David Gerrold on TNG and the Behind-the-Scenes Drama

What I've always heard is that they'd be seen briefly holding hands and someone would ask how long they'd been together, and that was about it. Just a casual bit of business.

 

Berman did talk a little about his decisions on the topic in this startrek.com q&a from 2011 (http://www.startrek.com/article/rick-berman-answers-your-questions-part-2):

 

^Which is not a very satisfying response. The problem is that he was treating gay people as an "issue" rather than simply as human beings who had as much right to be part of the universe as anyone else. What Berman never figured out, or maybe wasn't motivated to understand, is that the way to deal with it is not to make it an issue at all, but just to treat it as natural and normative. Write romance and attraction and relationship beats the exact same way you always would, except occasionally have them be between people of the same sex. It really is as simple as that, except in the minds of people who see GLBT people as some exotic phenomenon rather than just part of everyday life.

 

I'm perhaps off-topic, but it's still from the interview. I'm a little sceptical about that.

I had it happen to me several times where I would talk to Gene and explain that I thought “Data” was a bad name for the android and Gene would say “you are probably right, come up with another name.” And we would come up with another name and the next thing – later that afternoon – Gene would say “no, I’ve talked it over with my lawyer, we will keep the name Data.” Another time I would say we should do so and so and he would agree and then later in the day Gene would say “I’ve talked to the lawyer and we have to do it this way instead.” And I was “why does a starship need a lawyer, Gene?!” That was the control that the lawyer had. Gene was terrified that the studio would try and take the show away from him, so we ended up with this bizarre circumstance that Gene was so afraid of losing his show that he gave control away to his lawyer and he didn’t trust me or Dorothy Fontana after.

It's not about the story itself, but the way Gerrold talks about it. I suppose Roddenberry was indeed depending on his lawyer, but I doubt this was because he confused legal and creative issues. Is there someone who know this part of the story and can explain it more precisely?

 

Didn't even Rick Berman recently tweet something about Roddenberry's lawyer?

 

Here is a tweet from Rick Berman from 5 Apr 2013.

Sounds like corrobaration to me.

 

...I don't actually know. I think I was a victim of too-many-tabs-openitis.

 

Carlos Pedraza told me he'd adapted "Blood and Fire" into a single episode, and then Gerrold took it back and turned it into a two-parter, so its overlong duration isn't Carlos' fault.

I would be surprised if Gene's lawyer hadn't warned him not to let other writers name his characters, etc. "Created by" carries a lot of weight and financial benefits and any competent entertainment lawyer's going to caution against taking too many ideas from other people lest they try to claim co-creator status (which seems to have happened anyway).

Back to "Blood and Fire" I think Gerrold got his messages mixed up. Given all the stigma tied to AIDS at that time, an AIDS allegory was arguably not the place to first introduce gay characters. Deadly disease + message about blood donation = good. Using it as vehicle for first gay characters on show = tricky. It's too on the nose, especially if one of said gay characters was going to perish in dealing with it.

 

1991 Piller wrote a memo to the writer staff: "We want a story about gays." I have a photo copy here in the memo binder from the TNG production that Rick Sternbach sells on eBay. I am pretty sure Berman was behind it if Piller writes such a memo to the team.

 

I read the TNG "Blood And Fire" script in the early 1990s. It really would have been one of the two or three best shows of the first season - assuming all the others were as we saw. Since this would have been an early episode, though, I expect that it would have influenced the characterizations of the regulars to such an extent that TNG would have been a different - possibly better - series.

It's very TOS-ish, as you'd expect. Picard's dealing with protests/rebellions aboard his ship at his potential decision to bring people carrying the "bloodworm" infection back to the Enterprise for treatment, and he has the line "I refuse to sacrifice half the human race to save the other half," which I quite liked.

Wesley has a somewhat sullen, adolescent resentment of Picard; he pretty much accuses Picard of paying attention to him only to get to Beverly. "Is that what you think," Picard says, "That people are only nice in order to get something?"

Wes responds "Not people. You." Good for the kid; wish he'd been in the series.

