[ST-One]

Originally Posted by meeera

It's a fantasy and science fiction award. As the Puppies well know, having nominated a fair bit of fantasy themselves.

And that story is still in neither of those categories.
It's a forced-outing story. While I don't think it's particularly healthy to stay in the closed for ever and ever, I also think people should only out themselves when they feel ready, and not when they are pushed into that situation.
For that reason alone I reject the premise of that romantic short.

Originally Posted by meeera

The Sad Puppies achieved little when it came to the nominations, so they're not particularly relevant to post-Hugo discussions IMO. It was the Rabid Puppies who swept the nominations.

And F/SF has always contained politics and political messages, of a wide variety of types. People who claim otherwise are betraying their ignorance of the history of the field. I also can do nothing but laugh and shake my head when people whine about 'messages' in fiction, then nominate John C. Wright's stories!

Politics and messages in the genre are fine.
Pushing aside stories and books that do not promote an agenda or highlight the plight of that minority or the struggle of this sexual orientation isn't fine.
Sci-Fi is being read for a variety of reasons by a variety of diverse people. Being beaten over the head with the morality-hammer is probably the least of them.

Originally Posted by meeera

As for "repressed minorities of the day" and wranglings about representation: to me it's pretty simple. Humans consist of a huge variety of different people. Straight nondisabled white cis men are a pretty small minority of our planet's population, so when they make up a majority of fictional heroes, I get bored and turn off. A fiction of ideas and what-ifs is uninteresting to me when it's stuck in one particularly dull version of the past, ignoring the majority of the population almost completely. Unimaginative and backwards-looking is not what I'm looking for in F/SF.

This gay non-disabled white cis man here cares more about the overall story than certain attributes of the characters within that story.
If they do happen to be all "Straight nondisabled white cis men" - then that's fine with me (no one will guilt me out of enjoying LotR, the Star Trek novels, the Witcher books,...).
If they happen to be something other than that - that's fine, too (two of my favourite sci-fi-characters ever are Captain Kathryn Janeway and General Lydia van Dyke).

And - to beat this dead horse again - personally, I don't see what's forward-looking and imaginative about a story about some gay guy being forcibly outed.