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No gay character in new Star Trek movie. Perhaps the sequel however.
At yesterday's TCA one of the shows being presented was the new J.J. Abrams show Fringe. Alas, so far nothing gay about that show, but I did use the opportunity to find out if the new Star Trek movie might finally go where Star Trek has never gone -- namely introducing an actual gay character that isn't some lame metaphor for homosexuality.
Roberto Orci (left) & Alexander Kurtzman Two of Star Trek's executive producers, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci (both also work on Fringe) chatted with me after the Fringe panel. Here was our discussion:
AfterElton.com: Gay fans of Star Trek have waited a long time for Star Trek to finally include an actual gay character. Any chance that will finally happen with the new movie?
AE: So I shouldn’t be wildly optimistic that this is something that will happen?
AE: That’s what so ironic, the fact that that’s never happened.
AE: So, sequel? I’m sure you guys must know there’s a huge gay community out there who [love Star Trek and sci fi] ... it’s just something that has always rankled gay folks all these years. There’s all this diversity [in Star Trek], yet that’s the one thing that’s missing.
There you have it, gay Trekkies. Two of those directly involved with the new franchise say they are aware of this issue. However, the proof is in the pudding and with the new movie coming out in 2009, we're pretty much guaranteed that the Trek franchise will be almost fifty years old before the show finally fully lives up to it's boast of diversity. And let me just add, giving us a minor ensign who kisses his partner in a scene only to beam down to an alien planet where he is promptly killed, does not count. Given the franchise's ridiculous exclusion of gay characters for five decades, they owe us big time.
Submitted by on Tue, 2008-07-15 14:43. |
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There will never NEVER be a
Don't hold your breath
I agree with mendicant. THERE WILL NEVER BE a SERIOUS, Frequently Occurring Gay Character on any Star Trek Media.
Paramount will probably say something outrageous like: "In the future, they found a 'cure' for homosexuality". The American Fuckwit Association will approve even though their religion prohibits them from believing in the future; what with the crapture and all.
I mean if even Joss Whedon can't bring himself to portray a non-caricature gay male couple in any of his work then what makes any one think there is hope Star Trek ever will?
It's possible that in America the Religious Right comprises a significant portion of the Star Trek Fan Base. In which case the capitalist pigs at Paramount don't want to jeopardize their market share.
They wouldn't even make Odo gay and he was genderless to begin with!!!
Red shirts for the gay trekkies
Mendicant is probably right. On the remote chance there is ever a gay character on Star Trek, the best we can hope for is a red-shirted hottie who rips his top off before meeting a tragic end while saving the Enterprise. (If you don't know what a red shirt means, ask any SF fan.) Either that or some hermaphroditic alien that's a cheesy metaphor for bisexuality or fluid sexuality.
Give it up gay trekkies. You're never going to get your homo hero from this franchise. Look to Torchwood or Babylon 5 for a queer friendly future. You can also check out the fan-produced new episodes that recently released "Blood and Fire", a gay-inclusive show penned for the original series, but never produced. I haven't watched it yet, but it's available for downloading at http://www.startreknewvoyages.com/episodes.html.
There could be a chance.
Paramount has never taken a lead on this, so we can't expect any kind of change to come down from on high.
Obviously, during the 60s or 70s any gay character was out of the question. It wasn't until the late 80s with ST:TNG that it became a real possibility. At the time Gene Roddenberry stated that it was time, but remember this is the time when the whole world went insane when Thirtysomething had 2 guys in bed together, so anything that would have been done would have to have been some "Very Special Episode" and that was too much for Paramount to handle.
Once Gene died though, all hope was lost because Berman, and later Braga who took over the franchise, were dead set against ever doing it. Even though writer after writer and actor after actor vocally stated that it was time, they always got shot down.
Berman and Braga, even though they paid lip service to ST history of being progressive, decided to leave the progressive fan bas behind and focused on hormaonal teenage gamer boys as their key demographic. Hence all the space babes with anti-gravity boobs. The end product was Enterprise, where they teamed with right-wing nutjob Manny Coto (now of 24 fame) to make the worse ST show ever.
Luckily, the ST audience rejected their vision and the show was cancelled.
I can't say the new producers are any more gay friendly than Berman or Braga, but considering ST is now free of those 2, their is a slight chance the new team aren't just giving us the run around.
www.thebittersuite.blogspot.com
Abrams' track record isn't
Abrams' track record isn't astounding - the closest "Alias" ever came to a gay character was Rachel in season 5, who was properly introduced in an episode that had her (evil) best friend commenting that some guy was "Not your type...that's what I love about our friendship, no competition", then ran screaming away from that plotline and had her hook up with the "not your type" guy. Lost had "Tom", one of the more prominent villains, but that's about it (and in a show with such a huge main cast, "prominent villain" doesn't equate to a whole lot of screentime). Which isn't to say that future Star Trek sequels won't, just that I'd recommend caution with any optimism.
