The Star Wars universe just got a little more diverse. When Paul S. Kemp's Lords of the Sith novel is released on April 28th, it will include a character named Moff Mors — an Imperial, a lesbian, and the first canonical LGBT character in the franchise.
Not much is known about Mors, although according to Big Shiny Robot, she's "an Imperial who has made some very serious mistakes but she is an incredibly capable leader and spends much of the book working hard to prevent absolute failure." The book, which is set after Revenge of the Sith but before the Rebels TV series, doesn't mention the character in the official summary, so it doesn't seem like she's going to be a major character, but it's still a welcome bit of inclusiveness nonetheless.
Here's Del Rey's Star Wars editor Shelley Shapiro on Mors:
This is certainly the first character in canon. But there was a gay Mandalorian couple, so it's not brand new. It's not something I really think about, it just makes sense. There's a lot of diversity–there should be diversity in "Star Wars." You have all these different species and it would be silly to not also recognize that there's a lot of diversity in humans. If there's any message at all, it's simply that "Star Wars" is as diverse (or more so because they have alien species) as humanity is in real life and we don't want to pretend it's not. It just felt perfectly natural.
The Mandalorians Shapiro mentions are Goran Bevlin and Madrit Vasur, who appeared in several of the Legacy of the Force novels, so they were part of the Expanded Universe, but not canon. It's crazy that it took until 2015 and for Disney to declare everything going forward as official for Star Wars to get its first canonical homosexual character, but better late than never.
[Via Comicbook.com]