory or they stop worrying about the immoral decisions victory requires. Enders suffering is the result of living both paths.
I'm not Trace, but if you grew up as a gifted child, especially an accelerated one who skipped grades and primarily found intellectual confreres in older children / people, he really captures what that's like in Ender's Game, in a way that few other authors have. Especially if you *read it* as a child (which I did).
It's also an interesting story in its own right, with great characterization and a unique for the time take and "solution," which grappled realistically-enough with the institutions and broad societal trends that could end with that outcome, while also not standing pat on that solution, wholly looking at the moral implications, in a way that profoundly changes the main character AND the society's overall arc (but you don't get those parts til the later books, mostly).
The characters are shallow because they're kids. Ender doesn't care about other people because, from his perspective, no one (except for Valentine) cares about him. I sympathized with it because it was a story about someone being forced to play Mock the Weird Kid while not being allowed to fight back. But then he finds a place where his talents are appreciated.
Keep your Hogwarts letter. I wanted to go to Battle School. Give me video games over all the bullshit social Games People Play any day.
What a beautiful and gracious reflection. I know a few gay men who loved his books as boys but had come out before he his activism became prominent. The boyhood love of his work made his catastrophizing takes about our marriages much more painful. Safe to say your magnanimity is easier in victory.
I wonder if you heard from him about this? There's nothing stopping him from amending his views. Whatever he thinks of the culture war today, it's implausible to me that he still views your marriage as a threat to the Republic.
I haven't read Orson Scott Card, but it sounds like I would have agreed with him back when I was LDS, too, although "an attack on heterosexual marriage so severe that it would mark the end of Democracy" would've seemed a bit much. I was just scratching my head going "gee, can't the government just invent a new term like 'personal partnership' that may or may not be centered on sex, and then leave 'marriage' for us religious people? I was surprised both at how quickly gay marriage arrived, and how little interest the political environment had in relitigating the issue.
Of course, I expected religion and science were compatible because I thought my religion was, in fact, true, so that scientific analysis would ultimately vindicate that. As it turned out though, my religion was false. I left silently, telling no one from the church--let that be an object lesson in survivorship and selection biases.
After I read Speaker For the Dead I was ready to join any ism Card would begin. Then at a book club meeting a young writer told me I couldn’t like him because of his opposition to gay marriage. “No one” I said “who wrote a road map for engaging with the ‘other’ could be fully understood to be homophobic. It doesn’t make sense, but the work stands.” When you write that book, you create a conception of connectedness that allows for a lot of trial and error and eventually grace.
I read the first book and saw the movie. This talk reminds me of J. K. Rowling. Of course it does. One thing I learned getting my English degree is that personal values and how we derive them from genre fiction is overrated. One of the best American poets, Ezra Pound, was literally a card carrying fascist, and accomplice to the holocaust. He’s still one of America’s best poets and he’s the first modernist. Ever heard of T. S. Eliot? James Joyce? Pound helped discover them and establish them through publication. Literature is not the same without him, he’s still a fascist. Did reading Pound make me more virtuous? No. Did it instill a patience for reading difficult texts, and pushing myself to further understand? Yes. I can hate J. K. Rowling’s Twitter, and still like Harry Potter and acknowledge how it imparted an enthusiasm for reading. She doesn’t make that easy… I retain a desire for us to set down the YA genre series of our youth and pick up something a little more challenging… like Ezra Pound.
What's even more amusing is that Rowling never was fascist-adjacent. She was pretty much a model liberal circa 90s-00s, when the books were published, and the "polite society" was enamored with her. Dumbledore even turned out to have been gay all along! But still, the "progress" marches on, and the nice 90s liberals happen to be among the worst of today's fascists, unless they strictly adhere to the latest version of truth and goodness. Maybe there's even some poetic justice in there somewhere...
I do find that adult fandoms of children’s books often seem to display a certain degree of arrested development. Hence the hysterics when Rowling became unfashionable.
