LGBT Characters in Trek (Help and no flames Please)

But that's just my point -- you don't have to belong to a group to desire to see it represented more. You just have to have a positive attitude toward that which is different.

I read a while back about a study suggesting that some people's brains are wired to react more positively to novelty and difference, while others are wired to react to it with more wariness and discomfort. So some people are predisposed to favor their own group, and so they assume that others think that way too, and that if someone is promoting the rights or inclusion of group X, then either they must belong to group X, or they feel reluctantly compelled to include them in service of "political correctness." What they're missing is that there are a lot of people whose affinities aren't limited to that which is similar to themselves -- people who relish and embrace diversity, people who like meeting and interacting with people who are different from themselves.

Star Trek is a series that was created by and for the latter category of people. It's about actively seeking out the new and different, embracing and understanding people who are unlike yourself. So naturally it tends to attract authors who think the same way. I don't think, therefore, that it makes sense to expect Trek novelists to be interested only in promoting the groups they themselves belong to.

I mean, look at Keith DeCandido, Dave Mack, and myself -- three white males born within a year or two of each other. Yet in the course of writing our respective post-Nemesis TNG novels, working independently, we populated the Enterprise command crew with Miranda Kadohata, Jasminder Choudhury, Dina Elfiki, T'Ryssa Chen, and Joanna Faur. Almost all the new core characters we three white men introduced were women, almost all of those nonwhite. (Although I'm not sure if Faur has ever been given a specific visual description, so she may not be Caucasian either.)

I'm sorry, I don't see how that follows. Plenty of heterosexuals are sexually active; the notion that there's some specific correlation between being gay and being promiscuous is just a stereotype, an attempt by people who perceive both homosexuality and promiscuity as immoral to lump them together.

That's very, very strange to me. Why would you expect anyone to disapprove of someone being sexually active? This is the 21st century and we're writing about the 24th. The Victorian Era is back the other way. And did you ever see anyone disapprove of Kirk or Riker being sexually promiscuous? Frankly I'm hearing a double standard here.

Says who???? I've never heard anything like that before.

Here's why this is so laughable to me. Do you know why I portray T'Ryssa and other female characters in my work as sexually active? Because I like to imagine hot women getting naked and having sex. If I were gay, don't you think I'd be focusing on promiscuous male characters instead?

Then why even bring it up?

 

I'm going to contest that. I have no numbers to prove my case, but it's my observation that it is very often heterosexuals who feel compelled to make use of their position of greater societal acceptance to champion the cause of the homosexual minority and that accordingly, the inclusion of badly-written, superficial homosexual characters as a form of activism is more likely to come from a heterosexual. An actual homosexual is more likely to write a more nuanced character that isn't defined by his or her sexuality.

Sorry, but that sounds like a sterotype I can't match up with my own experiences. I'm heterosexual myself, but I know a fair number of homosexuals and call some friends, and on average they're not any more or less "sex-positive" than the heterosexuals I know. That all homosexuals are driven to be sexually outgoing is a bad cliché, your orientation doesn't correlate with your behavior when it comes to romance or sex drive.

 

Sure. What I'm trying to say is that the phenomenon of writers highlighting characters from traditionally stigmatized or neglected groups is a trait that, at the beginning of the acceptance curve, is most especially in evidence among writers from these groups. It's worth noting that in the current continuity, the first gay characters were introduced by a writing team including an out gay man.

In the other friend I'd made passing mention of Arthur C. Clarke. When I went back before his death to read some of his early books, I picked up his first novel, The Sands of Mars, and was struck by elements of the novel that hinted at a queer subtext. The protagonist is a happily single man without any heterosexual leanings, someone who in early adulthood suffered a nervous breakdown that coincided with the end of his most significant heterosexual relationship, father to a child raised without the protagonist's involvement?

(I've just realized that I haven't come out here. Was this a necessary but omitted subtext?)

I'm sorry, I don't see how that follows. Plenty of heterosexuals are sexually active; the notion that there's some specific correlation between being gay and being promiscuous is just a stereotype, an attempt by people who perceive both homosexuality and promiscuity as immoral to lump them together.[/QUOTE]

Well, yes.

What I'm trying to say that a writer's portrayal of one sort of sexual difference from the norm as something neutral or even positive is usually a sign that other sorts of sexual difference from the norm would likewise be treated well. It's a sort of transitive quality.

The Death by Sex trope reflects something deep-rooted in Western culture, at least. Going to the real world, in our lifetimes the trope has been very widely voiced, including phenomena as various as queer men deserving AIDS on account of their sexual orientation, opposition to HPV vaccines on the grounds that children vaccinated against this viral cancer might be disinhibited of the fear of sex ...

