Suited man with beard

That isn’t fair. It isn’t just. But it is reality. If Otto Frank had let this be included in the published version, there’s a large chance the homophobic backlash would have prevented the book from reaching the audience it did and spreading the message it needed to. It was NINETEEN. FORTY. SEVEN. The Holocaust had ended TWO YEARS AGO. The acceptance of LGBT identities was basically nonexistent. Otto Frank made a decision based on the time and place he was living in, about what the world at that time was and wasn’t ready to accept. 

Let me say this as bluntly as I can - I am a bisexual Jewish girl and I would have made the same decision Otto Frank did. Making sure Anne Frank was unambiguously seen as sympathic and heroic was more important. Making sure people weren’t sidetracked from the main issue of the Holocaust was more important. He shouldn’t have had to make that decision, without doubt. Anne Frank’s sexuality (however she would have identified in modern terms) shouldn’t be considered relevant to her status as a hero or a sympathetic victim. But in 1947, it undoubtedly would have been.

Although he couldn’t find somewhere to put it in the TV show “that wouldn’t have sounded nightmarishly didactic”, he’s still attached to a line from the book about how “you could find more grace than in heaven and more evil than in hell inside human beings, and the fucker of it is that very often it’s the same human being, and that was sort of the point of view that Terry and I went in with when we wrote the book, and it’s still strangely true, only now he’s dead and I’m some kind of lunatic elder statesman.”

One of the sharper insights in Good Omens is that the interests of heaven and hell aren’t really so misaligned, something Gaiman drives home by departing from the source material to show the audience both sets of headquarters – heaven’s a glossy, Apple Mac-white fantasia presided over by a troupe of gleefully war-mongering bureaucrats led by Jon Hamm as the angel Gabriel, who informs Aziraphale that “I’m afraid we have other things to do. The earth isn’t going to just end itself, you know.”