It’s fundamentally hard to live in a world where reasonable “experts” can disagree—regardless of what the expertise may be: adulting, politics, science, engineering, whatever—which is why so few people do. Everyone else is running around demanding that we all conform to reality as they believe it to be. I hope someday we get to a place where it’s enough to let someone speak and only respond with “I disagree.” without a histrionic hue and cry to burn them at the stake.
Ender’s Game was such an impressive work, and the heroes so believable and humane, I had a lot of trouble squaring them, and that book with the author who produced them after his panic about gay marriage and disapproval of gay people generally. It’s a series I keep meaning to return to, but have been unable to.
In addition to my bafflement at his beliefs about gay people, I was equally shocked to learn at the time that he was still a committed Latter Day Saint. Of all the sects of Christianity its tenets and-especially- its historical claims seem comically easy to prove wrong. I never could understand how an agile mind like his, who wrote thoughtful, humanistic, hard science fiction could still hang on to the demonstrably false history offered by Joseph Smith.
I have a very loose hypothesis that LDS believers make good science fiction and fantasy writers because their main religious text is essentially Bible fanfiction. (Apologies to all the LDS who are reading this! As a Catholic I always appreciated Card's obvious affection and respect for his Catholic characters.)
Lds theology/cosmology is science fi in nature. There is also an expectation of members to be able to write speeches and lessons because LDS doesn't have hired clergy. Those things probably have a lot more influence than your theory.
I always assumed it was because one of the things that happens in the Mormon afterlife is that you hang around with God and potentially undergo the process of becoming a god yourself, so making up entire universes is just studying before the test.
I’m kind of baffled a science fiction writer as adroit as Card could still be a believer of any kind.
I’m sure that will seem quite rude, but I don’t mean it to be. It’s impressive to me that Carr was able to so think outside his particular religious upbringing to create the enderver
OSC is one of my favorite childhood writers/heroes, and my opinion on OSC is that he is not someone who maintained true to his steadfast values as the rest of the world became too liberal around him, so much as someone whose values did in fact change, possibly due to external events, to become more conservative and xenophobic, and to treat his own earlier (relative) messages of love and tolerance as hopelessly naive.
Contrast his portrayal of Muslim characters in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow vs the other post-911 shadow series, for example. I also got this impression from some hack-ish books I've read in ~2014 or so that attempted to continue the Ender series, which portrayed the Formics in a substantially worse light.
I also thought your name reminded me of OSCs OTC story that you mentioned. His stories opened up worlds and the empathy he wrote about was so remarkable. I think we must all be doomed to have blind spots and live in our own time.
I agree with your assessment, and if you ever decide to book club one of his picks, I'm in.
I always thought it was amazing that OSC had such a nuanced mind and could portray human motivations and frailty with such fidelity, to show that boths sides nearly always have valid points and what true grappling with morality and "what is right" looks and feels like from the inside in his writing, coupled with discovering he was strongly anti-gay in the real world.
The man who saw and extended "humanity" to insect-aliens, sentient pigs, and more, who saw the humanity in literal psychopaths (Peter), but couldn't see it in gay people, some of whom he probably personally knows? It was mind blowing to me.
He literally writes about people born with predilections they have zero control over and struggle with - the OCD people about whom your namesake was a representative. And he never thought that gay people could just be born that way?
A great case study in "the smarter you are, the more you can just use those smarts to arrive at whatever conclusion you want."
I retain immense respect and admiration for his writing even so.
I think OSC absolutely could and did see the humanity in gay people as individuals, but viewed their sexuality as a flaw -- as all of us are flawed, in various ways -- and felt it a disservice to them and to the rest of us to "encourage" that flaw by formally legalizing gay marriage. That is, his mind was nuanced enough to distinguish between the humanity of the individuals and what he saw as the harm that would be done by legalizing gay marriage.
I don't agree that legalizing gay marriage is harmful, nor do I see homosexuality as a flaw, but if you can accept that as Card's worldview (and it is very much the view of the LDS church) and also really accept that Card did believe in both "hate the sin" and "love the sinner", then I think his position makes perfect sense... though the intensity of the way he expressed it still does honestly surprise me a bit.
Yes, if you regard homosexual relations as fornication, considering them "sin" is entirely consistent with your worldview. Not all homophobia is driven by disgust...entirely.
