The following article was written by my friend JA Fludd, my go-to for all things Trek.
In the Deep Space Nine episode “Rejoined,” Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) is reunited with a
former love, a Trill symbiont who now lives in a female host (Susanna Thompson, later the
Queen of the Borg on Voyager). The symbionts’ love is blind to the bodies they are
inhabiting, and in one scene the two hosts kiss. An outraged viewer called Star Trek and
complained, “You’re ruining my kids by making them watch two women kiss like that.”
The Production Assistant who took the call replied, “Let me ask you a question. Would you
have been okay if one of the women had shot the other to death with a phaser and the kids
watched that?” The aggrieved man said, “Yes, of course.” The Production Assistant then
said, “Well, maybe you’d better think about who it is that is ruining your kids.”
On the one level, this points up the perverse attitude that Americans have about “sex and
violence.” We find violence honorable and think it’s okay to watch people being killed,
maimed, and mutilated in any number of ways. But we have a persistent hostility and
stigma against portrayals of the human body and any kind of sexuality, especially if the
sexual behavior is between people with the same body parts. On another level, it just goes
to show how difficult it’s been to see any portrayal of gay life included in the many iterations
of Star Trek.
You may ask why it even matters whether gays and lesbians are included in Star Trek at all.
Such blindness to gayness flies in the face of what Star Trek is really all about. One school
of Trek fandom seems to believe that Star Trek is about “the adventures of two-fisted,
phaser-shooting cowboy James T. Kirk, bringing Straight White Male justice to a lawless
galaxy and shagging space babes along the way.” But the very creator of Star Trek, Gene
Roddenberry himself, had this to say:
“Star Trek was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day
that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and
differences in life forms. […] If we cannot learn to actually enjoy those small differences, to
take a positive delight in those small differences between our own kind, here on this planet,
then we do not deserve to go out into space and meet the diversity that is almost certainly
out there.”
There was a time when I, as a lifelong Trekker who was there when it was brand-new on
NBC and am also gay, used to defend Star Trek from fans who accused Trek of being
“homophobic” because there was never anyone gay on it. I’d tell them that Star Trek as a
creation was not homophobic; it is inclusive of everyone in principle and its creator wanted
to see gays aboard the Enterprise in his prejudice-free view of the future. And this is true.
During the original series, George Takei (Mr. Sulu), who was still closeted at the time,
though everyone knew about him anyway, asked Gene about including gays on the show.
Gene wanted to do it, but pointed out that he also wanted to keep the show on the air.
Gene told Takei, “…I’m walking a tightrope. The interracial kiss was very controversial.”
(Gene was referring, of course, to the famous forced kiss between William Shatner’s Kirk
and Nichelle Nichols’s Uhura in “Plato’s Stepchildren”). It’s worth noting that Gene himself was once at least an enabler of homophobes, or tolerant of homophobia. He related in a
1991 interview with The Humanist:
“My attitude toward homosexuality has changed. I came to the conclusion that I was wrong.
I was never someone who hunted down “fags” as we used to call them on the street. I
would, sometimes, say something anti-homosexual off the top of my head because it was
thought, in those days, to be funny. I never really deeply believed those comments, but I
gave the impression of being thoughtless in these areas. I have, over many years, changed
my attitude about gay men and women.”
According to the biography Star Trek Creator, Gene overcame his borderline anti-gay
sentiments through his friendship with William Ware Theiss, the original Star Trek costume
designer who died of AIDS complications in 1991. The 1990s was a time when The
Gaylactic Network, the organization of gay and lesbian science fiction fans (to which I
belonged), lobbied Paramount for some gay representation in Star Trek. Gene was “on
board,” so to speak, with this; it was something he advocated. But people behind the
scenes thwarted his wishes.