Exactly: there's a double standard. That's why your portrayal of a female character who has sex with multiple men, isn't looked on as morally flawed, and doesn't suffer a terrible fate anyway, might have been read as a signal.

Well, not necessarily. I mean, I appreciate T'Ryssa's enthusiastic heterosexuality without being heterosexual.

Because being GLBT friendly, while much more common than ever before, is still something that isn't normative, is still something worthy of appreciation and thanks, and is something that I find interesting.

Thank you.

 

That's a fair observation, too. I'd suggest that there's no incompatibility between the two observations both being accurate, that--for whatever reason--writers traditionally have written about characters who just happen to be non-heterosexual for specific reasons, to make a point.

What I said about about the portrayal of one sort of sexual difference from the norm often hinting that other forms of sexual difference aren't objectionable.

I'm not saying that these are reliable cues. They're clearly not. They are textual clues that people like myself have picked up on, incidental details that might well have a greater meaning, and often do. Lieutenant Sean Hawk's non-heterosexual orientation was first developed in detail by a writing team that included an out gay man, so it's not necessarily that unreliable

I have to admit, when I read Serpents Among the Ruins back in the day and came across a passing mention of Kamemor's mate being female, I briefly wondered if DRGIII himself was gay. Then, I read more of the current continuity and happily realized that explicitly non-heterosexual content--not just characters, but their relationships--was normal in this continuity and for these writers.

 

No, they weren't. That's a common misconception that's already been debunked in this thread. You're presumably referring to Ranul Keru and Sean Hawk from Section 31: Rogue in 2001, but they were predated by Bart Faulwell in SCE, debuting in 2000. If you're referring to Etana and Richter, they may have been introduced earlier in the comics, but weren't added to the novelverse -- or "outed" -- until 2002.

Not to mention that Messrs. Mangels & Martin have frequently debunked the assumption that the desire to include gay characters came specifically from the gay member of the duo. Andy has said many times that Mike has just as often been the one who had the idea, and that they're both equally dedicated to including characters of all types. Their work as a whole is populated with characters who are ethnically and religiously diverse as well as sexually diverse. It's not just about the gay writer wanting to write about gays, and it's unfair to both members of the duo to assume it is. It's about both of them wanting to live up to Star Trek's message of inclusion in general.

And for the record, I didn't need to catch up with any sort of "acceptance curve" before including LGBT characters. I've been including non-heterosexual characters in my fiction (most of it unpublished, admittedly) since I first started writing seriously in 1990.

But what "difference from the norm" are you talking about? Being sexually active? How the hell is that abnormal? T'Ryssa Chen, in the course of a novel spanning three and a half months, is shown having a casual relationship with a crewmate on one ship, then a single one-night stand during her subsequent time between ships, and then a fairly steady relationship which develops in the ensuing months aboard her new posting. That does not strike me as being in any way abnormal for an attractive, outgoing, 26-year-old person of either sex.

And that's a sad, foolish notion that we really should've left on the dustheap by now.

Why dwell on tradition? We're not relics from the past. We're here now, writing according to what we believe now. And as people who've grown up with Star Trek's message of inclusion, we believe in being inclusive. I think that for most of us, the only "point" to including non-heterosexual people is that there shouldn't be any specific point to make -- that they're simply part of everyday life and it would be unrealistic not to include them and treat them the same way we treat any other character. In this day and age, I'd say it's the people who go out of their way to exclude LGBT characters, to pretend they don't exist, who are the ones trying to make a point. The rest of us are just accepting reality.

I still don't see how being sexually active is a difference from the norm. Even in nominally prudish cultures like the Victorian age or 1950s America, people had a lot more sex than they would ever have acknowledged publicly.

It's been said by a famous psychiatrist (Freud? Masters? somebody like that) that if you look at the full range of human sexual behavior, the only thing that's actually an aberration is abstinence.

 

Hi all, David Greven here.

I am wondering what folks have made of STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS from a queer perspective?

I admire much of J. J Abrams TV work--ALIAS, FRINGE--but I don't think he has a queer sensibility. As I discussed in Gender and Sexuality in Star Trek, I felt that his first Trek film completely distorted the Kirk/Spock relationship. I would argue that the second film goes the opposite direction and weirdly enough distorts it even more--the reprise, with reversed roles, of the Spock death scene from STTWOK feels like unearned intimacy to me. The original scene has much more poignancy and, potentially, queer feeling.

I think that one of the unsatisfying dimensions of the Abrams Trek is the distortion of Kirk and Spock's characters--Kirk is a an impulsive and rather mindless guy pure and simple, Spock is an aggressive and rather militaristic hothead. The complexities and ambiguities of these characters in TOS gave the queer dimensions in their relationship more resonance.

