Trill and Sexual Orientation in Star Trek

Well, admittedly my own assumption was that the other man was Sulu's SO. But that doesn't make him gay.

Hell, maybe he's in a triad (or more!).

 

What would you have had Beverly say?

 

Think I already covered this upthread...

CRUSHER: Perhaps it is a human failing, but we are not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can't keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can't live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, our ability to love won't be so limited.

Better: I'm not accustomed to these kinds of changes. I can't keep up. How long will you have this host? What would the next one be? I can't live with that kind of uncertainty. Perhaps, someday, my ability to love won't be so limited.

If it were me, I would have owned my decision rather than suggesting that any other human in my place would have made the same choice. I would have expressed actual regret over the fact that I didn't feel I could maintain a relationship with someone I had claimed to be in love with. I would have shown some compassion for Odan given that "it" hadn't asked for what happened.

Given that I'm homosexual, so Odan being implanted into a woman might cause just as many problems for me as it did for Beverly...

Best: I love you. I really do, and I wish I could make this work, but I can't. I'm gay, and I'll never be comfortable being in a relationship with or physically intimate with a woman. I wish I could be that open-minded, but I can't find it within me. I'm sorry if this hurts you, but continuing the pretense of a relationship that wouldn't have a future wouldn't be fair to either of us.

 

You have a distinct ability to pull what is clearly a director's intent into some taffy like substance for your own speculation. I've seen it repeatedly. Not complaining. It's fascinating. Let me follow that logic. How do we not know that the man who Sulu was with might have been a being of pure energy who has existed from before the universe and who breeds by excreting a kind of non-baryonic matter jelly over dark matter toast which is then eaten by a host who then buds into charming light wave patterns. Sulu is not hugging him as others so clearly assume but is in fact trying to squish him into more pleasing shapes.

Seriously, the obvious intent of the movie was to show that they were a couple and this was his child. Why do these kind of silly pointless mental acrobatics?

 

I guess everyone has their own idea of where "avoiding assumptions" ends and "silly pointless mental acrobatics" begins.

But I'm curious then, do you think the intent of the scene was to declare Sulu gay, or simply non-heterosexual?

 

Unless Sulu wants to talk about it, his sexual orientation is NONE OF MY BUSINESS. The right to privacy is also an issue that should be respected.

 

I think we're allowed to wonder about it while acknowledging it's none of our business...

 

Mmmmmm, I think wondering about it is akin then to wondering about someone's favorite sexual position or picturing them naked.
Rather pointless unless you are with them and naked.

 

...that depends on what you're doing while picturing them naked...

 

I'm from a different camp.

Before Beyond, I was told that there would be Canon establishing Sulu as gay, which is a little awesome. The Beyond production team asked for a 44 trombone marching band parade to congratulate them for moving the genre forward into the 1990s by having a gay man in a happy stable relationship.

They wanted medals.

And... After Beyond...

Woah.

Is that it?

A hug.

For the level of accolade and fanfare Beyond was demanding, I felt short changed and swindled.

Are we supposed to give Justin Lin a slap on the back and a handy for half assing it?

No.

Not effing likely.

THEY GET NOTHING!

 

Disagree. Oh if Sulu were a real person then you would have a point, however Sulu is a fictional character whose life is on display for our entertainment and his personal life should be explored.

 

I'm sure the final scene would have played out a lot differently if it was truly private (i.e. if they didn't have to worry about the viewers at home). What Beverly would have really said to Kareel probably wouldn't be anything like what we saw.

I guess I understand why that scene comes across as wishy-washy, but when the writers have to care about what people at home will think - having to write a scene that offends absolutely no one - then it's almost inevitable. Especially back then.

 

I believe you've missed my point. In whatever version of Star Trek that is being produced, the private lives of the characters should be made into stories. However, randomly having characters inquire about their sexuality in the middle of other stories simply models bad, sometimes problematic, behavior. In other words, make the fourth film about the Sulus, but don't have Kirk run up Sulu and his family in the middle of the Yorktown, asking, "So, you're into dudes?"

 

Because having Kirk kiss Uhura in the late '60s is indicative of the writers worrying about making sure they don't offend anyone?

Same goes for Dax kissing Lenara Kahn in DS9, really.

If you don't want to send a socially progressive message and risk offending people, that's fine. But then don't bill yourself as a socially progressive series, and don't offend people to whom these issues actually matter by claiming that this is the positive future of humanity.

 

The only thing I am certain of is that 20th/21st century ideals of sexual identification will probably seem bizarre and either needlessly complicated and arbitrary or hopelessly simple and a result of repression and current zeitgeist. I am certain love will continue. It might even outlast hate. Intentwise, I think the intent was to say this was Sulu's loved ones, his family. What more matters?

 

Very well-said!

 

Star Trek has usually been behind the curve when it come to merely keeping up with the average of television, being "social progressive" was confined to rare isolated events.

In fact being social progressive is a title that comes mostly from a portion of the fans. with a few people on the production team too (David Gerrold comes to mind).

Not all viewers (fans and general audience) would even want Trek to be such.

Trek at it core is a action adventure sci-fi/fantasy show. With some ethical dilemmas, character moments and random pew-pew. on the side.

 

I'm pretty certain that being progressive is not a race. Who expresses a particular view first is not in an of itself a measure of how progressive someone is.

Perhaps more importantly, progressivism is a contemporary word that one would not find in use politically for most Star Trek's history. What people did talk about was social consciousness.

I remember many popular magazines, such as TV Guide, bringing up how socially conscious Star Trek was. They noted its diversity and cultural understanding, which came at a time that "multiculturalism" and "political correctness" were under attack by the likes of Rush Limbaugh. Rarely did the show comment on a current issue directly (Past Tense probably comes closest). Nevertheless, the series did model how people lived and thought in a society dominated by the achievements of socially conscious politics. (Or as Honest Trailors recently put it, "The future is woke!")

I worked for several years with a man who had taught at West Point. As he put it, a good anti-war movie was also a good war movie: something like Platoon still had everything that he and his colleagues enjoyed, and gave them intellectual matter to chew on, even if they disagreed with it. Because someone can enjoy the action and violence does not mean that whatever else the film or episode is trying to accomplish.

 

One thing to consider... Riker's personality seemed to be taken over by Odan, but all other Trill appearances have a sort of blend. I think this is because Riker is NOT a Trill, so in a sense, humans were not compatable with symbiotes. The Trill are.

Which does bring up a question I've always asked... HOW did the Trill start joining? Was the first one an accident? Did the symbiotes communicate with them somehow and say it was possible? Was there an experiment? An episode definitely could have happened with this question.

 

I doubt, both species decided out of the blue to join.
The likelihood of a co-evolution is far greater.

There would have been earlier stages of the symbiosis.
The first instances could have been symbionts only briefly linking to the humanoid trill for some other beneficial evolutionary reasons.
The merging of personalities and retention of the hosts memories could have been incidental.
Later medical research could have discovered that a permanent neural link is possible and started implanting the symbionts directly into the nervous system with the unfortunate side-effect, that the removal is lethal to both unless provided with a new host/symbiont.