He absolutely humanized gay people, thought of them as born that way, etc. I still remember this bit from Characters & Viewpoints, even though it's been years since I last read it:
> What if you just can't imagine yourself doing something? Then, instead of trying to think of what it would take to get you to do what your character does, think of something you actually have done that is like what the character does.
> For instance, Michael Bishop faced this problem in his brilliant 1988 novel Unicorn Mountain, in which one character. Bo, is a young homosexual who is dying of AIDS. Bo and another character are at a motel swimming pool when three muscular young men come to swim. Bo might have had any of several responses: envy at their health and strength; resentment that these boorish young heterosexual men don't have to pay a price like AIDS for their sexual activities. But what Bishop chose to show was simple lust. These three young swimmers had attractive, muscular bodies. Having AIDS hadn't stopped Bo from being a homosexual. He still looked at these young men with desire.
> I believe that Bishop, who is not a homosexual, based this scene primarily on analogy. What is it like to be a homosexual with AIDS? This question surely came up again and again as he worked on Unicorn Mountain. I think it led him to this analogy: It is very much like being a heterosexual with a fatal disease that has cut you off from having sex with anyone, but hasn't yet made you impotent or weakened your desire.
> Bishop knew what we all know, that swimsuits reveal people's bodies a great deal more than business suits do, and that nowadays swimsuits are designed to emphasize sexual attractiveness. It just happened that Bo was interested in and aroused by the men at the pool. Yet he was not affected the way a woman is usually affected when watching men in swimsuits. He was affected as heterosexual men are affected when they watch women in swimsuits.
> Complicated? Yes. And yet it led Bishop to write a quiet but startling scene that rang true—with me, at least. I did not realize that I had been asking the question: What is it like to be a homosexual? But when Bishop showed me this scene, showed his character's attitude toward these young men, I realized the question had been answered, at least in part—and that it was an important question, one that would matter to me even after the story was over, because it gave me a new way of looking at and understanding other human beings. In other words. Bishop had achieved one of the primary purposes of fiction.
It may be hard to remember - the social order that existed in the past often is - but the idea that public acceptance of homosexuality had some horrific corrosive influence on social order was once considered a strong argument. Imagine if this were true - if gay people being allowed to get married really did somehow turn us into Sodom and Gomorrah. You could love gay people as much as you liked and still think their activities should be suppressed, just as you might (say) love your mother who doomscrolls TikTok without hesitation, but support the TikTok ban because the algorithm is being manipulated by forces actively hostile to liberal democracy.
I've said this elsewhere, but it's almost like he has a second, completely different persona that takes over when he starts writing.
Have you seen what Janice Ian had to say about how OSC treated her when the LGBT community did nothing to help her? Have you read his stories where he has homosexual characters (Zdorab and Songmaster) who are born that way?
If you had, you would not be writing this about him.
Or maybe you would, if your goal was to hate the sinner and love the sin. But I prefer to give you the benefit of the doubt.
It's fashionable now to say that you can't separate the art from the artist, but I believe we can and should. Lots of artists were monsters on a personal level. How their art affects you is a separate issue.
I'm playing dirty pool here because I can't find the article I'm referencing, but a long time before "cancel culture" became a thing there was a lesbian writer who wrote (early 2000s on Livejournal, maybe?) about interviewing him. She loved his work but knew of his opinions, some seemingly harsher than mainstream LDS, and was eager to square the deeply sympathetic humanist whose novels that she read with some of the public statements that he made. And it turned out she couldn't, because his positions weren't merely political, or tied to his somewhat hysterical premonitions of the end of democracy, but actually were in part about a personal revulsion. Having identified her sexuality to him she asked him if he thought she was personally immoral, an abomination, and the short of it was that the answer was yes. Notably he never stopped being gracious and polite to her, IIRC, but there's dissonance between "gate the sin, love the sinner" and "you are an abomination, although I won't be awful to you because that's not how I roll." And like her, I re-read some of my favorites and really have trouble seeing that author of such profound sensitivity and decency as the same person whose dislike of "the homosexuals" seemingly goes well being doctrinal disagreement.
