The response to "Rejoined"

[DS9forever]

I was reading a the Titan Magazine DS9 issue focusing on "Rejoined" and noticed that the episode was banned in parts of the US (the southern states probably) and in parts of Canada

Ira Behr even makes a comment in the magazine "I know Paramount Pictures got a lot of negative feedback, which only goes to prove a point I always believed in, which is that science fiction fans and Star Trek fans are much more conservative than people want to believe, and this whole Gene Roddenberry liberal Humanistic vision is truly not shared by a significant portion of them".

Are Star Trek fans a little quick to condemn Star Trek for not having homosexual characters when the response to the kiss in "Rejoined" seemed to have been received negatively?

 

[Peach Wookiee]

I wonder if it's because it seemed like Trek was trying too hard to be trendy at the time. It was the time of the first lesbian kiss on Roseanne and The Simpsons joked about it in promos for the episode where Homer and Ned become BFFs and Homer kisses Ned.

I personally found Rejoined to be tasteful.

 

[IreneAdler]

As much as I hate to say this, Star Trek is a commercial franchise. The only way we get more Star Trek is if the current offerings are profitable. The writers know that. Lesbians are more "socially acceptable" than gay men, and there still is a tremendous amount of backlash against them. As a woman, I still get a lot of hatred from men, who think I have no business writing/'shopping Trek, because they think it's something that I do just to get attention -.-.

I think so long as there is still a significant fanbase that is extremely close-minded, we won't see a substantial gay/lesbian plot in a Trek movie. It's sad, but diehard fans of "utopia" can also be bigoted.

I really enjoyed Rejoined. I think it was well done, and it addressed a lot of questions about Trills that I'd wondered. If you've been both male and female and loved a variety of people, do typical gender/sexuality fully apply any more? What if the lover of a previous host still lived, or had a symbiont that had been joined again? Those were things that I always had curiosity about, and the episode handled it beautifully.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The only question I thought of when I saw this episode is, apparently Ambassador Odan doesn't know or care about the law against reassociation...

 

[House Stark]

I'm pretty new to the fandom and am kind of bewildered by how close minded some Star Trek fans are. To be fair when DS9 aired I was 3... but I still feel like a gay kiss on TV would have been a bit of a non-issue in the UK.

 

[Ward3]

I don't even see the kiss in Rejoined as a same sex kiss. It's a Trill kiss between formerly married symbionts in new hosts. Though I was not watching DS9 at the time, I certainly would not have batted an eye at this when it aired, but then again, I had been running with a pretty gay crowd for a long time then, and I had seen a lot more explicit stuff in person.

I also look at this 20 years later, in a society where I am married to a person of nominally the same sex, and it looks very tame. Nobody here cares if I hold hands with my spouse. Nobody batted an eye 10 years ago when I kissed my ex girlfriend goodbye on the subway every morning. We could not be more integrated into our working class neighbourhood in a working class city. Nobody cares here and we are totally accepted as part of this area.

I guess I am spoiled since I come from this culture. Looking at Rejoined now, I can see the fight against silly taboos, whether it be same sex relationships, or multi race marriages (I look white but am not really all that white). I don't understand what all that fuss was about and I don't understand what all this fuss IS about even now, not just with that kiss, but with the falling of taboos in any society. Love is love is love. If my spouse transitioned/was transexual, I would still stay in love. I hope she would feel the same about me. This has always seemed so obvious to me, but apparently I am not of this world.