I’m listening to the Blackstone Audio recording of Robert A. Heinlein’s STRANGER IN A STRANGE
LAND on my iPod, and I’m finding much to like as well as to laugh at
in the book — it’s quite the mixture of creaky mid-20th-century archetypes and
perceptive social commentary. I’d read the book before, of course, but reading it today in your 40s is a little different from reading it when you’re 12 (and when the world outside happens to be the world of 1968). I make allowances for the datedness of Heinlein — who, after all, was born in 1907 — just as I do for the datedness of, say, H.G. Wells, but what is one to do with the passage below?

…she had explained homosexuality, after Mike had
read about it and failed to grok — and had given him rules for
avoiding passes; she knew that Mike, pretty as he was, would
attract such. He had followed her advice and had made his face
more masculine, instead of the androgynous beauty he had had.
But Jill was not sure that Mike would refuse a pass, say, from
Duke — fortunately Mike’s male water brothers were decidedly
masculine, just as his others were very female women. Jill
suspected that Mike would grok a ‘wrongness’ in the poor in-
betweeners anyhow — they would never be offered water.)

Of course, it’s Jill thinking here rather than Mike. And there’s a hint
that Mike himself would accept a homosexual advance if it came from a water brother.
But still it doesn’t seem to fit in a book whose themes include the immensity and variety of love and the validation of others in the phrase “Thou
art God.”

It should be noted that Heinlein’s Martians are themselves free from the human concepts of gender (much less sexual orientation). So it seems unlikely that the Martian-trained human male Valentine Michael Smith would care much about whether the humans he meets are “decidedly masculine” or “very female.” (By both terms Heinlein apparently means “very heterosexual” — it’s hard to imagine what Heinlein would have made of the idealized hyper-masculine imagery of Tom of Finland or the lipstick lesbianism of some characters in “The L Word.”) When it came to the varieties of love, and to grokking what love can be, the real world turned out to be a stranger land than Heinlein could imagine.

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