Star Trek's Gay Episode Finally Gets Made

For Gerrold, New Voyages is providing him with an opportunity to give his original script more edge. "Can we go places we couldn't go in 1987?" he asks. "Yeah. At one point they are talking about getting married, and at one point they actually kiss on-screen. But we are not going any place that's thematically out of place in Star Trek. I'm enormously proud of how far we have come in such a short time and that I get to live long enough to see this episode be shot."

He adds: "New Voyages doesn't have time limits. If we were doing it for prime-time TV, we'd have to tell the story in 44 minutes. The script is probably twice as long as it should be so it's going to be a long episode, almost the equivalent of a short movie."

It is also providing him with an opportunity to renew his sometimes bumpy love affair with the Star Trek franchise. In 1967, as a young unknown writer, he submitted an episode for the original series called "The Trouble With Tribbles" — which got made.

"I was 19 and was an enormously big fan of the original show," he remembers. "I really like the original vision of Star Trek: to boldly go where no one has gone before. When you tell those stories of exploration, you are telling the real story of what it is to be a human being. There was a naiveté about it, a simplicity, but also a spirit of questioning. You go back to Kirk and Spock, and there was a relationship there: logic versus compassion. Kirk gets to learn something in every episode, stand up for the human race. That's something that has been left out of some of the later iterations of Star Trek."

Gerrold was later hired as an associate producer on Star Trek: The Next Generation and had high hopes for the show. "It wasn't Kirk and Spock, but the idea of that series was to do Star Trek again with a bigger budget, more effects, and they wanted more issue stories," he says. The show went on to have a successful six-year run and is now a feature film franchise.

Since then, Gerrold has been anything but idle. He has written episodes for over a dozen different television series, including Star Trek: The Animated Adventure, The Twilight Zone, Land of the Lost, Babylon 5, Sliders and Logan's Run.

He has also published more than 40 books since 1967, including a novelization of "Blood and Fire." Some of his other novels include The Man Who Folded Himself, When Harlie Was One and The War Against the Chtorr series. His autobiographical tale of his son's adoption, The Martian Child, won several prizes in 1995 and has been made into a feature film due to be released later this year.

Despite all he has accomplished, finding himself unexpectedly reliving an experience that, this time, he is confident will have a happy ending, is enormously gratifying.

"I think this is history making, and it proves that the original Star Trek is still going strong," he says. "I thought I was done with this a long time ago. The idea that it is going to be done now is very sweet."