Mary Sue site's article on DS9 and Queerness
- Thread starter Charles Phipps
- Start date
There is a long list of cowards from 90s television, and Star Trek's reputation for diversity isn't untarnished.
I think homophobia is mostly a generational thing. Older people grew up in more conservative environments, progress in terms of majorities supporting equality is only happening in recent years. The homophobes I know are old, conservative men. The progressive ones I know are <40, and tend to me more progressive the younger they are.
Just for the record, I'm a white male over 40 and I'm a progressive.
I've always hated the word "homophobia", it's not an irrational fear of same sex relations its hatred and bigotry.
Still cowardice. "Well, I THINK I MIGHT have been denied, so I never bothered to ask."
If it was anyone's priority, we would have heard about it again and again. "We tried, honestly!"
But everyone took the safe, weak-ass path of least resistance.
That kind of passive bullshit is what impedes progress. If everyone thought that way, we'd be nowhere.
That's more a fear of admitting what they really are and a hatred of us who accept that part of how we were born.
It has the benefit of reminding bigots they're cowards.
I'm sure you feel nice and superior branding people cowards and homophobes for their actions over 30 years ago in a vastly different cultural landscape, but you're looking at this with modern eyes, and that in itself is a form of privilege. Something else that impedes progress is the idea that progress is easy, which is why I objected to this article in the first place. Again, DS9 did a whole episode about this.
Gay people existed in the 90s. Everyone knew it. They weren't mysterious and unknown. There was no excuse for not including them in media except craven cowardice.
A few shows took tentative, halting steps towards correcting this. It wasn't often very much, but at least some people tried.
The country came around relatively quickly on widespread acceptance of gays and gay rights and it was largely due to being normalized via pop culture. Star Trek COULD have been at the vanguard of that movement, but they took the coward's way out.
Yes, it's very easy to sit here and judge. Guess what, they were also being judged at the time for not moving the conversation forward. Their failure in this regard isn't something that just now occurred to everyone.
It's privilege to say, "oh, well, we don't need to help increase visibility and acceptance of a marginalized group because, gee, what if we ruffle feathers." That's the most grotesque form of privilege there is.
"It was a different time," is never an excuse. Even back then, some people were at least trying, even if only a little. And people were crying out for representation, but Star Trek, once a leader in pop culture in representing marginalized groups, decided to sit this one out.
At least Ira Behr acknowledges his failures in this regard. And yet you can't even get that far.
Except there was. Yes, gay people existed in the 90s and there was an effort to better represent them in the media, but things hadnt changed enough for that to start happening. All I'm saying is that it's easy to point at the people who created that media as the problem, but they had to answer to the networks, and the networks had to answer to the businesses they advertised for and the people who watched television. You can say it's 'craven cowardice', but then at the same time anyone who worked on TV would have known the lay of the land.
So, 'it was a different time' is a good excuse. If you don't acknowledge that it was and that people had different constraints on them you trivialize all the work it took to get where we are today.
Also:
I'm not so sure about that.
I'm watching Downton Abbey. There's one gay character. However, the show writers seem to have gone out of their way to make him unpleasant. Mean to the other servants, trying to sabatoge other servants if he sees a chance of getting ahead, in WW got himself shot in the hand in order to get sent home, stole from the family who employed him, I could go on. Really too bad the one semi-out gay character was so unsympathetic. And Downton Abbey was made from 2010 to 2015.
@kkt, If I remember correctly, Barrow will
eventually be redeemed, becoming the household's butler after going through a number of setbacks.
I think that the story we are talking about is less problematic in the 2010s than it would be in the 1990s. Unlike the case that you bring up, Garak's homosexuality would problematize his larger moral challenges, his constant lying, his willingness to switch sides, etc. Moreover, would we want him to be the lover of any main character, male or female, when he might betray her/him at the drop of a hat?
Something that came up in Alone Together, the fanscript read by Siddig and Robinson, that I think drives home this point:
Garrak reveals that he had a one night stand with Dukat. That is exactly the kind of poor judgement I would expect from Garrak.
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