Also, if I may be extremely juvenile, I was always amused that the guy whose most influential work contained more than one scene of soaped-up teenage boys wrestling/fighting in the shower would be so opposed to The Gays, but hopefully you have a better class of reader than I.
I believe you're thinking of this one: https://www.salon.com/2000/02/03/card/?origin=serp_auto
This one is worth a mention as well--it's profoundly touching and covers ground somewhere between mine and the Salon article: https://grantland.com/features/ender-game-controversial-author-very-personal-history/
> Maybe Card decided at some point that the price of empathy was better borne by his characters than by himself. It’s hard to hate your enemies when you understand them; it’s much easier to go through life holding on to your prejudices by keeping those with whom you disagree at arm’s length.
> I don’t recognize the Orson Scott Card I see today, but I refuse to believe that the author whose stories helped me navigate my teenage years has disappeared entirely. Others may hate him, but I’m still struggling to understand him. That’s the least I owe him for gifting me with an ethical compass when I needed one. How strange and how sad, then, that Card’s compass pointed me in one direction while he strode off in another. But maybe that’s what he had given me: a gift so sacred that even Card himself could not be allowed to understand what it meant.
You and Luke T are right, that's the one. Thanks for the link to the Grantland piece - I always took a "death of the author" perspective to resolve that dissonance, but it's not so hard to imagine that a flawed man can write of better people than he's capable of being, or a more compassionate world than what he'd envision for the real one.
Let me disclaim, it's a bad practice to engage in armchair psychiatry. But, just making a casual comment, his work contrasted with his attitudes, strikes me as having a lot of evidence for his being gay but repressing it. I can't be the first person to have thought that.
I hate the "you secretly want to fuck spiders"-style rebuttal to phobias, so I'm glad Trace didn't make it here but...I agree. It seems very, very obvious to me.
It came up in the twitter thread this article is based on, but one of Card's arguments against gay marriage was that without a social opprobrium against homosexuality, men would never hook up with women because the sexes don't understand each other's desires the way same-sex partners could, and thus the species would die out because no one would reproduce. Speaking as a straight man, no heterosexual male would think that in a million years.
I believe this is the article in question: https://www.salon.com/2000/02/03/card/
lol! I thought his portrayal of Lanik Mueller in Treason (his most underrated book imo) was a little bit homoerotic as well
I always wondered if your username was inspired by the Enderverse and it is nice to hear that it indeed is. I remember what was done to OSC and the boycotts around the Ender's Game movie, and it was "cancel culture" before we even called it that.
Yeah, I made an immediate connection between his username and Children of the Mind as well. But, I figured that was just a weird associate I had, and that "TracingWoodgrains" was probably a reference to a woodworking hobby or something.
Wow, I had the same immediate association, as well, when I first found this blog but sort of pushed it aside as it seemed too random. I have strong personal memories of that book, more visual, tactile and of scent, however, rather than of, say, any clear narrative or so.
I happened to read it as a teenager mostly holed up inside a small sleeping space in a Nordic summer cabin surrounded by nothing but mattresses, a small window letting in light almost around the clock, and each wall filled with endless grains of the plain wooden panels, still smelling of fresh woodwork and dripping sticky resin with a heady scent here and there. For some hours of the night I needed a flashlight to read, leading me occasionally to trace the woodgrains myself like the children in the book. There was something special in that reading experience, maybe partly because there was nothing much else to do, and your thoughts could wander freely. The cabin was built on a small rocky island in a big wide open lake over 100km from most marks of civilization, lacking but the barest modern amenities, impenetrable by the brushy vegetation and infested by mosquitos on moist and cloudy days, flesh-eating horse flies on sunny ones.
