Why No Gay Sex in Game of Thrones? Writer says “This is not a democracy” Certainly Not A Gay one

George RR Martin: 'It's not a democracy. You can’t just insert things because 
everyone wants to see them.' Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

There is plenty of bloody, ruthless violence in George RR Martin's novels, and lots and lots of sex – but why is there more explicit gay and bisexual sex on display in the Game of Thrones TV adaptation than in his books? The question was asked as Martin addressed an audience at theEdinburgh international book festival on Monday night – why do his A Song of Ice and Fire novels only hint at the subject?

 Martin, who has two more in the series to publish, said he would put it in if it lent itself to the plot. He said the books are narrated through his "viewpoint" characters, so he was more limited than the TV shows. "Frankly, it is the way I prefer to write fiction because that is the way all of us experience life. You're seeing me from your viewpoint, you're not seeing what someone over here is seeing.

Because none of the viewpoint characters are gay, there are no explicit gay sex scenes in the early books. "A television show doesn't have those limitations," he said. "Will that change? It might. I've had letters from fans who want me to present particularly an explicit male sex scene – most of the letters come from women."

But he added: "I'm not going to do it just for the sake of doing it. If the plot lends itself to that, if one of my viewpoint characters is in a situation, then I'm not going to shy away from it, but you can't just insert things because everyone wants to see them.

"It is not a democracy. If it was a democracy, then Joffrey [the sadistic boy king] would have died much earlier than he did."

Martin was one of the star names at the book festival, staged in association with the Guardian. His books are global bestsellers and adored by his fans, but he admitted there was still a kind of literary prejudice against his type of fantasy fiction. "I've been aware of this since I was a kid and I take heart with the fact that it is changing.

"When I was 12 or 13, I had teachers take away science fiction books by [Robert A] Heinlein and [Isaac] Asimov and say: 'You're a smart kid, you get good grades. Why are you reading this trash? They rot your mind. You should be reading Silas Marner.' If I'd been reading Silas Marner, I probably would have stopped reading."

The prejudice against sci-fi and fantasy is still there, but is not what it was. "These things are breaking down. It is an artificial distinction anyway – literary fiction in its present form is a genre itself."

The event in Edinburgh sold out quickly and the queue for book signings quickly became one of the longest the festival is likely to see.

But it had not always been the case, Martin said. A writer's real enemy is obscurity, and he had been there, sitting behind huge piles of books in shopping malls waiting for people to come only for them to ask where the cookery books were.

Martin was relaxed, cheerful and funny – there was no repeat of himreplying "Fuck you" to questions about his health.

He conceded that internet speculation and conspiracy theories abound about how the story will unravel – but that did not influence him, even though he had been dropping clues along the way. "I've been planting all these clues that the butler did it, then you're halfway through a series and suddenly thousands of people have figured out that the butler did it, and then you say the chambermaid did it? No, you can't do that."

He said he had been coming to Scotland since 1981, the year he visited Hadrian's wall, which later inspired the much bigger wall in his novels. "I remember standing there on a cold October day – not quite as cold and grey as today – and I stood on that wall and stared off into Scotland, or what was Scotland, and tried to think what it was like to be a Roman legionnaire … at the end of the world. It was a profound feeling. But fantasy is always bigger, so when I wrote the books, I made the wall 100 times as high and a lot longer."

He said to the Scots in the room: "You should build a gigantic wall. It would become a tourist attraction, and then you can keep the English out!”

Theguardian.com
Mark Brown