 

^Gene Roddenberry's comments over the years made it quite clear that Kirk and Spock's relationship was never intended to be anything more than a strictly platonic friendship. So it is absolutely not a "distortion" to portray it that way; it is truthful and accurate. The distortion is to interpret it as "queer" when it really isn't, to mistake the deliberately subversive reading of slash fiction for the original intent. Slash can be an entertaining fantasy, and it's understandable why readers in the past seeking LGBT themes would've latched onto close heterosexual friendships between fictional characters of the same sex and projected sexual attraction onto them for lack of genuine LGBT characters on TV and film; but it should be recognized for the alternative take that it is.

If anything, the idea of a loving platonic friendship between heterosexual men is something that should be embraced and celebrated, since it's a good counterpoint to the way Western culture conditions men to be aloof and detached from one another. I've always admired the way Gene L. Coon in particular wrote male friendships in ST and The Questor Tapes.

And the new films haven't "distorted" the characters so much as created alternate versions of them. The films are explicitly in an alternate history in which events have shaped their lives differently. Kirk grew up very differently because he never knew his father, and Spock was profoundly changed by the destruction of his planet and the death of his mother.

 

Actually, Christopher, you're adding your own agenda to what I said. Saying that Abrams distorted the Kirk/Spock relationship is not at all some kind of statement to the effect that he should have represented them as lovers. The friendship between Kirk and Spock--the respect they have for each other as well as the love--is precisely what Abrams mishandled profoundly in the first film and continues to mishandle in the second. To say that there are queer potentialities, resonances, suggestive aspects to this friendship is not at all, again, to say that they should be shown as being involved in a sexual relationship with one another. I felt that the second film made a mockery of the devastating, because so well-earned and enriched by our long associations with the characters, Spock death scene in STWOK.

 

I think people allow their own long associations with the characters to color their judgement. If this had been a sequel of a film without a huge back catalog of material and a similar scene had happened, I doubt anyone would have honestly cared.

I like how the scene was done in The Wrath of Khan and I like how the scene was done in Star Trek Into Darkness.

 

I don't agree with this at all, and I don't see how you could reasonably make this argument.

To say that Kirk is mindless is just not fair. It is reasonable to say that he is a rogue and sometimes impulsive, but his arc in STID is very much one of an arrogant man being humbled, learning to accept his own fallibility and to make sacrifices for others.

And it's positively absurd to call Spock aggressive and militaristic. It was Spock who objected to the mission to kill Harrison in Star Trek Into Darkness, who stood up against the idea that the militaristic response is the right response and for the idea that no government can just sign a man's death warrant without a trial. (A lesson not well-learned by our real government, by the way -- I loved that part of STID was a criticism of the U.S.'s drone/targeted assassination policy.)

As for giving STID a queer reading...

I think there's a definite subtext to Pine!Kirk and Quinto!Spock's relationship. At least one reviewer did note that Spock's reaction to Dr. Marcus's first appearance was like that of a jealous girlfriend.

 

That's your opinion. I don't agree. These movies are showing the early stage of their relationship, its gradual evolution from a tense beginning. I think it's been handled rather well. These are two young, driven men who are slowly learning to trust each other and to follow each other's example. It's not mishandled, it's just being shown in its formative stages. They're learning that respect and trust before or eyes.

I'm not quite sure what it's supposed to mean, then, and I'd appreciate it if you'd clarify. Although I suppose that our culture's fear of open affection between men in any context is linked to homophobia, so depicting a warm and emotional relationship between men, even a platonic one, could help counter the fear of "effeminacy" that produces homophobia, and perhaps sexism as well. So I can see a connection there, but other than that, I'm not so sure what you could be referring to.

That was certainly a contrived and silly moment, yes, and it's true that it wasn't earned; but I think it's the exception to the rule. For the most part, the movies' portrayal of the developing relationship works for me.

Absolutely right. This is the story of the young Kirk in the process of becoming the James T. Kirk we know.

Indeed. The movie did a good job of replicating the dynamic Gene Coon employed in "The Devil in the Dark" and "Arena": Kirk reacting as a soldier first, favoring aggression as his first response to an attack; Spock urging him to consider a more peaceful path; Kirk rejecting that advice at first, but then ending up following it when he confronts the enemy. I found it quite faithful to the original characters.

Ooh, good point. I think I did notice that at the time.

 

I disagree srongly. I loved the death scene in Into Darkness. The idea that it can only have meaning if the characters had 15+ years of history together is baffling to me. When someone's important to me (and I mean this as a friend, despite the topic of this thread), I'm going to be heartbroken if they die after knowing them a year just as I would after 15. Kirk and Spock's bickery BFF relationship in ID was wonderfully done, IMO.