At that point, I was totally unaware of OSC's religious background and political views, which was probably for the better, since the latter especially came as a bit of an upsetting surprise later to a vaguely left-leaning boy like me, from an ever more liberal, previously poor Northern European society where the hard-fought-for welfare state model had taken its first serious hits a few years back, soon after it was thought as finally getting “completed”, due to a prolonged and partly ill-managed economic crisis (following eg a haphazard liberalization of capital controls, the resulting “wild 80s” and then the shock from the crash of the Soviet demand for various sub-EU standard industrial stuff we were too dependent on exporting) — and where even the closest things to conservatives at that time weren't still that far from mainstream Social Democrats (who were moving right though).
I love this essay.
I'm kind of similar to you - I grew up reading OSC, have read more of his books than almost any other author (around 60 I think?), and long considered him my favorite author. Two of his books have been incredibly influential in my life ("Ender's Game" and "The Worthing Saga"). Heck, he even introduced me to one of my other favorite authors - Brandon Sanderson - by writing about him in his newsletter and blurbing his first book.
We are different in that I'm straight, and not a Mormon.
That all said, OSC's views on homosexuality influenced me a lot as I was growing up, though I now disagree with 99% of those views. Unlike you (I think), I spent many years defending OSC in person and online every time his name came up, claiming he was wrongly maligned, that he has incredible gay characters in his books and speaks about them in a nuanced way (he does), etc.
But after many of these arguments, I was mostly convinced that I'm wrong. He not only wrote popular pieces on how homosexuality laws should be kept on the books - he was active in pretty bad groups that were acting against gay people, iirc, and
Another claim made against him, which you didn't mention, is that he is racist. I found this one pretty ridiculous at first, and still mostly do, but there are certain things that give me a lot of pause, like an article criticizing Obama, which includes claims that Obama is trying to become a dictator like the dictators of a few African countries (don't remember which). It certainly read to me, in retrospect, like he was on purpose comparing Obama to leader of African nations without any real reason other than racism.
That all said - while I don't defend him anymore, I try not to judge people only by views of theirs I disagree with. His writing is still some of the most important and influential writing in my life, and like you, I find the secular liberal humanist view he espouses to basically align with my own. That he ends up applying these values in ways I vehemently disagree with in some specific cases, doesn't mean I don't agree with him on the majority of his other views, and still consider his ideas an important and good part of my moral and intellectual core.
I've heard people argue that you shouldn't judge someone only on the basis of their worst day. Perhaps we shouldn't condemn someone based on their worst belief?
This article struck me to the core. Growing up as Mormon kid in Utah, who adored Orson Scott Card's books. I was the President of our Ward's Priest Quorum and on our Stake's Youth Council (which turned a 3 hour Sunday block of Church into 5-6 hours easily). But I left the LDS Church at 18 because I didn't feel as though I could go on a mission, sit in a concrete house in Mexico, and teach people that 2,500 years ago Israelites sailed to upstate New York and that is why Native Americans exist. I couldn't reconcile the gap historical/ scientific reality before me with dogma of the church.
As I grew older I came to realize that people much smarter and more well versed in science and history than myself were able to make that reconciliation. To me Orson Scott Card is emblematic of the leagues of very faithful Mormons I call friends and family; who are brilliant and complex thinkers and with whom I disagree vehemently about the nature of world. I am so happy those people exist though (even if in 2025 they hold the same antiquated, reprehensible beliefs about gay marriage that OSD held) and believe they shouldn't be excluded from the culture conversation because it forces it the agnostic, liberal minded thinker a serious challenge to build their intellectual house on well reasoned rock as opposed to ideological sand.
At this point I kind of believe the LDS church is a real estate company, that is seeing high growth throughout the 3rd world by sending out white sales bros from Orem, Utah, and is probably going to rule the world when the eventual apocalypse happens. (only like 75% joking). But my mom doesn't, and I really respect her ability to think and reason. The LDS church built a community in the middle a desert, that now has one of the strongest economies in the U.S., along with some of the lowest rates of single motherhood, with the best income equality of any state. There's a book that's about 1/3 longer than the New Testament that written in 2 years by a 22 year old that's been read continuously for nearly 200 years that's a keystone of life for nearly 17 million people. So maybe my mom (or all of our out-of-touch moms) have a point.
Thanks for writing this article Trace, you put into words feelings that I have never been able to express.
TLDR: Mormons are goofy and believe some awful shit but we still should probably still hear them out.
