Star Trek and Homosexuality

[Relayer1]

T'Girl wrote:

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Camp means "deliberate ridiculous," with respect I don't think you're using the term correctly here.

That doesn't really work. Star Trek is a show, if gays were referred to, but just not seen, you could then make the statement you just did. The fact of the matter is there are simply no gays on Star Trek, in any form.
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'Camp' ? You could be right, but it seemed preferable to some of the alternatives - what would you suggest ?

I am still not convinced that failing to address alternative sexualities means that they do not exist or worse still, that they no longer exist.

[Bry_Sinclair]

T'Girl wrote:

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I have wondered if two isolated ships could through subspace communications tie in together, and allow two people to have a "rendez-vous" on the holodeck. Not a holo fantasy character, but a interactive encounter in real time with their actual lover.

I would think that by 2378 (when my Border Service fanfic is set) that that could be a very real possibility. What someone does on the holodecks in their own personal time is their business, and (thanks to "Up The Long Ladder") we know the ship cleans itself so the next user would be none the wiser.

I mean if holodecks were around now, they would predominantly be used for porn/sex wouldn't they?

[Nerys Myk]

Bry_Sinclair wrote:

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I would think that by 2378 (when my Border Service fanfic is set) that that could be a very real possibility. What someone does on the holodecks in their own personal time is their business, and (thanks to "Up The Long Ladder") we know the ship cleans itself so the next user would be none the wiser.

I mean if holodecks were around now, they would predominantly be used for porn/sex wouldn't they?

That and Star Trek fanfic.

[CaptainMatt]

I for one would have little or no problem with a gay character on Star Trek. It doesn't matter that much to me like it seems to do on here.

[Destructor]

Trek really, really dropped the ball on this one- obviously a gay character should be in any future series, but when they had a chance to really make a difference and be progressive and forward-thinking (when DS9 and VOY were airing, basically), they decided to sidestep the issue (with the exception of Rejoined and The Outcast, of course, which were both excellent). Even if they do have gay characters in future episodes of some hypothetical future series, they will be so far behind the curve it will be laughable.

That said, it is an extremely tricky issue to tackle and I can see why the predominantly white male writing team behind all of the shows were wary of introducing it, since it would be under immense scrutiny and any misstep could be horribly misconstrued.

A big part of Riker's character IS his heterosexuality. I think that is fine and we know people like that in reality. Most of my gay friends do seem gay. Some (a minority, certainly) of them are outrageously camp in a way that would seem totally OTT if you saw it on a TV show (as the Jack character was on Will & Grace), particularly a show like Trek where most characters are understated or, god forbid, actually quite bland. Most of them are not camp but are quite straightforward about their sexuality- you'd know they were gay after talking to them for 5 mins. I'm assuming that we're talking about this sort of representation on Trek (since 'campness' is so era-specific, it wouldn't really wash in the future [not to say that you can't have camp characters, like Lwaxana, in Trek]), where a character doesn't seem that different to the other characters, they are just sexually interested in same-gender characters. How would this be teletyped, on the show? The best thing you could do is play it directly, as they did in Rejoined, not make a big deal of it. But it would still have been a big deal to the audience, since it was this new thing, and everything would have been a statement. I think they can and should have done this- but it is somewhat understandable why they did not.

Anyway, in my head, Geordi, Garak and Harry Kim were all totes gay.

[The Wormhole]

jpch wrote:

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on ENT it was stated very publicly the first season that Malcom reed is gonna play the first homosexual male,also edited later on...

I don't remember any official word that Malcolm Reed was supposed to be gay. Fans certainly speculated that he was, and I think Dominic Keating even jokingly suggested it in a few interviews. But no official word that I can recall.

[Maurice]

Oh jeez. You know how you write a gay character on Star Trek? You write a straight character and merely flip the gender of whom they're attracted to. That. Is. It.

[T'Girl]

Relayer1 wrote:

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'Camp' ? You could be right, but it seemed preferable to some of the alternatives - what would you suggest ?

An accurate depiction of a real gay person.

I am still not convinced that failing to address alternative sexualities means that they do not exist or worse still, that they no longer exist.

