In which The Gay Recluse posts an incisive reader comment.

This was left in the comments but we thought it merited a full post because it brings to light several important and interesting issues that are not unrelated to our obituary of Arthur C. Clarke, which — ahem — did not please everyone.

Vikram — a gay man in India — writes:

I thought your reworked edit was unfair, sure, but also funny and not without some points. One of them you’ve defended above. The other is the certain level of discomfort one feels about a closeted Western gay man parachuting into a developing country like Sri lanka and using the status he gains by being there to lead a life he wasn’t able to lead in the West, at least when he went there, and which most gay Sri Lankans still can’t.

As a gay man living in India I don’t want to make assumptions about the intentions of all foreigners who live in countries like this, but it does rather creep me out to encounter rich (over here) foreigners who use their status to have sexy local men at their beck and call. Maybe some level of envy here, I agree, and often these guys do take care of their local guys. Nonetheless there’s an element of exploitation that cannot be overlooked easily.

I’d even be willing to do that if these guys would make some effort to use their considerable influence to change attitudes and government policy towards homosexuals, but that rarely happens. You point out how much it would have helped a young gay sci fi fan to discover that someone like Clarke was gay – imagine how much it would have helped a young gay Sri Lankan man to have learned that Clarke was an out, proud gay man,rather than someone around whom lots of salacious (and probably incorrect, but that’s not really the point) rumours always swirled in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka isn’t the worst place to be gay in, but its not great. Some bad stuff has happened, like the extension of anti gay laws to cover lesbians. Clarke did do a lot for Sri Lanka, but he could have done a lot for gay Sri Lankans. Perhaps he tried – I’ll mail Sri Lankan activists I know to check – but the chances are he was happy to benefit from the special status he had there, but not willing to help others who didn’t have it.

Thanks for this comment, Vikram. These are important issues that extend far beyond the legacy of Arthur C. Clarke, and we look forward to exploring them more outside of that context (which is already getting a bit tedious, now that he’s been dead for so long.)