(Also my dad told me OSD was my uncle's brother-in-law, this might be bullshit you tell to a kid, but it always made me feel an extra connection to his novels.)
Thankks for writing this. I think there are a few more aspects of Card that you missed in your examination of why he got "exiled" the way he did; I wrote a similar article to this years ago, and find it interesting to see the ways we ended up in parallel vs diverging in our views of him.
https://daystareld.com/orson-scott-card/
Very interesting to see the parallels and distinctions, yeah. Thanks for sharing - you covered a lot of ground I've been only vaguely aware of.
I’m surprised you’re such a fan of Card. I’ve struggled to understand his appeal, and I’m curious how you think about it.
When I read Ender’s Game, I… hated it. It’s not simply that it ascribes, quite straightforwardly, to a highly reductive great men of history theory, but that so much of it feels unearned. The twist at the end has no real grounding, and what moral weight the book carries (beyond what’s tacked on) is choked with self-pity. The characters felt shallow, and the whole thing struck me as deeply indulgent in its portrayal of Ender’s suffering while being dismissive of most people—as though their experiences and struggles don’t really matter. It seemed an Ayn Rand book for kids.
I remember feeling genuinely baffled that the book had been recommended to me. Not just once, but many times. And I get that people read differently as kids—there are certainly books I loved then that wouldn’t hold up now—but your politics suggested to me someone who would /not/ connect with this book’s worldview.
I’m genuinely curious how you square it. What do you see in it that I might have missed, or how do you think about it differently? Did this all get addressed in the sequels?
The thread of "Ender is deeply special and that makes him important" does continue for the rest of the series, for what it's worth. As someone who liked the book a lot as a teen, I find it interesting to reflect on what it was that I liked about that. As Performative Bafflement notes, part of it is the portrayal of what it's like to be a gifted child, but I think it might be more than that. Being brilliant is literally the only reason Ender is allowed to exist. He's a hated third child, he faces social ostracism for being born, and in response he fights back so as to prove that he was worth it all along. I wonder, in hindsight, if I liked him because I felt that way, myself, as a gifted kid. I liked the fantasy of actually being able to live up to expectations, of having the abilities that would justify my many quirks and failures, of having my suffering matter.
There's something both beautiful and painful about that desire to prove your worth. Harry Potter has it, too. The Sorting Hat even explicitly notes it! It's a real Main Character kind of trait. I am trying to decide, as I write, about the extent to which it's good or bad. It's good to have ambition, but maybe it's better if that ambition comes from a place of security in a way that Ender's does not. Still, I do think that the main reason people like "Ender's Game" is because they identify with Ender in one way or another. And I think that evoking people's feelings about themselves is a worthwhile thing for literature to do.
Appreciate the thoughtful reply.
To be clear, I think I do understand the arc of the narrative and its personal appeal, I think where I’m lost is the (potential) failure (from my view) to reckon with the implications of the story. I loved Wizard of Earthsea. It’s got the same “gifted kid has to prove himself” arc, but it’s wholly different in tone and philosophy. Card pretty explicitly states that he thinks some people are worth more than others in his own introduction to the book. The whole book goes on to be the triumph and tribulations of the chosen one, with others to be used by him as circumstances demand.
I understand being drawn to media that speaks to you personally. But I’m very uneasy with the idea that that in itself is a “good.” I suppose I framed my initial question poorly, insofar as I think I understand the appeal of the book, I was just hoping to learn that I had missed something. Or whether folks had reckoned with the philosophy behind the book they like at all.
I do think aesthetics matter. I think it matters if we hold up books like Ender’s game as paragons of what gifted kids should resonate with and mirror.
Wizard of Earthsea is a fascinating comparison. I read it as a child and felt cheated by it—what do you mean, the Chosen One just ends up needing to fix his own mistakes and grow as a person? As an adult, of course, I see that it was doing something deeply important.
