I'm not going to see Ender's Game. This is not a revelation. I'm queer. My opinion of Orson Scott Card's politics and his flimsy rationalizations is on record. I don't buy books he writes. I don't watch the movies based on them.

But I've still got a paperback on my shelf – battered and worn in the way beloved books get, spine floppy, corners bent. On the title page, in faded blue ballpoint pen, it's inscribed: "To Rachel - a friend of Ender."

It's not wrong. It would be easier if it were.

The first time I read Ender's Game, I was eight.

Ender's Game was one of my first and most precious paper mirrors. I was a gifted and severely socially alienated little kid, and authors who can write really, freakishly brilliant children are extremely rare. Ender's Game was an inestimably important touchstone – the first and sometimes only sign I had that there was someone out there who even vaguely got it and cared enough to try to write it down.

This isn't an uncommon experience, I think. But it's not the end; there's another part of the story that comes later, the part I don't usually mention.

As a college student, I corresponded extensively with Orson Scott Card. For several years, I considered him a mentor and a friend. He was incredibly generous with his time and advice, and supportive of me as an aspiring fiction writer. I've had dinner at his home.

I was out during that time. I was also largely unaware of the extremity of Card's politics. His political reputation was much quieter back then – most of his internet presence was concentrated around a network of online writing workshop and critique groups – and his op-eds were published in circles I never stumbled into. The only time his beliefs came up in our conversations was a comment he made about fiction being a totally inappropriate venue for any kind of ideological proselytizing. I may not have agreed with his personal beliefs – I knew that he was an observant Mormon and at least somewhat politically conservative – but I respected and still respect the principle of not using fiction as a soap box, even if the author who introduced it to me has since forgotten or abandoned it.

The truth, of course, is that Card had been avidly homophobic since long before I knew him. That at the same time we were talking about character development and the shapes of stories, he was railing against marriage rights for same-sex couples and insisting homosexuality was a byproduct of child abuse. Whether the rampaging extremism he's exploded into is a product of a significant change in perspective or just less tact and a larger platform, I'll never know: We fell out of touch long before, for which I'm cowardly grateful.

Card's hate has come to color my experience of his fiction – as, I think, it should. Neither fiction nor its creators exist in a vacuum; nor is the choice to consume art or support an artist morally neutral. Orson Scott Card is monstrously homophobic; he's racist; he advocates violence and lobbies against fundamental human rights and equates criticism of those stances with his own hate speech.

I would never, ever suggest that a student seek out his advice. I will not pay to see Ender's Game; I will never buy another copy. But there's that battered, beloved old paperback still sitting on my shelf, and I can't and don't want to erase what it's meant to me. Whoever I am, wherever I've come from, as a writer and a human being, Ender's Game was part of that. And so was Card.

But I don't want to walk away without stopping to mourn for what was worth mourning.

In February, Alyssa Rosenberg wrote an excellent and nuanced examination of the paradox of Ender's Game, and the tricky negotiation of consuming valuable works by reprehensible artists. In the 1930s and 1940s, George Orwell produced article after article trying to navigate the treacherous intersections of literature with the personal and political. But even now, there's no map. It is unconscionable to keep supporting Card, to buy his books, to afford him any further platform. But if we all walk away and keep walking, someday a kid is going to reach for the touchstone that I clung to – and come up empty.

Once, early in our correspondence, Card and I talked about villains. I don't remember the exact words, but Card's advice stuck with me: to find something worth loving in every antagonist. It's the lesson that made Speaker for the Dead my partner's favorite book in the Ender series: that no one is all good or all bad; that most of us live the lives we think we have to.

If this were fiction, there would be a clear answer. Real life is messier, the stakes higher. Complex and painful problems aren't always offset by elegant solutions. Sometimes, there's no right answer. Sometimes every choice means letting go of something valuable – the question isn't "whether," but "what."

These days, it's easier for me to think of them as two separate people – the Card I knew, whose books I loved; and the increasingly unbalanced and extremist pundit whose worldview scarcely counts me as a person. But that's reductionist, and a disservice to both. Card is a monster who helped me learn to write, an author of hateful screed whose novels taught lonely, angry kids compassion and gave them their first sense of home. None of those things makes the others go away. None of those things makes the others stop mattering.

I am not Ender. The enemy's gate is not down. And some battles can't be won.