The episode also touches on Gerrold's long-time encouragement of blood donors.

There was a good deal less emphasis on the gay couple than in the "Phase II" version, understandably so as they were fairly minor supporting characters in the TNG episode and Bobby Rice's character was treated as fairly important in the "Phase II" episodes he appeared in.

 

It's also been almost 30 years. Of course a modern interpretation is going to have modern sensibilities.

 

Can anyone comment on the role of LGBT characters in Gerrold's novels? I'm in the middle of a massive Trek marathon read, but I am interested in reading Gerrold's novels eventually, but the inclusion of LGBT characters will increase my interest.
It's interesting that the whole AIDS paranoia about blood donors still persists today, as gay men are banned in the US and other countries from donating blood. That's the sort of thing that can be a slap in the face. I'm a pretty civic minded person and would donate if I were legally allowed to. Every time I see a sign promoting blood donation it reminds me that I'm a second class citizen.

 

It makes sense.

 

Here's my question, though. And it's an honest question, not a backhanded way to say "let's not show them gay people on screen!"

According to the statistics I've seen, it's estimated that around 3.5% of the US population is LGBT. That's a significant number -- around 8 million, I think -- but still an extremely small percentage of the overall whole.

Now, in the context of Star Trek, what we see on a week-to-week basis are the adventures of one ship's (or station's) crew, which is such a small sampling of the human population at large as to be statistical noise. On top of which, even if there are claimed to be over 1,000 people on a ship, we interact on a regular basis with less than 20 of them.

My point being... aren't the odds that most, if not all, of the people we run into during the show are going to be straight, just on a statistical basis? Simply because we haven't seen an openly gay crewmember amongst the command crew of the few ships we've seen, is that any indication of their prevalence in the Trek universe? Or necessarily even of the producers' attitudes toward the LGBT community?

 

David Gerrold is a bit hit-or-miss for me, but does have interesting concepts.

His "The Man Who Folded Himself" I think has a man who goes through time and has relationships with various male and female versions of himself. And, while I haven't read it, I believe the protagonist of "The Martian Child" is gay....something that was changed for the feature adaptation.

 

To me, over the top shoehorning like that is what makes a lot of fan films so off-putting.

That sounds great

 

Even at 3.5%, odds are we should have run into one or more LGBT humans in speaking roles in TNG or DS9.

 

3.5 sounds low to me, I've usually heard the numbers are 5 to 10%. Even at 3.5% there should've been a gay character eventually in the franchise.

 

Here's the problem with arguing based on statistics:

Statistically, less than one human being in five is white. About one in three human beings is Asian. There are nearly as many black people in the world as white people, and since birth rates are high in Africa, the ratio is probably shifting in favor of black people.

Now, tell me: Given this information, does the cast of the Star Trek franchise, in any way, shape, or form, constitute a statistically representative sample of the human race?

Even if it were, your own statistical argument doesn't work, because there have been over 40 main characters in the various Trek series, so even if the figure you gave were correct, that would mean that we could expect 1 to 2 of the lead characters to be gay or lesbian if the cast were a representative sampling. And I think your figure is lowballing it, because of course sexual orientation is a continuum, and there are plenty of people who fall in between. Wikipedia says 3.8 of Americans identified as LGBT on a survey, but a higher percentage acknowledged same-sex experience or attraction without choosing to identify as part of that community. And of course many might feel unwilling to identify as LGBT because of social stigmas from their families or communities, so the reported figure is probably lower than the actual figure. The article suggests that 5 percent is a more reasonable figure, and I'd say the percentage of people with occasional same-sex curiosity or experience is probably significantly higher. I've read about a survey of college students revealing that 60% of the women surveyed said they were attracted to other women and about one in five of the men said they'd kissed or fantasized about other men -- though that's just college students, who are likely prone to be more open-minded and willing to experiment than the populace as a whole.

But then, wouldn't the same be true of Starfleet officers?

 

Well, I've read that is the reason Tom Paris is not Locarno, the writer of that episode would have to be paid a royalty for every episode of Voyager he is in.