I support your critiquing of Ender’s Game; I think you’re right that there are flaws here. But I think I learn more by liking the book and then reflecting critically on it than I would by only reading books of a more improving kind. It’s not so much that I mirrored this book, I think, as that it mirrored something for me. I wasn’t copying it, I was being shown something that was already there. Without that mirror, the parts of me that resonated with it would still exist, but I wouldn’t have been able to see them in the same way.
I was never an Ayn Rand type; I mostly felt my designated specialness as a burden rather than evidence of my unique importance. It’s not clear, from the book, that Ender is someone you should want to be, overall. But he’s stuck being that person and he wins at it; indeed, he wins too much.
Even as I can see why people see the Ender series as glorifying the special brilliant people at the cost of the normal folks, I think it wouldn’t be as successful and evocative as it is if it did not also lean heavily on the moral complexity of the ‘brilliant’ role. What if winning is not the same as actually doing something good? What if you’re trapped in a system that rewards you for success but doesn’t allow for friendship and humanity? The book mixes this in with the sweet taste of success against all odds, and you could complain that it’s trying to have its cake and eat it, too. Yet I think this is part of what makes it compelling.
It is one of my favorite books. For me what makes it special is that Enders personal struggle feels like mine. He wants to be moral, but also wants victory. Most people either reject the methods that achieve victory or they stop worrying about the immoral decisions victory requires. Enders suffering is the result of living both paths.
Enders Shadow was probably better.
I'm not Trace, but if you grew up as a gifted child, especially an accelerated one who skipped grades and primarily found intellectual confreres in older children / people, he really captures what that's like in Ender's Game, in a way that few other authors have. Especially if you *read it* as a child (which I did).
It's also an interesting story in its own right, with great characterization and a unique for the time take and "solution," which grappled realistically-enough with the institutions and broad societal trends that could end with that outcome, while also not standing pat on that solution, wholly looking at the moral implications, in a way that profoundly changes the main character AND the society's overall arc (but you don't get those parts til the later books, mostly).
The characters are shallow because they're kids. Ender doesn't care about other people because, from his perspective, no one (except for Valentine) cares about him. I sympathized with it because it was a story about someone being forced to play Mock the Weird Kid while not being allowed to fight back. But then he finds a place where his talents are appreciated.
Keep your Hogwarts letter. I wanted to go to Battle School. Give me video games over all the bullshit social Games People Play any day.
What a beautiful and gracious reflection. I know a few gay men who loved his books as boys but had come out before he his activism became prominent. The boyhood love of his work made his catastrophizing takes about our marriages much more painful. Safe to say your magnanimity is easier in victory.
I wonder if you heard from him about this? There's nothing stopping him from amending his views. Whatever he thinks of the culture war today, it's implausible to me that he still views your marriage as a threat to the Republic.
I haven't read Orson Scott Card, but it sounds like I would have agreed with him back when I was LDS, too, although "an attack on heterosexual marriage so severe that it would mark the end of Democracy" would've seemed a bit much. I was just scratching my head going "gee, can't the government just invent a new term like 'personal partnership' that may or may not be centered on sex, and then leave 'marriage' for us religious people? I was surprised both at how quickly gay marriage arrived, and how little interest the political environment had in relitigating the issue.
Of course, I expected religion and science were compatible because I thought my religion was, in fact, true, so that scientific analysis would ultimately vindicate that. As it turned out though, my religion was false. I left silently, telling no one from the church--let that be an object lesson in survivorship and selection biases.
After I read Speaker For the Dead I was ready to join any ism Card would begin. Then at a book club meeting a young writer told me I couldn’t like him because of his opposition to gay marriage. “No one” I said “who wrote a road map for engaging with the ‘other’ could be fully understood to be homophobic. It doesn’t make sense, but the work stands.” When you write that book, you create a conception of connectedness that allows for a lot of trial and error and eventually grace.
