I'm pretty sure?, though I have a tendency to extrapolate and interpret, and link things together, so I can't say for certain. I think most of that was taken from snippets we were given in the show, though maybe some of it was retconned? I think most of it is on Memory Alpha, under Denobulan.
Sorry, I'm behind on my reading - do you want this moving to the Enterprise forum, or shall it stay here?
People wouldn't be so anxious to identify a character as being gay if there were a fair number of actual gay characters already being portrayed. Gay characters in sci fi are still extremely rare, especially gay males. Sci fi is a lot more comfortable with lesbians, although even then it's often done in an exploitive way. Since even the recent ST movies couldn't be bothered to have a gay character, there is still a lot of room for improvement. The novels have done much better.
I can think of several gay male characters in genre TV: Jack Harkness and Ianto Jones in Torchwood, Sam Adama (and his husband) in Caprica, Steve Jinks in Warehouse 13. (And Gaeta on Galactica, but only in webisodes.) And there have been a number of non-exploitative portrayals of lesbian characters, like Camille Wray and her partner on Stargate Universe, Toby Nance on Primeval: New World, Jenny and Vastra in Doctor Who (well, depending on what you consider exploitative), etc. And when you say "in sci-fi," I assume you mean film and television -- but that's a tiny, tiny fraction of the science fiction continuum, and generally much more restrained than literary SF. There have been plenty of explorations of alternative sexualities in prose SF/fantasy going back decades. For instance, Diane Duane's The Door Into... trilogy (aka The Tale of the Five) has a gay male couple as its lead characters. Although admittedly that might be part of the reason why it didn't sell well enough for her to get a publisher interested in the fourth book.
But I'm not really talking about him being closeted. As you say, that shouldn't even be a thing 200 years from now. What I'm talking about is a character discovering/realising a same-sex attraction where there hadn't been one before. In the huge spectrum of human(oid) sexuality, such changes do happen even if they are rare. Anyway, don't they say that comparatively few people are full Kinsey 6s or 0s, and most are somewhere in-between? Maybe Reed could be a 1-1 1/2, and he just meets the one guy who does it for him in a life previously full of women. That's certainly consistent with his characterisation. Someone could say to him "You never said anything," and he could reply, "You never asked." To be fair, we didn't learn enough about JJ-Sulu, -Chekov or -Scotty to say that they definitely aren't gay, just not that they definitely are. It's the old thing where for all we know the screen could be full of gay characters and we just never found out because they never had dialogue about romance or relationships. Yes, that's a cop-out, but I'm just devil's-advocating. What about Keenser, Olson, Cupcake? We just don't know. For those two Caitian girls to have a threesome with Kirk must mean a certain comfort level with same-sex activity. .
I did say rare, not nonexistent. Those are some good examples - but all those shows are over with now, except for Who, and it's unknown if or when Jenny and Vastra will return. There's improvement, but gay characters are still rare - yes, mostly in tv and movies. Books are always more progressive that way. Thanks for the info on The Door Into novels, I wasn't aware of them, but I will check them out! On the subject of the new movies, I am assuming that main characters still have the same sexual orientation they had in TOS. Of course, there are some characters whose orientations haven't been explored, but I don't see that as meaning anything. It's possible they could be explored and developed in the future, but I'm not considering unknown orientations as actually adding anything to the diversity. Gay fans deserve better than that as some kind of consolation prize in place of real diversity. If anyone would be bisexual in Enterprise and just not have shared it, it would be Malcolm, but despite his closed attitude towards sharing his favorite foods, he was pretty expressive in his interest in women, so that would only work if he took a different attitude in expressing his interest in men over how he expressed his interest in women. If he were leering over T'Pol but secretive over his interest in men - that doesn't really work.
Bah, Humans with tails do not a pair of Caitians make. I choose to believe that these women were members of a sub-culture that appreciates the Caitian form and has artificial tails implanted, or something. "We're Caitians! A Human can be a Caitian too!" (They want Kirk having sex with "exotic" alien women but they don't actually want the women to be exotic or alien. Now, I would have loved to see Kirk having a good time with a pair of actual, honest-to-God Caitians, the ones that are covered in fur. http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20051124061813/memoryalpha/en/images/7/7d/Caitian-brown.jpg)
If they weren't called Caitians in dialogue, it's not canonical that they were, no matter what the producers have said about their intentions.
I don't really consider Kirk having a threeway with two alien women to say much about LGBT characters. That was all about showing what a hetero stud Kirk is.
In terms of LGBT characters in Trek, i'm pretty sure in DRG3's latest effort, The Lost Era novel One Constant Star, states that Demora is bi. I don't remember the exact page, but i'm pretty sure i read that she was dating a person and that "they" were then dating another person. Sorry i forget the specifics...i just kept reading after i read that part. Thought it was cool. Just thought i'd mention it in the thread that is currently talking about the presence of LGBT characters in trek ..please correct me if I remember it wrong
You're not wrong. Demora, in the prologue, thinks about her slowly deepening relationship with another female, and their eventual three-way relationship with a "male" Andorian - noteworthy, in that an Andorian would consider there to be someone missing from that arrangement, rather than someone extra .
Oh that is interesting! I look forward to reading that! I love the Andorians and their complex and very alien sexuality.
I'd note that, so far as I can remember, no statement is made as to Demora's sexual orientation; it's not a case of "she's bisexual" as such, merely "she is capable of forming a sexual/intimate bond with at least one person who happens to be the same sex" - if this makes sense?
I think I understand completely. I don't really recall sexual orientations being referred to much at all in Trek lit when gay/bi or other alternative alien sexualities are present. People in Trek don't seem to be all that worked up over labels, except for the very awkward essay by Kirk in one of the movie novelizations where he addresses the Spock rumor - which as a kid was the first time I'd encountered the idea of same sex relationships treated with something like equality.
Really? Which novelization was that? I don't remember and I haven't read any of the TOS Movie era novelizations in awhile...
I don't remember which one it is, sorry. My best guess is ST2. The whole point of the essay was Kirk denying that he had a secret relationship with Spock, that he prefers women, but the denial is done in a mostly respectful way. The tone is that he's not gay, but there's nothing wrong with that, and that Vulcan's mating every seven years would be a bigger problem in a relationship than gender. Edit - From a quick look at reviews on Amazon, it sounds like the first movie novelization is the one I'm thinking of. I don't have any of the novelizations any more, so I can't check personally.
Maybe. I think that term shows up in some of the early novels, which often had lots of slashy subtext snuck in, some of it pretty blatant.
Wasn't there an episode where Phlox is discussing how close he is with all his wives, and then adds "and even some of the other husbands," causing whoever he was talking to (I think it was Archer, though it might have been Trip) to give him a strange look?