If gays are a ostracized segment of the over all Federation society it's unlikely we would be seeing them in Starfleet, certainly not openly. That last being a variation of the "they're there, we just don't see them."

[Nightdiamond]

l don't know if Trek will really ever show or address the concept.

Trek seems to have a certain reservation with showing direct homosexuality.

You can find some surprising hidden messages in some episodes.

Like the TNG one where Beverly finds out that her Trill lover's new host body is a female.

Before she smiled when Worf told her the host had arrived. Then she frowned when she saw it was female.

She obviously wasn't into women, which was her right-too bad Trek never explored differences in preferences in the 24th century to explain her reaction.

[Seven's Alcove]

I remember two stories of Whoopi Goldberg having, or at least trying to have, an impact on the presence of gays on Star Trek.

The first was during a scene in Ten Forward she asked two male extras to hold hands at a table, just as something to be seen in the background if you were looking for it. Unfortunately, someone higher up freaked out and had them not do it.

The second was in a scene where I believe Data is asking Guinan about love or mating or something along those lines. Whoopi's line was, "When a man and a woman fall in love" but she changed the line to, "When two people fall in love".

It really is amazing that there wasn't a single gay character in 25 seasons of modern Trek. Not one. For such a forward thinking franchise it's a shame they were afraid to go somewhere that other shows had already gone to, safely, at the time.

[Takeru]

J. Allen wrote:

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To be fair, portraying a gay person on screen, and doing them justice, is rather difficult.

It's not difficult at all, all you have to do is take a script, pick a random guest star who mentions his wife and replace the word "wife" with "husband".
Don't try to make a "gay episode" and doing them justice or you end up with David Gerrold's Blood and Fire which was written for TNG and filmed for the TOS fan series. The gay part of Blood and Fire was almost offensively bad, they have a gay couple and one of them kills himself because of Space AIDS.

I'm sure the episode was rejected for TNG not because of the gay couple (if that was a problem they could have made them a straight couple) but because it was stupid.
The couple served no purpose other than showing the audience that gay people have feelings too "See, they're kissing and are happy, now one of them is dead and the other one is really devastated and angry but in the end he gets better!". Well, thank you David Gerrold, you totally showed the audience that gay couples are regular people, who would have thought?! Too bad you didn't treat them like regular people but made them the centerpiece of your AIDS allegory and death drama instead.

Seven's Alcove wrote:

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It really is amazing that there wasn't a single gay character in 25 seasons of modern Trek. Not one. For such a forward thinking franchise it's a shame they were afraid to go somewhere that other shows had already gone to, safely, at the time.

Star Trek was never a forward thinking franchise. There was a lot of talk within the show how awesome and liberal they are, but as a real world franchise it was always really conservative.

[Destructor]

T'Girl wrote:

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If gays are a ostracized segment of the over all Federation society it's unlikely we would be seeing them in Starfleet, certainly not openly. That last being a variation of the "they're there, we just don't see them."

This idea seems thoroughly incompatible with the idea of the Federation as presented to us.

[TrekTot]

I am way new and was browsing the forums BUT this topic really hit me. It was a couple of days ago that I watched DS9 Rejoined in which Dax reunites with her previous wife Lenara. The politics surrounding the forbidden love in this ep are reminiscent of perhaps a deliberate attempt to address this issue. However, I would not know but the content of this specific show addresses policies in culture and visually gives the audience a same sex couple. In any case, I could be reading too far into the matter but it is something that I had always wondered too AND hopefully it will be addressed in the future!

thanks for letting me chime in!

[Destructor]

I think Trek has always worked well with analogy (so they didn't portray racism against blacks in TOS, they portrayed two races that were half-white and half-black on opposite sides to illustrate the stupidity of racism), and that is what they did (successfully, to my mind) with 'The Host' and 'Rejoined'. They couldn't address the issue directly, so they used metaphor.

But the problem is that you see black men in Star Trek being treated exactly the same as their white colleagues- there is demonstrable, on the ground evidence that in the 24th century, race simply isn't an issue. It doesn't need to be put into metaphor because it's right there in front of you. I think gay characters need this sort of exposure in Trek- they don't need episodes about how they are gay, they just need to be gay and for everyone to be okay with it.

[Destructor]

Bakula should have been the first gay Captain, now that I think about it.