Anonymous writes...

Hello. I was just reading the Lexington section last night in the hopes you had clarified something about Lexington's motives, and some stuff I read made me wonder about something. As the question I was looking for hasn't been answered, however, I'll ask this first.

I recall a long time ago that you mentioned that, in Future Tense, Puck chose Lexington as the mastermind because he was going for shock value. What were this dream-Lexington's reasons for carrying on Xanatos' legacy after the "real Xanatos" died in the fight with Hudson, though?

Secondly, and here I get to the main reasoning behind writing this: I very much applaud your intentions to, if the societal climate ever provides for it, portray Lexington as attracted to other guys. Although I'm not attracted to my own gender myself (I am a young man), I do believe in tolerance for people who are attracted to their own genders, so I approve of this very much.

However, some of the reasoning mentioned in the discussion as to why Lexington is attracted to other men concern me that you may be unintentionally indulging another kind of intolerance without knowing it. That of the intolerance directed towards a person, often ostracized by their peers simply because they prefer books and the so-called more "thoughtful, intellectual" pursuits as opposed to what the majority of the society prefers; simply because they're "smarter." This is a group I belong to.

In the discussion some of the people asking the questions theorized Lexington was attracted to other guys because he was scrawny, wasn't as interested in Angela as the others, was friends with Alex, and some other reasons I don't recall. You confirmed their questions in such a way I'm unable to tell if you're also confirming their reasoning behind which gender Lexington finds attractive.

This is a concern to me because there are plenty of ostracized "smarter" people. (By the way, I can't think of a better term right now, but I apologize to anyone who reads this if it sounds arrogant. My personal belief is anyone can become as smart as anyone else, some just choose not to enhance their thinking capacity as much as others.) Plenty of people in this minority who don't care about their appearances because they believe appearances are on-the-surface traits which don't matter. Plenty of people who find the opposite gender attractive but choose not to pursue attractive people because they're either uninterested in a relationship, or believe whether a person is or isn't attractive is not important in life and not worth concerning oneself with in any way. (Or, to use a less extreme example, plenty of people who do pursue the opposite gender a little, but even if they are interested in relationship or paying attention to attractiveness, are much less interested in a relationship or a person's appearance because they would rather engage in other "intellectual" activities.) And plenty of people who do not believe in the stereotype that a male of any age should only associate them with "tough" aspects of life and befriend children outside of their own family, show affection to them. So on and so forth.

And from what I've heard and inexperienced, one of the harshest insults levelled against people such as this, who simply would rather be different than the majority, is to accuse them of being different not because every person is unique and because people could be interested in things outside of what the majority is interested in, but because they are attracted to their own gender. Which is insulting not only because these people mistakenly think it is wrong to be attracted to one's own gender, but also because they are claiming that the only reason they could still be a human being and not be interested in sports, cars, appearances, popularity, et cetera, is to be part of a minority they see as horrible. In other words, that no one could ever not be interested in what the majority is interested in and still be a human being of any kind.

So what I want to know is; why did you characterize Lexington in these ways? I know you would never intentionally portray anything intolerant, but I feel the minority I'm a part of is often misrepresented in many ways: for instance, as "wanting to be popular despite being different" when many of us simply don't want anything to do with the majority of a society we strongly disagreed with and just want people to recognize its okay to be different. And because of this, when studying how to best portray Lexington right, some of your ideas came from this misinformation. Hence, I'm speaking now to make sure you were not misled by this misinformation and the minority I belong to is being represented accurately as well.