In Robert Ferro’s 19ed illness afflicting gay men, spread by sex, and for which there is no cure

Can gay male desire only survive when gay men are able to control their own reproduction?

Mark’s only hope seems to be a medical trial that requires the transfusion of genetically identical white blood cells, until his friend Matthew, who recently lost his lover to the ‘Plague’, begins writing letters to Mark revealing another potential cure. Shortly after the disease erupted some seven years previously, a group of gay men made contact with aliens, living on a planet called Splendora, who are ‘long, lean, delicate, in the sense of a swimmer’s body’. ‘Darling,’ Matthew writes, ‘they are gay.’ The aliens’ advanced technology will enable a group of gay men to escape to Splendora, be cured of their illness, and live safely on a planet populated only by gay men – and gay aliens. Mark dismisses Matthew’s letters as the fantasies of a dying ‘queen out of control’; his family eventually acknowledge his illness, and a brother donates the blood needed for his trial. It was a fantasy that seemed to promise everything, but there was one detail Matthew couldn’t explain about how this community could survive: ‘Reproduction is something of a mystery.’

Yet the novel ends with Mark and his lover Bill gazing at the sky, ‘waiting as if for the ship to Splendora’ – attracted, in spite of themselves, to Matthew’s fantasy of a gay planet

For centuries, writers, artists, and speculative thinkers have used science fiction to imagine the possible futures we might have. That’s one reason the genre has long been a storehouse of fantasies about reproduction. Imagining a different future requires imagining a different way of getting there, and the way we get there, the way any group makes it to any future, is by reproducing over time. Science fiction’s reproductive fantasies have rarely been utopian in any simple sense, since one group’s utopia can all too easily slide into another’s dystopia. But because of the genre’s commitment to world building – its requirement to have, if not always directly reveal, a logical and technological explanation for every part of its imagined world – it requires writers to explain how their fantasies of the future can be made real.

Sometimes, such world-building can be lazy, gesturing towards a logical explanation for the fictional world without ever convincing the reader. In other cases it can be almost neurotically belaboured: extended histories of alternative galaxies, chapters outlining the reactions of alien chemistries. These explanations are ruled by the science available to the writer, even if they move beyond it: the extent of an era’s science forms the horizon of its science-fictional possibilities. And that is why science fiction’s reproductive fantasies never only belong in their alternative futures, but in each writer’s present: its knowledge, its politics, its desires. Science fiction forces characters like Ferro’s delirious ‘queens out of control’ to take their desires down from the starry skies of fantasy and into the grey prose of reality.

It makes these dreamers answer the hard questions lying behind any form of gay separatism: can gay life reproduce itself without heterosexuality? Should we desire a gay planet? It’s easy to mock these intergalactic fantasies, as Mark does. But just as science fiction is never only about the future, the planets it creates are born out of desires we can find, now, on this planet of our own. Gay men in the 1980s, living under the shadow of AIDS, were far from the first to imagine a world where reproduction happens beyond heterosexuality. One of the earliest feminist science fictions, Mizora (1890) by Mary E. Bradley Lane, is also one of the first outlines of a completely self-sustaining society populated only by women.