i read a post stating george lucas said lgbt people don’t exist in star wars and that he sued fans who wrote gay fanfiction. is this really true? google is failing me :(
not that I know
of. What happened was the people behind the games said that homosexuality didn’t exist in Star Wars and prohibited
fans from talking about it on the official boards. Here is what I found:BioWare take
their Star Wars role-playing seriously. So seriously that the developers are shutting down talk on
Old Republic’s message boards about homosexuality, because it’s a term that
does “not exist in Star Wars”.Yes, if you care to trawl
around the site, there are a few threads that either began as, or devolved
into, discussion of how the game – or the game’s future player base – would
handle gay relationships. And those threads are now locked. A thread
complaining about those threads being locked (along with the words
“homosexual”, “lesbian” and “gay” being censored
on the boards) has now also been locked, with BioWare’s community manager Sean
Dahlberg posting succinctly:As I have stated before, these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars.
Thread closed. [x]
I honestly don’t know where
George Lucas (and LucasFilm at the time) stood on this because all I couldn’t find
anything directly connecting this to him (as if this order came from him). Some fans claim this lack of representation didn’t
came from George but from the executives. There were a couple of LGBT
characters in the EU but George himself didn’t get involved in the EU so it’s
hard to tell. What we do know is that George said this:“At first, C-3PO was not intended to be a robot but a Morphlak, a
humanoid species that were only of male gender, but the studio wasn’t too open
about the idea of a gay character, let alone a whole planet sustaining a gay
species” GL remembers. “You have to remember it was the 70′s, people were
far more uncomfortable about the topic of LGBT rights at the time. It made the
producers, lets just say, pretty uneasy, so we eventually changed his character to an asexual robot” he said. [x]“We told [Anthony Daniels] about the character’s homosexual inclinations
but not to make it too visibly “open”, due to the producers reticence. He
surprised us by taking a gay British accent which we believed was just pure
genius, that’s how the character took place and is frankly one of the most
popular characters of the series with his companion R2-D2, as everybody knows”
he acknowledged. [x]
Alas, those quotes are from a satire site unfortunately. I think they’re completely made up. But! George did donate $50,000 to the campaign to legalise same-sex marriage back in 2009, which seems to indicate pretty strongly where he stands. (Lucasfilm the company donated a further $50,000. I think he still owned it then? I’m not sure.)