No female starship captains in the 2250s-60s?

I don't think that segment has much clout anymore. I haven't noticed any major uproar over Lost Girl or Orphan Black, for instance. I'm sure there are some who are offended by them, but they don't seem to be a major voice as they once would've been. They're clearly on the wrong side of history, and like I said, the generation coming to maturity now is largely more accepting of diversity. And that's the generation that studios and advertisers will want to appeal to.

So Star Trek may not currently be breaking boundaries, but other shows are. And that'll make it easier for Trek when it finally comes back to television.

 

I do think there's a lot of truth in that, that society as a whole, not just in media, will continue to shift more towards fairness and equality.

I do think that there will be less upset over "hot lesbians" like you're getting with Lost Girl, but Torchwood was pretty popular too.

I like the optimism that Trek is coming back to television, I hope that happens someday. It's pretty sad how long it's been off tv for, when there was at least one Trek show, often two on at the same time ever since I was a teenager up until after ENT died an early death. I am optimistic that if a new Trek show comes on there will be a gay character. Even if the movies do a gay character, which they should, it's doubtful there will be time to do much with them, not and still have time for Spock and Uhura, and for Kirk to have a love interest and have random threeways. I'd like to be surprised and be proven wrong though.

 

Factually speaking it's not the first interracial kiss on television or even on Star Trek. It's the first black/white kiss on American television. Shatner kissed Asian France Nuyen earlier in 3rd season in "Elaan Of Troyius." And Cuban Demi Arnez kissed his wife Lucille Ball on their show I Love Lucy years before.

 

^"Elaan" was filmed first, but "Plato's Stepchildren" aired first.

 

All true, but it doesn't chance the importance of the kiss with Kirk and Uhura. That's the one that got the media attention, and whether it makes sense of not, it's the black and white interracial that grabbed people's attention.

To be honest, I never gave France Nuyen's race any thought. I just saw her as an exotic looking woman without even considering the interracial element.

 

^^ And that's likely how a lot of people saw it.

 

I guess the difference is that adding a gay character to an existing show will upset the homophobes already watching it, versus creating a new show with a gay character, which they will have no interest in.

 

I think TPTB think Americans are all delicate and will faint away.
This reminds me of some letter they mentioned in "Making of Star Trek" (I think) where this guy wrote to complain about the Kirk/Uhura kiss. I'm summing it up from memory "You know I don't believe in the mixing of the races but if you've got a beautiful girl in your arms you should kiss her properly."

People get over these things if they're done properly. Like I think they do the bisexual/homosexual thing well in Torchwood. Probably the stuff in 'Lost Girl' and the fan-made Star Trek movie might be too explicit for the general public. Who knows though?

Though, if they had made one of the twins Kirk bedded a boy then that's probably all we'd be talking about and not the rest of the movie

 

It's all in execution. Star Trek has never been about showing explicit sex. But you can get the point across without being gratuitously graphic.

 

You must be thinking of another book. The Making of Star Trek was published during the 1968 hiatus, before season three was broadcast.

 

Perhaps he's thinking of Inside Star Trek (the Solow/Justman book) ... I feel hazy on it, but I think there's a reference to a letter sent in by some fan from the South who overcame in some part his own racism after seeing the kiss.

 

No. I, too, recall that letter being mentioned from way, way back. Could it have been David Gerrold's book The World Of Star Trek?

 

I think it's in Shatner's Star Trek Memories.

 

I'm pretty sure I read it in the '70s.

 

Ok, I scoured through the Solow/Justman book tonight but couldn't find any mention of the quote I was thinking of, so I took the interwebz and I found the comment I was thinking of, which Wikipedia is attributing it to Nichelle Nichols' autobiography, Nichelle Nichols, Beyond Uhura: Star Trek and Other Memories pp. 196-197:

I don't know if this is what the rest of you were thinking about, but this is exactly the quote I was remembering.

 

No, I read Nichelle Nichols' book and I definitely recall that letter from much earlier.

 

Even so, at least we now have one source it can be attributed to.

 

I feel embarressed causing all this debate but it must be a decades old book, maybe Gerrold's book but I haven't read Nicholls book or Solows.

I did read those Best of Trek books a long time ago too.

I think there was also a story in it about de Forest Kelley where a fan sent him a joint and said that she wanted to turn him on like he turned her on.

Funny the things you remember.
Its sad that I don't have those books now

 

Oooo, the Best Of Trek books, I wonder if I could have read it there.

 

Last night and this morning, I gave some thought to the Janice Lester question.

Memory Alpha article aside, I don't recall any canonical reference to Lester actually serving in Starfleet. Can anybody else cite anything?

In the absence of any evidence, I propose this backstory:

Kirk, Lester, and Coleman all met as Academy cadets. They may or may not have had some shipboard service together, but Kirk and Lester had a brief romance, with Kirk concluding that Lester was mentally unbalanced, and most likely sociopathic. When the time came for the "psych test," Lester failed miserably, and was excluded from entering the Command track. She convinced herself that she was being singled out because of her gender, challenged the ruling -- the first sexual discrimination suit brought against Starfleet since pre-Federation days -- and lost, badly. She briefly investigated gender reassignment surgery, but even in the 23rd century, it involved a lengthy preparatory/screening process, and the permanent loss of the ability to produce offspring, and between that and the general consensus among her doctors that it would do more harm than good to her chances of getting into the Command track at the Academy, she gave up, left the Academy, and pursued a Ph.D. in xenoarchaeology at U.C. Berkeley. But she never gave up her delusion that it was her gender, rather than her sociopathic and emotionally disturbed nature, that had kept her out of the Command track at the Academy.

Coleman was smitten with an unconditional and utterly jealousy-free (but entirely unrequited) love for Lester, and after bouncing around among minor Starfleet postings, culminating in his being dismissed from a CMO posting for incompetence, leaves Starfleet, finds that his reputation has done him little good in civilian medicine, and signs on to Lester's expedition to the planet that was the subject of her doctoral dissertation, Camus II.

Several years into the expedition, Lester makes a discovery: while the ancient civilization there had never managed to discover a FTL stardrive, they did manage to discover a way to exchange minds between bodies. No doubt the discoverer of the underlying principle feverishly developed a practical version as a way to save the life of a beloved, but terminally ill, spouse, and at first, the technology was only used to save the terminally ill by transposing their consciousness into the bodies of condemned criminals, but almost certainly at some point, the Camus II rulers used the technology as a means of achieving immortality, leading to tyranny that almost certainly doomed their civilization.

Lester, after using members of her expedition as unwilling guinea pigs in her experiments with the device, deliberately exposes them to celebium radiation, first to test whether the death of one member of a transposed pair would make the transposition permanent, and then to silence them. By the time Kirk arrives, she and Coleman are the only ones not either dead or dying of radiation poisoning. And the rest is canon.

"You cannot write in science fiction (...) without realizing that sexual equality is as basic as any other kind of equality. This does not mean that in future pictures I will ever stop using women as sex objects, as I will not, but to be fair we have always used and will be continuing to use males as sex objects, too. As a matter of fact, when I was younger and much more agile I've been used as a sex object myself; I think it's great fun."
- Gene Roddenberry