The 'lesbian' was invented in 1992 by Sir Arthur Lesbian.
About Lost
Abrams doesn't really work on Lost at all anymore, BTW.
Star Trek - On a good note...
Like renting So noTORIous
Like renting So noTORIous just to see Zachary Quinto do some real *ahem* acting?
LOL
Have no fear, I've given up
Have no fear, I've given up on the 'verse long ago, back when Berman and Braga were raping it, calling it "Something New!" Abrams is going to do to this movie like he does everything. Flash, hype, and then a swift kick in the nuts with a "How's that for a twist?" He has never had any follow through, just look at Lost and Alias. It will show here too.
B5, the ultimate Space Opera, was like heroine for Sci-fi fans who craved not only a good story, strictly following canon, but also great acting. That show was built around dedication to the facts. As a person who now hates BSG for screwing with canon just to make a moral judgment, B5 is the ultimate.
?
As a person who now hates BSG for screwing with canon just to make a moral judgment, B5 is the ultimate.
What are you referring to?
Well, there were many
Well, there were many instances, but the first major was the third season episode where they erased established storylines of how long Adama had been commander of Galactica. In the episode, they had him possibly starting the second coming of the cylons by sneaking over a recon ship in to their territory. Of course, that crappy plot set it up to make it look like he knew they were possibly coming. The whole episode contradicts everything in the mini-series.
Other instances, turning Caroline Adama in to Carole Anne the drunk. Making the show the Starbuck/Apollo will they/won't they project. The cylon's had a plan? 8/9 cylons in the fleet that Boomer could sense? The note from the end of the mini-series!
See, I was very passionate about the show, now, I hope it crashes and burns.
Preferences?
Where Trek will never boldly go...
I have no expectations that there will ever be any gay characters on any official Star Trek onscreen movie or television production.
Diversity is something that Roddenberry felt passionately about, but he's been dead for a long time and his successors have been almost religious in playing the most safe, white-washed version of diversity especially sexual diversity.
Same-sex attraction has either been shown as suggestive of moral indecency (as with the Mirror Universe) or else symptomatic of non-human gender-bending aliens (the Trill symbionts). I would even go so far as to suggest that the last few series have had a definite anti-gay undertone to them. It's not a coincidence that come conservative Trek fans have argued that the Federation found a "cure" for homosexuality and that it no longer exists, at least not in species like humans, in the future.
For this reason I've largely lost interest in the Trek franchise as I think it's devolved into message-free mass-market entertainment trading on an established fan base to deliver mediocre crap. If they were even a fraction as progressive as they like to pretend they are there wouldn't even be any question of having to talk to "the powers that be".
And who would these "powers" be anyway? Paramount has certainly had gay characters in other movies. It's also worth noting that Paramount is owned by Viacom, which among many others things is the owner of Logo itself!
To me this implies that someone lower down the food chain, closer to management of the Trek franchise rather than someone elsewhere in the Paramount hierarchy, is taking the anti-gay stance. This is either to maintain Trek as a "family-friendly" franchise or else because of specific anti-gay bias on the part of someone managing the franchise.
When the word 'franchise' is
When the word 'franchise' is involved, it comes down to money. Oh no! The conservatives won't see the movies, watch the tv shows, buy the DVDs and merchandise, or go to the Experience in Vegas (which is closing this year, btw). Let's see how the Dumbledore outing affects the 3 Harry Potter movies yet to be released, as well as Universal's Potter park.
And for you Trekkie/Trekkers/KirkSpockers looking for gay inclusively genre stuff, I recommend Disney's Gargoyles. It's got lots of Trek actors doing voices and is all around awesome. The show is in reruns on ToonDisney and 1 1/2 seasons have been put out on DVD. New stories are being told in an officially licensed comic book, including Lexington's discovery of his homosexuality.
Ah the irony of Trek
The original Star Trek series was actually quite controversial for the late 60's. Thinly-veiled criticism of the Cold War and of U.S. and Russian manipulation of "less advanced" countries. A mixed-racial crew, including a black female officer. A (slightly truncated) kiss between the white captain and said black female officer (albeit under durress). Really edgey for the late 60's.
But now Trek is the establishment. It's old, entrenched and perhaps even starting to become decrepit. The last couple of Trek series were weak in the ratings and the last few movies were not well-regarded (most people said they were just two hour TV episodes on the big screen).
When the BBC decided to revive Doctor Who they decided to go out on a limb, allowing Russell T. Davies to come in with his gay sensibility and make the new show more current than the old one had been. When Doctor Who really began to speed into decline with the Sixth and Seventh Doctors a lot of the problem was that they were trying to maintain it as a very kiddie sort of show as it had been in earlier decades. But the youth of the late 80's and early 90's weren't as interested in cutesy vanilla programming.
