Ask the Flying Monkey! (June 29, 2009)

Q: Are there any good gay inclusive sci-fi movies, TV shows, or books that aren't produced by the BBC? I don't mean gay in passing like The Andromeda Strain from last year, but where the gay character is a main character. – Sakhmet

A: Books, yes. My favorites are Robert J. Sawyer’s terrific Neanderthal Parallax trilogy and Steven Harper’s Silent Empire series (alas, no longer in print). But also check out the nominees for the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards and the Lambda Awards in the “sci-fi fantasy” category for more titles.

Gay sci-fi TV shows or movies? Not so much. Last week’s Virtuality TV movie, the pilot for a series that Fox has apparently chosen not to pick up, did include a gay couple, except the show itself didn’t qualify as “good” in my view.

Gene Farber (left) and Jose Pablo Cantillo in Virtuality

Q: Pushing Daisies was one of my favorite shows. Can you find out what was going to happen if it hadn’t been canceled? – Brutus, Chicago IL

A: “The Empire Strikes Back.” Pushing Daisies out creator Bryan Fuller tells the Flying Monkey. “You’re separating R2D2 and C3PO and sending them off into two different directions, and so that was going to be Chuck and Ned. Chuck was going to go off with the father, and Ned was going to try to chase her down.”

Meanwhile, Olive was going to have a huge falling out and go off to start a macaroni & cheese restaurant, The Intrepid Cow. Lily, after her own falling out with Vivian, was going to move in with Chuck. Meanwhile, there was going to be more of Wendie Malick as Lily and Vivian’s nemesis Coral.

“That was the heart of it,” Fuller says, “and [a big] part of the third season was Chuck being exposed and what happens when part of your family shows up and says, ‘Just kidding! I wasn’t murdered on the beach in Aruba.’”

Bryan Fuller

By the way, that “wrap up” at the end of the last episode, where we were learned what was going to happen to the main characters (including a brief look at Olive’s Intrepid Cow restaurant)?

“That was all added in post-production,” Fuller says. “Bill Powloski, who was our visual effects supervisor on the show and did such a wonderful job, really came through for us in this last episode. He went to all the houses that we had been dealing with over the twenty-two episodes of the show, and was like, ‘We have no money, but we’d like to do this sequence at the end to give some semblance of closure for the show. Can anybody help us?’ And everybody helped us … They donated to us because they liked the show, and they were sad to see it go, and they were upset that we weren’t able to end it properly.”

Since they couldn’t touch, would Ned and Chuck ever have actually slept together?

Pushing Daisies' Ned (Lee Pace) and Chuck (Anna Friel)

“That seemed like the lowest hurdle of the relationship,” Bryan says. “It definitely created bigger ones down the line, but they kind of figured that one out. I figured if they didn't figure that one out pretty quickly, it would be hard to really buy their situation as realistic. I mean, really, he puts on a condom and you go to town. And there's always mutual masturbation. We could’ve got the shot framing everybody from the bust up and you just see moving shoulders and smiles.”

Read the rest of my interview with Bryan here.

Next page! Hallelujah, gay Christian musicians! Plus Gregory Michael's Greek future.