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That's a more succinct version of what I believe. Even a cursory examination of history will show ever-changing values, and any person's views must be considered in the context of his society. For example:

1) Read through The Merchant of Venice without prior knowledge of who wrote it and when (maybe modernizing the language to remove that as a clue), and you'd conclude that, overall, the author must be anti-Semitic. Yet in Shakespeare's time, the steroetypes of Shylock had justification. Consider instead Shylock's "Hath not a Jew eyes?" speech to see that Will Baby was, for his era, relatively sympathetic towards Jews.

2) Before the Civil War, slavery was legal in southeastern states and an accepted way of life. Many of our Founding Fathers, such as Washington and Jefferson, came from these states. They were still great men.

3) If you read through a complete collection of Gilbert & Sullivan libretti, you'll find the word "nigger" three times. It's used once to degrade Caucasian entertainers who wore blackface and twice with regard to changing skin color while making no insinuations about the people affected. The word was perfectly acceptable in Victorian England, and we think no less of Gilbert because he used it. Yet for obvious reasons the word simply can't be sung in performance nowadays except by groups who slavishly value historical accuracy over sensitivity, and other lyrics are substituted.

As to the case at hand, I've said with tongue in cheek that homosexuality wasn't invented before I attended college in the late 1960s. Admittedly I could be naive, but in my childhood the whole concept of homosexuality was unknown to me. I liked girls (still do), all of my friends were straight (at least as far as I knew), and it was not a subject addressed on TV.

Rod was 25 years older than I, with a military background in which he took pride, so I imagine his views were even more strongly formed by what was typical of his society. Even if he was quoted as using an anti-gay slur, society in general probably considered homosexuality itself more offensive than any description of it.

Although I'm defending Rod here, I don't feel it's necessary. What I've really attempted has been to reverse the disillusionment that J. A. Fludd or anyone else might have experienced. Don't dwell on a choice of words that had different connotations when he used them; instead, admire him for crossing racial barriers in casting and using his scripts to speak out against prejudice.