I read the first book and saw the movie. This talk reminds me of J. K. Rowling. Of course it does. One thing I learned getting my English degree is that personal values and how we derive them from genre fiction is overrated. One of the best American poets, Ezra Pound, was literally a card carrying fascist, and accomplice to the holocaust. He’s still one of America’s best poets and he’s the first modernist. Ever heard of T. S. Eliot? James Joyce? Pound helped discover them and establish them through publication. Literature is not the same without him, he’s still a fascist. Did reading Pound make me more virtuous? No. Did it instill a patience for reading difficult texts, and pushing myself to further understand? Yes. I can hate J. K. Rowling’s Twitter, and still like Harry Potter and acknowledge how it imparted an enthusiasm for reading. She doesn’t make that easy… I retain a desire for us to set down the YA genre series of our youth and pick up something a little more challenging… like Ezra Pound.
What's even more amusing is that Rowling never was fascist-adjacent. She was pretty much a model liberal circa 90s-00s, when the books were published, and the "polite society" was enamored with her. Dumbledore even turned out to have been gay all along! But still, the "progress" marches on, and the nice 90s liberals happen to be among the worst of today's fascists, unless they strictly adhere to the latest version of truth and goodness. Maybe there's even some poetic justice in there somewhere...
Liberal fascism is correct. Trump is the greatest president. The Holodomor never happened.
The real dogma is that no Russian was killed in the Holodomor. Even though they obviously deserved to be.
Yes dogma, Ukraine started it.
No, I think it was the famous Russian dictator Dzhugashvili.
He deserved to captured, he was weak. We need a man of steel.
I do find that adult fandoms of children’s books often seem to display a certain degree of arrested development. Hence the hysterics when Rowling became unfashionable.
Yeah, that has been my experience as well. Both inside and outside the fandom.
It’s fundamentally hard to live in a world where reasonable “experts” can disagree—regardless of what the expertise may be: adulting, politics, science, engineering, whatever—which is why so few people do. Everyone else is running around demanding that we all conform to reality as they believe it to be. I hope someday we get to a place where it’s enough to let someone speak and only respond with “I disagree.” without a histrionic hue and cry to burn them at the stake.
Ender’s Game was such an impressive work, and the heroes so believable and humane, I had a lot of trouble squaring them, and that book with the author who produced them after his panic about gay marriage and disapproval of gay people generally. It’s a series I keep meaning to return to, but have been unable to.
In addition to my bafflement at his beliefs about gay people, I was equally shocked to learn at the time that he was still a committed Latter Day Saint. Of all the sects of Christianity its tenets and-especially- its historical claims seem comically easy to prove wrong. I never could understand how an agile mind like his, who wrote thoughtful, humanistic, hard science fiction could still hang on to the demonstrably false history offered by Joseph Smith.
I have a very loose hypothesis that LDS believers make good science fiction and fantasy writers because their main religious text is essentially Bible fanfiction. (Apologies to all the LDS who are reading this! As a Catholic I always appreciated Card's obvious affection and respect for his Catholic characters.)
Lds theology/cosmology is science fi in nature. There is also an expectation of members to be able to write speeches and lessons because LDS doesn't have hired clergy. Those things probably have a lot more influence than your theory.
I always assumed it was because one of the things that happens in the Mormon afterlife is that you hang around with God and potentially undergo the process of becoming a god yourself, so making up entire universes is just studying before the test.
That is a great point.
I’m kind of baffled a science fiction writer as adroit as Card could still be a believer of any kind.
I’m sure that will seem quite rude, but I don’t mean it to be. It’s impressive to me that Carr was able to so think outside his particular religious upbringing to create the enderver
OSC is one of my favorite childhood writers/heroes, and my opinion on OSC is that he is not someone who maintained true to his steadfast values as the rest of the world became too liberal around him, so much as someone whose values did in fact change, possibly due to external events, to become more conservative and xenophobic, and to treat his own earlier (relative) messages of love and tolerance as hopelessly naive.
Contrast his portrayal of Muslim characters in Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow vs the other post-911 shadow series, for example. I also got this impression from some hack-ish books I've read in ~2014 or so that attempted to continue the Ender series, which portrayed the Formics in a substantially worse light.
I also thought your name reminded me of OSCs OTC story that you mentioned. His stories opened up worlds and the empathy he wrote about was so remarkable. I think we must all be doomed to have blind spots and live in our own time.
I agree with your assessment, and if you ever decide to book club one of his picks, I'm in.