When Gene stated his intention to have a story about AIDS and homophobia on The Next
Generation, David Gerrold (“The Trouble With Tribbles”) created the story of “Blood and
Fire” to present the issue in a Trek context, including the presence of gay crew members. A
May 2022 article at The Literary Hub mentions that “Blood and Fire” was shot down by
Gene’s predatory lawyer, Leonard Maizlish (a much-hated man), and that Gerrold himself
blamed the veto of the episode on Executive Producer Rick Berman, who took over primary
responsibility for Trek from Gene. A rewrite of “Blood and Fire” actually was produced, not
for Next Generation or any “official” iteration of Star Trek, but for the online series Star Trek
Phase II – New Voyages. The gay characters in this version, whose orientation is a matter
of fact and not an issue, are Captain Kirk’s nephew and his fiancée. This episode is highly
recommended and can be found on YouTube, though it is a fan production and not a part of
any actual Star Trek television series.
Instead of actually showing gay characters or gay Enterprise crew members, what Next
Generation offered viewers instead was “The Outcast,” an episode about Will Riker
(Jonathan Frakes) falling in love with Soren (Melinda Culea), a member of the gender-free
alien species of J’Naii. Among the J’Naii, expressing any gender at all is outlawed; when
Soren “comes out” as female, her society forces her into “psychotectic” therapy to have her
gender expression completely removed, breaking Will’s heart. This makes for a good
allegory for “conversion therapy” being forced on gays in real life, but is not what the gay
Trek fan community asked for. Jonathan Frakes himself expressed disappointment that the
episode wasn’t daring enough, and Soren was not cast with a male actor—which would have
put a very different spin on the conspicuously heterosexual Riker!
Then again, remember the episode “The Host,” which introduces the Trill species via a
character named Odan (Franc Luz), who falls in love with Beverly Crusher (Gates
McFadden). When Odan’s symbiont is transplanted into a female host, the heterosexual Beverly is unable to continue the relationship. Some decisions about sexuality, at least, are
made to keep characters in character.
Things have changed for gay inclusion in Star Trek since “The Outcast”. The movie Star
Trek Beyond, which is set not in the original Roddenberry universe but in an alternate
reality, casually shows Mr. Sulu (John Cho) with his male partner and their daughter.
George Takei was pleased to see gayness represented in Trek, but disappointed that this
portrayal of Sulu was in contradiction to the character that Takei originally played. And
now, on streaming television, there is the CBS/Paramount series Star Trek – Discovery with
its frankly gay couple, Lt. Paul Stamets (Anthony Rapp) and Dr. Hugh Culber (Wilson Cruz).
Fans were at first thrilled to see these characters, who were not guest characters but
regulars on the show, then horrified to see Culber murdered. It smacked of old Hollywood
films in which gay characters were punished for being who they were. Thankfully, Culber’s
death was later reversed with some science-fiction hand-waving. And one episode of the
new series Star Trek – Strange New Worlds, “Spock Amok,” mentions that Nurse Chapel
(Jess Bush) once had a same-sex relationship, something that would have been unthinkable
for the character when played on TV by Majel Barrett in the 1960s.
People today who object to Star Trek becoming “too woke” completely overlook the fact that
Trek was “woke” all along, even while most of the rest of popular culture was still “asleep.”
Gene may not have been able to include gays in the original series, but he initially created
Trek with a female First Officer—Number One, played in the initial pilot, “The Cage,” by
Majel Barrett. (In Strange New Worlds she’s Rebecca Romijn). When pressured to remove
this very progressive character from the show and also write out Spock, who was thought to
be too “devilish”-looking for viewers in the heartland, Gene relented on Number One, but
insisted Spock had to stay because alien life is what the show is about. He then brought in
a black woman and a Japanese man as witness that his future was not a place where white
men ran everything! Even if it was a long battle to get gays onto the show, that belief in
diversity was always there. It was made explicit in the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC—Infinite
Diversity in Infinite Combinations. Introduced in the 1968 episode “Is There in Truth No
Beauty?”, IDIC is expressly about learning to accept, live with, and even enjoy differences
between beings. It is summed up at the end of that episode by this exchange between
Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and Dr. Miranda Jones (Diana Muldaur):
Miranda: “The glory of creation is in its infinite diversity”.
Spock: “And the ways our differences combine to create meaning and beauty”.
And that, friends, is the heart of Star Trek: Not space battles and phaser fire and things
blowing up, but finding our humanity in the diversity of life. There was always a place for
gays in Trek. It was only a matter of getting through that final part of the Final Frontier.
