That way, part 2
The other day, in my lament for the lack of male homosexual attraction in sf (particularly as written by male authors), I indicated that a female protagonist of an sf story would never say "Yeah, I loved him—oh, but don't get the wrong idea, I didn't love him in that way."
When I thought about that more later, I meant to go back and amend it, but didn't get a chance, and now Karen's called me on it in email.
So I'll modify that a little. I know that women have said such things plenty of times in real life, and I can even imagine a female protagonist in an SF story saying it (though often in fiction it would turn out to be a clue that she's actually interested, just not admitting it). So instead, flip the genders: I don't think I've ever seen a male protagonist in an sf story say that about a female lead.
The closest I can think of is Parke Godwin's superb A Truce with Time (subtitled A Love Story with Occasional Ghosts), in which (hazy memory here, it's been a while) the male and female protagonists have known each other a long time and the question arises of why they've never slept together. But that book is unusually mature (for sf, imo) in its portrayals of interpersonal dynamics, and anyway it's not really the same dynamic I'm talking about. I'm saying, imagine a charismatic and attractive female leader character, and a male character who idolizes and adores her but isn't at all sexually interested in her. Seems unlikely to happen in fiction, even though I know it happens in real life.
(Am I being unfair? Presumably if the male character were gay, he wouldn't be sexually interested in her, so maybe it's unfair of me to expect anything else from a straight male character idolizing another male character. I dunno. All tangled up. Not enough sleep.)
The other thing I wanted to mention is that I wasn't quite being fair to the author of one of the two stories I mentioned; I forgot to say that in the one where I didn't get the impression that the protagonist was a closet case, he does explicitly say something like "If he'd asked me to sleep with him, I might have gone along with it." So that's something, anyway. Not actual interest, but willingness. And it probably would've been a kinda shocking line twenty or thirty years ago, so maybe we're making some progress.
I'm babbling. I go do something else now.