Happy Pride from the planet Dirbanu 🏳️‍🌈🪐

Happy Pride to everyone but especially these fab gay aliens—the “loverbirds” from planet Dirbanu in Theodore Sturgeon’s short story “The World Well Lost,” originally published in the June 1953 issue of the pulp magazine Universe, with illustrations by Gredno Mahasm.

It’s a Pride miracle: I stumbled upon this story earlier this month in a Sturgeon collection that’s been sitting unread on my shelf for years. I knew Sturgeon by reputation as an exceptional mid-century American writer of sci-fi, fantasy, and other weird tales, and an occasional writer on the original Star Trek TV show, but I had no idea that he wrote and published an unambiguously gay sci-fi story in 1953!

In “The World Well Lost,” the loverbirds arrive on Earth and enchant the desensitized population with their graceful, loving ways. I love this description of them in particular:

They came down out of the sky in a single brassy flash, and stepped out of their ship, hand in hand. Their eyes were full of wonder, each at the other, and together at the world. They seemed frozen in a full-to-bursting moment of discovery; they made way for one another gravely and with courtesy, they looked about them and in the very looking gave each other gifts—the color of the sky, the taste of the air, the pressures of things growing and meeting and changing....

Spoiler alert: the loverbirds, whose sex is ambiguous at first, turn out to be a same-sex couple—fugitives from aggressively homophobic Dirbanu. I won’t recap the plot (you can easily read the whole story online) but it hinges on an act of solidarity committed by a gay human—a hulking, closeted, near-mute starship crewman whose internal monologue is embroidered with exquisite poetry.

I loved it so much that I went looking for the issue of Universe in which it was originally published and found a copy on eBay. Apparently multiple publishers rejected Sturgeon’s “daring” tale (no surprise there), with one even contacting other publishers to insist that they not publish it either. But Raymond Palmer and Bea Mahaffrey (working together under the pseudonym George Bell) did publish it, alongside Mahasm’s lovely illustrations, in the first issue of their new mag.

According to what I've read online, Sturgeon seems to have been pretty enthusiastically hetero, if a little situationally bi (as who among us is not?). Today we might think of him as an ally, who used his gifts to advocate for understanding and acceptance of queer people long before straight Americans started doing that in large numbers. I love that he wrote this marvelous, deeply sympathetic story, that he found someone to publish it, and that it reached me across time and space in June 2024—71 years later.

For an engaging and illuminating conversation on "The World Well Lost," I recommend listening to this terrific episode of the podcast Queer as Fact.