So I was looking up George Nader on Wikipedia (like you do), and learned that not only was he gay, but he had been with his partner for 55 years, and that they had been friends and a found family with Rock Hudson (Avalanche) .
After retiring from acting, he wrote Chrome, “a science-fiction novel dealing positively with a same-sex relationship.” George Nader - Wikipedia Amazon reviews are fairly positive, and the book goes for a lot of money.
I thought others might be interested in this. I’m going track down a copy of this book.
It’s still an impressive, and brave, thing to write about during that period, though. These days just about everybody in what I write is LGBTQ in some way, which will hopefully remain a possibility in the next few years.
It’s good to know in advance with some of these older works. I’ve read a few things where it’s all “hey, this is really progressive for the time” and then, turn the page,… Oh.
Sometimes knowing what to expect makes it easier to process and focus on the things they actually did right.
Yyyyeah… [sigh] When we read Eudora Welty in 8th or 9th Grade, they pruned out the N-Bomb. Imagine my shock years later when I saw the not-all-ages versions and that word was all over the place. (See also: Hemmingway. But I never liked his writing anyway.)
As Mayor Quimby said, “it can be two things”. I think it can be fascinating seeing works like that that are surprisingly forward in some ways and very much of their era in others - it shows how far we’ve come, if nothing else.
Star Trek comes to mind here (like it does a lot for me); it did a nice job from the start with race and international representations, but it took a long time to get to a decent place with LGBTQ characters and plots.
Roddenberry had a phobia about women wielding any kind of power, though, apparently.
I remember going to a lecture he gave that finished off with ‘The Cage’ (not available otherwise at that time) and the audience ‘oinking’ at some of Pike’s sexist remarks.