The revived series of the 21st Century put current era culture and humor right up in the front. I remember being taken aback in the first new episode when the Doctor grabs a tabloid, skims through it and remarks: "It'll never work. He's gay and she's an alien." To my memory that was the first time any explicitly referenced homosexuality in Doctor Who. Of course later that season we had the (rapturous) pleasure of the introduction of Captain Jack Harkness, who has unquestionably changed the view on bi/gay characters (and gay actors playing action hero roles) at least on the UK side of the pond.
In order to become contemporary Doctor Who threw away a lot of the old rules, not least of which was the sexless vanilla world of olde tyme TV. Star Trek has not been anywhere near so bold, as instead they maybe upgrade the steaminess a bit (Star Trek has always been steamier than Doctor Who, at least in a heterosexual sense). But realistically, other than maybe showing more making out, they haven't pushed any boundaries in a very long time.
Star Trek is very conservative, which is ironic given it's liberal origin. Whereas Roddenberry risked great controversy with some of his storylines (and indeed triggered quite a bit of it) the current regime is geared towards being as inoffensive as possible. They try to make only the most oblique references to real world politics to avoid alienating any viewers.
But they have definitely succeeded in alienating me. I find their willful exclusion of gays as a direct insult to their gay viewers. A statement that we are so unnacceptable that in this otherwise utopian future vision people like us cannot exist because we're too offensive. So I see no reason to show much loyalty towards their repetitive repackaging of the same product. In my opinion nothing really good has come out of this franchise since the 80's and I don't expect the upcoming re-imagined movie to be any more innovative either. Just another attempt to cash in on the brand name.
This was a great article to publish, mostly because it makes it clear that the folks at Trek have no real intention of doing anything for gay fans. They're just rehashing the same endlessly tired excuse that some distant "powers that be" still need to be convinced and may be "someday". But I'm not betting on it. Not dropping any money on Trek stuff either.
I know a writer who knew
Ironic given that Trek triggered the slash movement
By some accounts, the entire slash genre really begins with Kirk/Spock slash written back in the days when fans did all this stuff on printed hardcopy. Getting Shatner and Nimoy to kiss would be considerably more difficult than getting Shatner to kiss Nicoles however.
Roddenberry was one of the great old time liberal idealists who believed in a future that was better than the present that he lived in. Which is not to say that he didn't think that the future was perfect. The Federation is a thinly-veiled metaphor for the USA and in some of the original series episodes he makes it pretty clear that they're good guys but not perfect. But then, he was using the Federation (USA), the Klingons (USSR) and Romulons (China) to convey social messages about war and politics.
It's been widely reported that Roddenberry was pro-gay and we probably would have had gay characters in TNG had his health not gone downhill. Since then they've had plenty of opportunities but have always done their best to avoid the issue. Honestly I have no expectation of it in any movie or future TV series. They're just to conscious of keeping the franchise viable in Middle America as well as in foreign markets with less gay-friendly attitudes.
Slash is about the only place we'll really see gays in Star Trek.
Call me bitter, but I think
We're not where the Brits are yet
Russell T Davies pushed the envelope, successfully, and brought two bisexual characters (Jack and Ianto) onto mainstream sci-fi and made them a couple. He even took one of Whedon's alumni (Marsters) and made him bi too.
All-in-all quite a milestone. But I think that the Brits are better able to cope emotionally than Americans.
Star Trek is at the opposite end from Doctor Who/Torchwood, trying very hard to be as uncontroversial as possible, a far cry from it's idealistic origins. I don't think we can expect them to boldly go anywhere that might offend Middle America nowadays.
Ezri, and Leeta
were lesbians in the Mirror Universe. And they weren't "evil" like the Intendant Kira was. Granted, this is very, very little. But it's something. DS9 made more inroads than any other series. Also, there was an episode of DS9 where a female Ferengi dressed as a male in order to be treated as an equal in their society. She fell in love with Quark while he thought she was a man. He was uncomfortable, but just because it got in the way of their business relationship. Then, he found out she was a woman and freaked out and went to Jadzia Dax for advice. Jadzia said coyly with no derision or malice, "I think (the ferengi's name--can't remember it) likes you." And Quark responded with annoyance. "Yes, she does."
Jadzia (shocked): She's a woman?!
This confirms a) Homosexuality still exists in "our" universe. and b) not just in a lowly type of race like the Ferengi, but also in the Trills.
Again. It's very little. But at least something.
Jadzia, Jadzia, Jadzia!
Yet another example of why we love Jadzia Dax so much over at Angry Puppy! She's not shocked at all (and seems titillated) that a male Ferengi is in love with Quark.
We just re-watched the season 6 finale in which Jadzia is killed by that Pah-Wraith. The scene itself is a little anti-climactic, but I think Kodos and Marc shed a few silent tears...
theAngryPuppy.com