Do you think it is possible to create a fictional world totally free of homophobia?

Ah. Understood. And yes, strange to tap Ayn in such a way.

Spoiler

 

Aaaaand we see @Lemex gradually coming around to Ayn Rand's way of thinking. By July, he'll be singing the praises of Atlas Shrugged, calling Rand the greatest mind of modern times, and marrying the closest approximation to Dagny Taggart he can find. (Or Howard Roark, if he continues to come around all the way to @Wreybies' way of thinking...)

I am, of course, kidding.

 

Give it a few years.

My opinions on all that has considerably softened, but still, I'm not likely to see Shrugged as a prophesy just yet. .

 

Oh, this will be cool! You're teaching your students now that Atlas Shrugged is terrible, but in a few years, when they're in graduate school and your thinking has come around some more, you'll be teaching the same people that Atlas Shrugged is a brilliant work of unsurpassed genius!

They will be rather confused and will likely convert to Rastafarianism. You will, of course, follow shortly after.

 

Already done that in my Bob Marley years.

I think by now I'm too much of a leftie to ever appreciate Rand in anything more than the odd thing. :/ She would have hated me, I actually like the idea of Socialism.

 

I would say definitely yes. Just depends on how you write your story. As the writer, you can make your story feature homophobia or not feature it. It's entirely your choice.

 

I believe that in a story anything you want is always possible. It just depends on how well you can craft it. I do see some potential traps to this idea, though.

I think that a world where any of the characters is gay or bisexual and no other character seems to even flinch to the sight, sound or thought of it, is, by inference, already a world where homosexuality is well within the norm. Unless you explicitly or implicitly specify it, it's still left to the imagination of the reader to determine if the rest of the world is like that. A homophobe reader might want to imagine that there are somewhere in that world people like him.

If you want to make it explicitly known to the reader that there is absolutely no homophobia, you have to be careful not to make it sound forced. If being gay is totaly within the norm, then you have to keep in mind that people in that society aren't going to think of it in terms of the same meaning that you do in this world where homosexuality isn't yet the norm. Most likely being gay to those people would be as relevant to a conversation as "what's for dinner tonight?". Not being straight, to them, might be as important to think about as not playing golf.

That doesn't mean you wouldn't have anything to work with. It just means you have take care to not force it into the story, and find a subtle, coherent way of showing it to reader. I think it's, in essence, a bit like creating a utopian world, where you have to be careful not to shatter the illusion.

I don't think it limits it character development either. But I think there's a fundamental question that should be asked here, about both the character and the world: What exactly does this add to both?

I had a an idea a while ago about a world where humans were not a dimorphic species (men and women look the same, like dogs and cats do). I haven't writen anything around that idea because I'm still clueless about what relevance would that have in a story. Because, let's face it, different opinions and beliefs, different genders and races, etc, are all among the things that usualy add interest to stories or help a plot develop.