Do you think LGBT characters will feature more prominently?

[Guy Gardener]

That was almost one of my Tuvix solutions.

Add Kes to the mix.

Ketuvix.

Janeway was going to let Tuvix exist, until Kes insisted that she had a love for the hedgehog that defied limits, and that it made her very-very sad to live in a world without her boyfriend.

(She broke up with him less than 20 episodes later.)

 

[borgboy]

I wonder if in Star Trek's future if there is a sexist schism, bordering on segregation, inside the gay community between natural gays and straight guys who were blasted with odd radiation from random alien tech until they didn't like girls any more?

Is this a reference to something I'm not getting?

 

[Kemaiku]

I'm pretty sure we lost the code manual for Guy's posts at some point.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Is this a reference to something I'm not getting?

Pink Kryptonite?

Almost every other characteristic of being human in Star Trek was adjusted by weird tech or a radiation accident, so if gay stuff wasn't banned, then gay characters might have been toggled straight and straight characters might have been toggled gay by maybe a weird space cloud or a viruses or...

90 percent of the stuff Kirk faced off against should have made him sterile and impotent, so how unlikely is it that at some point that he might have ate a space mushroom that made him want to caress Spock's bare chest?

 

[Kemaiku]

You know Star Trek is literally where Slashfic came from?

There's probably about 500 stories using that premise by now.

 

[borgboy]

Pink Kryptonite?

Almost every other characteristic of being human in Star Trek was adjusted by weird tech or a radiation accident, so if gay stuff wasn't banned, then gay characters might have been toggled straight and straight characters might have been toggled gay by maybe a weird space cloud or a viruses or...

90 percent of the stuff Kirk faced off against should have made him sterile and impotent, so how unlikely is it that at some point that he might have ate a space mushroom that made him want to caress Spock's bare chest?

I don't know if Star Trek will ever be ready for gay mushrooms when they couldn't even manage to definitively establish Sulu as having a husband on screen after having a huge media event talking about it.
I'd really rather Trek not show sexual orientation as something that could change when it's taken them half a decade and they're still not to the point yet where soap operas had gotten with LGBT diversity by the early 90s. That children's shows have done a better job with LGBT characters is kind of sad. Trek trying to handle a spore that turns the crew gay for one episode isn't something they'd have a chance in hell of doing with any degree of success.

 

[Kemaiku]

They have scripts done for several episodes, so they have it thought out and written already, it's just a matter of waiting and seeing what that amounts to. 13 episodes isn't much time to go a lot of detail, so character interactions will all have to be short and meaningful, that'll help.

(And two things, just nipping in here since I was feeling guilty just hitting 'like' so many times and not contributing. And it might be helpful to say LGBTQ since I'm in the Q catagory).

 

[Guy Gardener]

It's like rounding off Pi to howeversomany decimal places you can remember, even though LGBTTQQIAAP shouldn't be that hard to memorize.

 

[Kemaiku]

LGBTQIA at last check. But it breaks down into neat groups:

LGB/P (Sexuality)
TQI (Gender)
A (Asexual/Agender)

Or something like that.

 

[borgboy]

The alphabet soup thing is just unweildy, and it keeps changing. I consider myself to be PC, and I think for the most part, at it's best, PC is just politeness. I kind of like queer because it's so all encompassing, but not everybody is comfortable with that.
I've been openly gay for over twenty years and I've never seen it done as LGBTQIA. I've seen variations that used two Qs -one for queer, one for questioning. Including the I and A are relatively new.
I usually go with either gay (I'm so old that in my day gay pretty much meant everybody that wasn't standard heterosexual) or LGBT and my intention is that's meant to include everyone that wants to be included.

 

[Amaris]

I go with LGBTQIA+, personally. Honestly, there's no correct or incorrect way to do it, I think. Human sexuality and gender is so damned fluid, we could probably fill an alphabet's worth of letters into the acronym and not even cover everything. As long as the effort isn't to exclude (Transgender folks get a lot of shit from the community, and they shouldn't), then the basic acronym works fine. In my opinion, of course.

