Sci-Fi Characters Set Phasers to "Gay," Straight Male Heads Explode

Pro-Male laments the great technological breakthroughs that will never be because the feminizing of Sci-Fi means todays manly boys won't be watching Sci-Fi and therefore will not be inspired by it.  Can we all pause now for a moment of silence to honor all the breakthroughs that didn't happen because girls and gay boys didn't pursue the sciences because it was the straight mans domain?

Clearly Pro-Male sees only what he wants.  While he believes the SyFy network has been ruined by introducing female and gay friendly themes, I've stopped watching the network because it's seems to feature almost nothing but bad "SyFy Original" movies and pro-wrestling.

And clearly, I was watching a different original version of Battlestar Galatica, which had strong female characters and relationships.  In the pilot, Apollo got married, but then was quickly widowed, and later, a female pilot joined the gang and because his love interest.  Apollo's sister was part of the command crew, and Starbuck had a long term relationship with, I believe, a nurse. 

And finally, I want to say that I agree with saxgoddess, the original Battlestar Galactica was better - lots of cheesy fun - especially the cylons.  I loved the sound they made and their red scanning eyes.  (If you watched Big Bang Theory last night, you'll know why I must have Sheldon's toaster.)

So here's to all the brilliant new things coming our way now that the the sciences are opening up everyone!

P.S.  I'm totally psyched to discover that season one of the original Bionic Women, with Lindsey Wagner, is now available on Hulu!

Right..this guy is not very smart, but I'm sure we can all agree on that.

He goes on about how women are ruining sci-fi and they never had nothing to do with it before, right?

According to this douchebag, we had nothing to do with  Star Trek, ST: The Animated Series, ST: The Next Generation, ST: Deep Space Nine, The Six Million Dollar Man, Logan’s Run, Babylon 5, Earth: Final Conflict, Land of the Lost, He-Man and The Masters of the Universe, Beast Wars: Transformers, ReBoot… such great and manly works of science fiction could never touched by womanly hands...!/sarcasm/

That sci-fi  has only ever had great writers like Michael Richards, J. Michael Bingham, D. C. Fontana…Huh? What? No, that can’t be right…… those are all pen names...for Dorothy Catherine Fontana! And she wrote episodes in ALL of those series. But… that can’t be… women are BAD! Wait, she co-wrote the PILOT for TNG?? No! Not “Encounter at Farpoint!”

This man does not know half of what he is talking about. Including about how long women have been in the game.

I have no idea if it was prompted by the same blog, but in the last few days there was a thread about whether SF is homophobic or gay-friendly on the Escape Artists forum (the discussion forum for the Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and Podcastle fiction podcasts).

My answer was that up to the 50s, homosexuality was as invisible as it was in almost all entertainment.  With the 60s and the advent of the New Wave and authors like Michael Moorcock, literary SF became very progressive and has only become more so with time, while screen SF has remained very invisible, possibly even more so than general entertainment, largely because screen SF has remained so focused on the action-adventure, straight male targeting genre.

The general consensus of posters was that SF was very inclusive, I think because the forum tends to very serious, literary-SF minded consumers.  They recall all of the positive portrayals they've encountered, without realizing that almost all of them were probably in print SF.

Sadly, partway down the first page, some moron posted that just because you don't like gay people doesn't make you homophobic, and the interesting discussion fell away in favor of arguing with this guy.  On the plus side, by the time I got bored and stopped reading, no one had sided with him, although there were some of the usual "I don't think it's helpful to label people bigots" comments.

I won't bother to discuss the article. The guy is an idiot. Less said about that caveman the better.

However, as a fan of the original series of BSG, I am a saddened about your description of BSG1978. The new series isn't better or worse than the old one, it is different and made 30 years later. You CANNOT possibly compare the two series, because they were made in two compeletely different time-frames. 

Your description would fit 99% of what was shown on tv in the late 70s, early 80s. Way back then, there were few series particularly friendly to women and even less to gays, so there's no real reason for dissing BSG1978 for what it was, THIRTY years ago. Is it really so hard to simply respect a series and leave it where it was? In the past.

I applaud the adding of more gay people on sci-fi or on any other series. For the original BSG it's too late to change anything and the new BSG didn't really help much either, though it took a careful step in the right direction with Gaeta.

I can only hope that, 30 years from now, people are going to laugh at your precious "rich, complicated, sublime remake" because of the way it kept Geata safely in the closet for so long, because 30 years from now gay people will simply be a part of society and able to get married and have families and live peacefully in yet another time-frame. And maybe there will even be a BSG2036 that will reflect that.