on gender in The Forever War

This is in answer to a letter from a reader . . . .
Actually, I should be content to just let the text stay, and explain itself, but there's a lot that was more clear forty years ago than now -- and wasn't completely clear to everybody then. 

The ideas of, first, compulsory sex among soldiers and, later, compulsory homosexuality among everybody, were meant to be tongue-in-cheek; absurd.  That I employed the rhetorical devices of hard sf to that end was supposed to be the big McGuffin, if you will.  If people didn't think it was funny . . . well, as they say in literary criticism, fuck them if they can't take a joke!

Does that mean that the novel was not intended seriously?  No.  But one could write a book -- a deadly boring one -- about what seriousness means in a comic novel.  (Using "comic" in its broadest literary sense.) 

What I would probably do differently now, maybe because I'm becoming politically correct in my old age, would be the feminization of a couple of the gay male characters, and masculinization of a couple of the female ones.  That wasn't necessary then and would be doubly unnecessary now.  (A couple of gay readers did take me to task for that even back then.)