Credit Where Credit is Due: Ron Moore Finally Delivers the (Gay) Goods.

When I interviewed Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore back in October of 2008 about the lack of gay visibility in science fiction programming, Moore was pretty frank with me, saying:

We’ve just failed at it. It’s not been something we’ve successfully done. At Star Trek we used to have all these stock answers for why we didn’t do it. The truth is it was not really a priority for any of us on the staff so it wasn’t really something that was strong on anybody’s radar.

Asked how that failure now made him feel, Moore said: 

It makes me guilty. I always feel guilty when these questions come up because it’s something that I don’t do and I haven’t done enough of and I hope I do do, but I haven’t really done it.

Moore also told me work on Caprica was just getting underway and that " ... we are talking about it as an active thing, like okay, how can we work in gay, lesbian and bisexual storylines into this and that – it’s just not there yet, but it is part of the discussion."

I can't tell you how many times I've heard that from writers and showrunners. That's second only to "We're certainly open to the idea."

Let's just say I wasn't exactly holding my breath at the time.

I was reminded of all of this when I recently interviewed Jane Espenson, executive producer on Moore's new series Caprica. When I asked Espenson how the show came to include a gay character, she told me Moore told the writers, '"Let's put Clarice in this group marriage," and he also just said, "Oh, and by the way, Sam's gay."'

And that makes Moore a very rare creature — a straight man working in science fiction who actually came through on what he said and created an interesting and compelling gay character. Even better, Sam Adama (pictured right) isn't mostly a background character who fits into a nice safe little box of what Moore thinks might be palatable for Caprica's straight male viewers — or for gay viewers. He's created an interesting, complex character with which he takes some chances. 

Moore actually came close to breaking this barrier last year with his pilot for Virtuality that included not one, but two gay characters and who were married to each other. That's something we never saw on Star Trek.

Alas, Virtuality died a quiet death after the two hour pilot aired on Fox and was never heard from again, meaning gay fans of genre television still had to wait to see some actual gay male visibility on American television. But that wait is now over and for those of us long peeved at Moore for Battlestar Galactica's lack of gay inclusion, we can now sit back and say, "Thanks, Ron, for finally taking us where no other show dared to go before."