The Martian Child: where'd the gay go?

A reader tipped us off to an interesting development in the journey of gay author David Gerrold's semi-autobiographical book The Martian Child to movie screens (the film, which stars John Cusack as Gerrold, opens in June).

It seems that the story of a gay single father coming to understand his adopted son (who insists that he is an alien) is now about a straight man (Cusack) who is so shattered after the death of his girlfriend that he adopts a kid that spends most of his time in a cardboard box.

What the heck happened here?

(READ ON for more on this interesting page-to-screen transformation)

It actually appears as though Gerrold might have had a hand in the straightwashing of the main character (which is actually kind of himself, which is even more interesting). In an interview conducted back in 2004, Gerrold noted:

I got back to L.A., and I started getting inquiries ... Bonneville was trying to get into film production, and they actually hired me to write a script. But Bonneville was funded by Mormons, and they were unhappy with the fact that...they just didn't know how to deal with it, okay? So I said, well the guy could be divorced. "Oh, no. He can't be divorced." And so, they were unhappy with the script. And they shut down their whole movie producing eventually. And I think that was very much because they did not understand movie making more than anything else. And that was okay in that I got my script back. And then we got a call from Kirschner [David Kirschner, producer – D. Lambert], who makes a very, very lucrative deal. New Line has announced that John Cusack is going to star in the picture. Nick Cassavetes [The Notebook] is supposed to direct. This isn’t totally set, because there's still paperwork flying around that hasn't been signed. At this point, I really can't say much about the details, because there aren't any details to report. A lot of it still hasn't been decided...

Interesting. It's not clear whether this "lucrative deal" hinged on Gerrold's changing his main character from a gay man to a straight one, but it does suggest as much. Fans of the book (both gay and straight) are up in arms over the change -- we'd love to hear your thoughts if you've read it. In the meantime, here's the trailer for the movie (which was eventually helmed by Dutch director Menno Meyjes, after Cassavetes backed out):

UPDATE: An eagle-eyed reader found an IMDB forum post by someone claiming to be Gerrold that blames the producers for the character being made straight. And I also want to point out that we interviewed Gerrold last month about his involvement in a gay Star Trek episode that was squelched by producers -- like many gay artists, he has been dealing with this kind of resistance his whole career.