While the BioWare/Star Wars/gay characters kerfuffle has largely blown over, it did have the effect of ferreting out any gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or remotely curious chara
cters in the extensive Star Wars cannon. Pixel Poet sent me a fantastic bit he dug up from the recent Penny Arcade post, which mentions the first married gay couple in the Star Wars universe, between male humans Goran Beviin and Medrit in Karen Traviss’ novel Sacrifice. (Penny Arcade also did a fantastic comic on the subject, the first panel of which is shown above.)
Sacrifice is the fifth novel in the Legacy of the Force series, and Traviss has supplemented it with a FAQ specifically addressing the gay couple in her novel (emphasis mine, or rather Pixel’s):
The gay Mandos – like the rest of the Mandalorian cast – are in the series because I think the Star Wars galaxy, with millions of worlds and species, is probably more diverse than just a regular vanilla diet of straight, good-looking, able-bodied white folk with red hair and emerald eyes or whatever. So I decided it was time SW had its first gay characters, because it was dumb for such a rich universe like that to be so narrow and unreal.And I say that as a straight white able-bodied woman.
Because whatever your personal prejudices, we live in a diverse world, and people you don’t happen to like because of colour or orientation or age or gender are not going to vanish because you don’t accept them. I don’t like slave-owners and people who think decapitating another being is casual work, but I still write about them, because they’re there in the SW universe.
If you didn’t spot that Goran and Medrit are queer – well, maybe you were only looking for pink armour, limp wrists, and mincing walks, not hard-as-nails mercenaries and armoursmiths. But none of the gay men I know are mincing pink-clad queens, so…I wrote what I saw around me. Real people who just happen to prefer their own gender.
It’s worth noting that while Traviss describes the couple as married, they are not acknowledged as an actual married couple in canon source. But Beviin and Medrit certainly know a lot about what each other wears beneath their hot, sweaty Mando armor.
Thank you, Karen Traviss.
