I agree with everything @ltdew said. That’s exactly what I believe as well, except said much more eloquently than I could say myself. Especially the points about how avoiding the topic altogether is an even greater issue.
@213 seems to not be reading anything anyone has said so far though. I haven’t seen anyone advocate for openly gay characters. I don’t see how something like an optional side quest dealing with homosexuality would take any extra time or resources. It would take the same amount of time as any other side quest dealing with a facet of medieval society.
This game is set in 1403, a period in Czech history rife with religious and social tensions. If they were going to make a game trying to avoid social issues, they should have set it in a different time.
And anyways, medieval treatment of homosexuality is extremely relevant to the modern controversies surrounding homosexuality. It’s in fact the historical predecessor to them. There was very little stigma attached to homosexuality in the western world before the rise and spread of christianity and monotheism in general (There was still some - but that’s a different topic). Most of the modern preconceptions and anti-homosexual sentiments come from these periods of religious dominance of society.
Speak for yourself of about how interesting it is or isn’t. For those of us interested in all facets of past societies, it would be very interesting.
Really, if homosexuality had been a non-issue at the time, there would be no need to write write religious and secular laws detailing punishments for it. Or any reason for historical sources to mention it at all.
While I understand to an extent where you are coming from, you have to remember that speaking or writing about sexuality was taboo until very recently - so unless you have been reading only primary historical documents about the period, any more modern sources would be heavily biased against historical sexuality based topics. It’s a comparatively new scholarly field.
EDIT: Some small changes. Also, wanted to link to this old but interesting article on this very subject: http://h2g2.com/edited_entry/A7715315
Interesting points from the article:
- Homosexuality as a word seems to have first been used in the 19th century. Before that, homosexual acts were lumped in with the rest of sodomy.
- “Interestingly, it was thought that any man was capable of performing a homosexual act, a view very different to the idea of innate sexuality that we tend to think today.”
The author of the article is supposedly a historian. It would have been nice if they included a better bibliography though. Still worth a read.