 

[borgboy]

I definitely include the T, always. I'm a big believer in a unified LGBT community, and am ashamed and appalled at the gays that don't want the T community to be included. We're stronger together has always been my philosophy.
And yes, Coloratura, the letters kind of keep coming and going. I'm not even sure all asexuals want to be included, and then there's aromantic people, and agender people, pan (and I've never been convinced that pan is really not just a fancy new way of saying bisexual), etc. All are welcome, but I can't promise I'll always know which letters to add to the LGBT - there is no firm consensus - and I can almost guarantee as soon as I adapt it'll change again.

 

[Amaris]

I definitely include the T, always. I'm a big believer in a unified LGBT community, and am ashamed and appalled at the gays that don't want the T community to be included. We're stronger together has always been my philosophy.
And yes, Coloratura, the letters kind of keep coming and going. I'm not even sure all asexuals want to be included, and then there's aromantic people, and agender people, pan (and I've never been convinced that pan is really not just a fancy new way of saying bisexual), etc. All are welcome, but I can't promise I'll always know which letters to add to the LGBT - there is no firm consensus - and I can almost guarantee as soon as I adapt it'll change again.

I consider myself pansexual, though I don't mind if people refer to me as bisexual. I'm primarily attracted to intelligence, kindness, compassion, and humor, anyway. The physical body in which I find those traits isn't as important as those qualities.

 

[borgboy]

I've seen people try to differentiate between pan and bi by saying that pan people can fall in love with all genders, agender people, trans people, etc while bi people only are into binary male or female, but I don't accept that definition as being true.
Really, can't anyone fall in love with a trans person? There are straight identified people in relationships with trans people. Same with gay people with a trans partner. If gays and straights can be with a trans person, then so could a bi person.
I like intelligence and all that, but there does need to be a body I like attached to all that that I like if I'm going to be more than friends.

 

[Amaris]

I've seen people try to differentiate between pan and bi by saying that pan people can fall in love with all genders, agender people, trans people, etc while bi people only are into binary male or female, but I don't accept that definition as being true.
Really, can't anyone fall in love with a trans person? There are straight identified people in relationships with trans people. Same with gay people with a trans partner. If gays and straights can be with a trans person, then so could a bi person.
I like intelligence and all that, but there does need to be a body I like attached to all that that I like if I'm going to be more than friends.

At 36 years old and being lonely all of my adult life (my last date was in 2001 and none have been romantic in nature), some things get stripped away over time. Loneliness is heart rending, soul crushing, and it doesn't do any favors for your body, either.

 

[Tenacity]

If there was a man shortage.

Scarcity.

Post-scarcity.

 

[Awesome Possum]

I've seen people try to differentiate between pan and bi by saying that pan people can fall in love with all genders, agender people, trans people, etc while bi people only are into binary male or female, but I don't accept that definition as being true.
Really, can't anyone fall in love with a trans person? There are straight identified people in relationships with trans people. Same with gay people with a trans partner. If gays and straights can be with a trans person, then so could a bi person.
I like intelligence and all that, but there does need to be a body I like attached to all that that I like if I'm going to be more than friends.

It might be a generation thing where older people consider themselves bi and younger people consider themselves pan. But as far as I'm concerned just think of trans men as men and trans women as women. Then apply sexuality from there depending on who they are attracted to. So there can be straight, gay or bi/pan trans people

 

[Guy Gardener]

Wouldn't it be hilarious if you were both exactly the same age?

 

[borgboy]

Wouldn't it be hilarious if you were both exactly the same age?

She's right though. I've heard that pan/bi is a generational thing, when despite the name difference, they're essentially the same thing.

 

[Amaris]

She's right though. I've heard that pan/bi is a generational thing, when despite the name difference, they're essentially the same thing.

I think it's a learning experience for each generation. We each define ourselves in different ways. It's why I don't mind using either term (though I prefer pansexual when describing myself).