The weblink in the above article is no longer valid but I did find an archive of it. The article is written by Jonathan Tolins who was one of the script writers for the movie. It's worth a read. I posted it again in full here as I didn't know how long the archive would remain active for and I like saving stuff for prosperity.
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Why the Martian Child’s Daddy Isn’t Gay
[This essay first appeared last week but disappeared for some unknown reason. Here it is again with minor changes and a different picture above.]
There is a minor controversy brewing online concerning the sexuality of John Cusack’s character in Martian Child. As a co-screenwriter (with my writing partner Seth Bass) and co-producer who worked on the project from the beginning, and as a gay man who cares deeply about these issues, I want to record my experience and provide an accurate history of how the film came to be from someone who was there.
Martian Child began as an award-winning short story by the science fiction writer David Gerrold that was published in the 1990s. The story tells of the narrator’s experience as a single man adopting a child who claims to be from another planet. A film producer named Ed Elbert secured the film rights and eventually teamed up with producers David Kirschner and Corey Sienega. Seth and I were working with David and Corey on another project and they gave us the short story to read to see if we might be interested in pursuing it with them.
The story grabbed us immediately. It’s a touching and warm piece of writing that tapped into deep human impulses. It reminded me of the classic changeling fantasy, in which a child comes to believe he is actually the descendant of a fairy or some other legendary creature and left in place of a human child. There was very little plot, but Seth and I felt immediately that the seeds of a good movie were there.
The sexual orientation of the narrator in the short story is never mentioned.
We began work on the pitch with Corey and David sometime between 2000 and 2001. (I know it was that early because when K-Pax came out in 2001, I worried that our pitch would be in jeopardy because of some similarities. Fortunately, I was wrong.)
Early in our discussions, I brought up the question of the main character David’s personal life. Why was this single man adopting a child? I wanted to know what led him to this decision and why he wasn’t pursuing a family down a more traditional path. I thought an audience would want to know, too.
We discussed several possibilities, including the notion that David could be gay. In the end, we decided to make David someone who had suffered a recent tragedy -- his fiancé died shortly before they were to be married. (The director Menno Meyjes and John Cusack later changed this slightly to make David a widower.)
Why didn’t we make David gay? As the author of The Twilight of the Golds and The Last Sunday in June, and as someone who was completing my stint as co-producer on the first season of Showtime’s Queer As Folk, I certainly had no qualms about writing gay characters. The real question at that point was, why would we? We didn’t make our protagonist gay because that simply wasn’t the movie we envisioned. The questions raised by a single gay man adopting a child, whether those questions are legitimate or not, would have to be dealt with in the movie, and they threatened to overwhelm what we saw as a gentle, fable-like story. This was not Sidney Shorr: A Girl’s Best Friend (the basis for the sit-com Love, Sidney) or a Lifetime movie about the issue of gay parenting. This was going to be a movie intended for the whole family.*
We worked on our pitch for over a year. Shortly before we went out to try and sell it, Corey and David informed us that David Gerrold had expanded the story into a short novel. In this new longer form, David reveals that he is gay. (Gerrold blurs the lines between his real life and his narrator’s. The author is himself an adoptive parent and openly gay, the latter fact I did not know until I heard about the book’s impending release. His sci-fi fans may have known, but I did not. Nevertheless, Gerrold and his son both say that The Martian Child is a work of fiction.)
I still remember the moment I found out, sitting in David Kirschner’s den; I banged my head with my hands and said, “Oh no! It will be just my luck. We’ll get this movie made and everyone will say we changed the character from gay to straight.” Oh, yes, I saw this coming. And as the only gay man involved, and as someone who has taken heat for some of my writing about gay issues in the past, I was already bracing for the worst.
I did eventually read the novel, though I can’t remember whether I did so before or after we sold our pitch to New Line. To my surprise, the book did not make me wish we had written our treatment differently. There is a moving moment when David tells his adopted son Dennis that he is gay and Dennis doesn’t seem to care, but otherwise, David’s sexuality is rarely mentioned. He “happens to be gay” and has no romantic life to speak of. There is a passage near the end in which David talks about a lost love who was “shot in the face,” but I confess I read those pages several times and still had a hard time understanding exactly what was being said. For whatever reason, Gerrold keeps this aspect of his story somewhat vague.
Indeed I wonder if those accusing us of “changing” David from gay to straight would have been satisfied with a movie that was strictly faithful to the novel. I suspect they might have complained that David was just another safe, neutered gay character with no romantic interest. But again, since we began our work from the short story (that we all loved), we had no responsibility to be faithful to the novel (which we did not use) or to create a gay hero to further a political or social cause.
We wanted our movie to be about a parent accepting an unusual child. In the book, the gay David seems to seek acceptance from Dennis, as if his child’s love will somehow validate his own life and worth. I don’t think that is a fair burden to put on a child, real or fictional, and I’m afraid that element in the movie would have bordered on self-pity.
Now I come to the one confusing element in this story. Sometime last year, when this issue was raised on the movie website IMDB.com, David Gerrold wrote in to the IMDB message board claiming that he always wanted David to be gay in the film and that he campaigned vigorously, heroically even, but was rebuffed by the producers and the studio for commercial reasons. I cannot explain why he wrote what he did.
For the record, I have met David Gerrold exactly once. Seth, the producers, and I had a long meeting with him after our second or third draft was completed and it looked like the movie was on track to get made. I fully expected Gerrold to bring up the issue of David’s sexuality. He did not. Instead, he wanted us to include more details of the complicated adoption process (which we did, though not all those elements made it into the final film), and he wanted David to make more jokes throughout, but that was the extent of his notes. He never said one word about making David gay.
And if David Gerrold ever did complain to the studio or the producers about this issue, I never heard about it. Let me also mention that the producers and executives I worked with have been honorable and forthright throughout our long journey together.
That’s all I know.
I personally have not heard from any of the bloggers or other writers accusing us of once again erasing gay people from the screen. To my knowledge, no one has contacted any of the people who actually worked on the movie to ask questions. But then, if fact-checking were routine these days, we wouldn’t be in Iraq. While there is a long way to go before gay people are represented fairly in the media, in this case, the alleged offense is simply the result of timing and the difference between David Gerrold’s original short story and the later novel. I repeat, the character of David was not gay in the story from which we started.
I find this confusion especially unfortunate because, in a larger sense, our movie of Martian Child is extremely gay positive. It is a film about a parent who learns to accept a child who is different, about challenging small-minded expectations and having the courage to be who you are. I hope the fact that our main character is heterosexual will not interfere with that message reaching a wide audience.
- Jon
P.S. One more thing. So Martian Child is not the important film about gay parenting -- the Philadelphia of adoption -- that as a new gay father, I long to see. Fortunately, that film should be on the way. My partner Cary (professionally known as Robert Cary) is now attached to direct a film version of The Kid, Dan Savage’s wonderful non-fiction book about how he and his partner adopted their son. Let’s hope it makes it to the screen in less time than the seven years it took us to make Martian Child.
* I mean that -- “intended for the whole family” -- in the commercial sense. I do not believe there is anything wrong with young people learning about gay parents; I read my daughter books on the subject every night. But movie studios poised to spend great sums of money do think about what kind of audience they are trying to reach, and gay protagonists are not yet considered family fare.
(The photo above is of a storage box in my garage that is filled with drafts of the movie.)
That's my 2 cents and no, you can't have it!
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