(but the less said about Spock's "Khaaaaaan!" the better)

 

^Well, that's what I mean, really. The scene per se was fine in principle; what undermined it was the fanwank, the attempt to make it a copy/inversion of the TWOK death scene and the tacked-on, unmotivated "KHAAAAAN" yell, a laughable moment that took me out of the movie. If they'd just let it play as a scene that honestly, organically grew out of this story, rather than rehashing all the bits from a different story, then it would've worked fine.

 

Hi Sci--just to clarify, I am mainly referring to the characterization of Spock in the first Abrams Star Trek film. He is made aggressive and belligerent in this film--the scene where, goaded by Kirk, he rains blows down on Kirk on the bridge is the lowpoint of the film for me. I enjoyed the second film more, but I still believe that TOS and some of the TOS-cast films were far richer, more complex, and also more daring in their way about putting platonic male love on the screen. Christopher, thank you for your response to my original post. To clarify, by "queer" I mean something non-normative, that does not fit neatly into sexual categories and standards. Along these lines, there is definitely something queer about the Kirk-Spock relationship even if there is nothing sexual about it, given the masculinism and homophobic policing against male-male bonds in our culture.

 

One could also never imagine the Abrams Spock giving the Abrams Kirk A Tale of Two Cities or them having anything like a cultural or intellectual exchange. The militarism in Abrams vision is overwhelmingly geared toward the technological side of things--there is no more high culture or poetry or art and beauty in this Trek.

 

Then you must hate "This Side of Paradise" and "Amok Time." The Kirk-Spock fight you're referring to was a pretty blatant homage to their fight in TSoP, to the point where I expected Kirk to say "Had enough?" I mean, they were both about goading Spock into releasing his aggression and forcing him to confront how he'd become compromised. Sure, the modern version was less subject to censorship and able to depict the violence somewhat more graphically, but the intent of the two is virtually identical.

Can you really say that if you'd just seen your own mother die in front of you the day before, let alone watched your whole civilization get destroyed, you wouldn't have some rage built up inside you?

It's a given that a weekly series is going to have the time and the room to make the world and the characterizations more complex than movies. I found the TOS and TNG movies to be mostly far more simplistic than the shows. Movies aren't the best format for Star Trek.

We've only spent a bit over four hours with these characters. It's a bit premature to make assumptions about what they do in their downtime. And what "militarism?" Into Darkness took a pretty strong stand against militarism, with Scotty resigning his post rather than blindly follow orders to take weapons onboard, and Spock convincing Kirk to defy orders to shoot first and not ask questions.

As for culture, the films feature such things as popular music, vintage automobiles, and I believe I saw a 20th-century phonograph in one scene. Just because those don't fit some elitist definition of "high" culture, that doesn't mean they're devoid of cultural merit. Isn't it inconsistent to say you're in favor of depictions of non-normative cultures and behaviors, and then turn around and dismiss the validity of any art or culture that isn't Shakespeare and Milton and Dickens?

 

I think they tried to be a little too clever - make an emotional death scene (which I say they very much succeeded with), pay tribute to WoK (where they went overboard, although only in Scotty's "Better get down here... better hurry" and Spock's "KHAAAAAN!" IMO) and present an alternate reality version of a famous Trek scene (which doesn't make much sense coming 15 years earier and begs all sorts of questions about fate in Trek, almost as if Kirk and crew are a loosely fixed point in the multiverse, Eternal Tide-style. It also brought to mind the "Before and After"/"Year of Hell" Kes/Seven substitution in the Jefferies tube. If such similar events were commonplace through the multiverse it may explain some of the huge coincidences required to set up Trek's mirrorverse and other AU episodes, but I digress.)

I also think that, coming after Khan's attack on the helpless Enterprise (after beaming Kirk, Scotty and Carol over), which is what damaged the warp core and sent them falling to Earth, that Spock's reaction was justified - just not the yell. A cold, silent rage would have been infinitely more powerful. Perhaps even with "KHAAAAN!" as a challenge when they laid eyes on each other in San Francisco, right before Khan bolts.

 

^They also riffed on the "Ship out of danger?" exchange, the hands on the glass, and other beats from the scene.

And personally I don't think the "KHAAAAN!" yell was ever justified, even in TWOK. It was the most embarrassing, stupid moment in that movie, and it's remembered mainly as a joke. I wish it had been absent from both films.

 

I think you meant This Side of Paradise not Tomorrow is Yesterday, Christopher.

 

^Thanks. Fixed.