Was a Rick Berman a bad choice to run the Star Trek Franchise after Gene Roddenberry died?

[Oddish]

Tell that to the gays in 13 different states. The sodomy laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 2003, two years after "Enterprise" began. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but it's true. Finally, a couple who had been arrested for sodomy challenged the law. It went to the Supreme Court, and the court basically directed all the states to let people make their own romantic choices.

 

[Lord Garth]

Tell that to the gays in 13 different states. The sodomy laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 2003, two years after "Enterprise" began. Yes, I know it sounds incredible, but it's true. Finally, a couple who had been arrested for sodomy challenged the law. It went to the Supreme Court, and the court basically directed all the states to let people make their own romantic choices.

Well, then yet another thing I don't like about Rick Berman, if that's the case.

I don't have any respect for people who I think are cowards. Never have, never will.

 

[Oddish]

I more see it as pragmatism. Idealism might feel good, but pragmatism keeps you and your employees out of the unemployment line.

 

[BigDaveX]

Then why didn't Berman just come out (no pun intended) and say that he'd have totally been up for including LGBT characters, but the higher-ups at Paramount wouldn't let him? Instead, he's always justified it with this weird circular logic argument, saying that he didn't want to just mention in passing that any characters - no matter how small their role was - were gay because he felt there should be an actual episode which addressed the topic, but then refusing to allow such an episode to actually be written because he didn't feel the writers could tackle the subject without beating the viewers over the head with the message.

 

[JLBTucker]

While Mr. Berman's treatment of women was certainly unacceptable, and his hamstringing Voyager's characters was wrong, I can at least understand his hesitation regarding gay characters.

Around 1990, the AIDS pandemic was still a very real thing, and the resurgence of homophobia (even the press was demonizing male homosexuals in the mid-80's) that came with it, was less than a decade past. In a number of states, it was still illegal to have consensual sex with a same-sex partner. That essentially means that they could not get 50% of the voters in those states to even agree that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own damn business. The decades-long media campaign to gain acceptance for gays was in its early stages; Lynn Johnson (who wrote "For Better or For Worse") got death threats for having a minor character in her strip be gay. In short, it was a very different world. Introducing a gay character would please a small percentage of Americans, but infuriate a much larger percentage. And for someone who thinks in terms of ratings, that's risky. Berman might have simply been trying to play it safe.

Proponents of cancel culture might judge a person who was active in the 80's and 90's by 2020's standards, but I refuse to.

I dont judge Gene for the simple reason that the time he was in was alot different then now but by the 1990's i think Berman should have known better. By that i mean the weird border line harassment stuff. The non inclusion of LGBT is more just a sign of the times

 

[F. King Daniel]

I dont judge Gene for the simple reason that the time he was in was alot different then now

Tell that to Grace Lee Whitney.

 

[JLBTucker]

Tell that to Grace Lee Whitney.

we dont know who actually did that and we never Will because everyone involved in it is dead. A terrible thing to happen

 

[The Wormhole]

While Mr. Berman's treatment of women was certainly unacceptable, and his hamstringing Voyager's characters was wrong, I can at least understand his hesitation regarding gay characters.

Around 1990, the AIDS pandemic was still a very real thing, and the resurgence of homophobia (even the press was demonizing male homosexuals in the mid-80's) that came with it, was less than a decade past. In a number of states, it was still illegal to have consensual sex with a same-sex partner. That essentially means that they could not get 50% of the voters in those states to even agree that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own damn business. The decades-long media campaign to gain acceptance for gays was in its early stages; Lynn Johnson (who wrote "For Better or For Worse") got death threats for having a minor character in her strip be gay. In short, it was a very different world. Introducing a gay character would please a small percentage of Americans, but infuriate a much larger percentage. And for someone who thinks in terms of ratings, that's risky. Berman might have simply been trying to play it safe.

Proponents of cancel culture might judge a person who was active in the 80's and 90's by 2020's standards, but I refuse to.

Enterprise began in 2001, a time when plenty of American TV shows had gay characters in their main casts. In fact, Will and Grace, a show with a gay character as the titular co-lead premiered its fourth season the day after Broken Bow aired. Enterprise aired on the same network as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had a lesbian couple in its cast, and had for two years prior to 2001. Having a gay character would not have been a risky thing for Enterprise to do at all.

 

[cooleddie74]

I especially remember how Ellen was cancelled when she came out because TV in the '90s wouldn't tolerate a lesbian charac...

oh.

 

[cultcross]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a gay character in the same year as Voyager season 5. Buffy would later move to UPN, so it clearly didn't put them off that show.
Instead, we got two more years of Voyager and 4 of Enterprise that go out of their way to be heteronormative. At a certain point, the excuses dry up.

 

[XCV330]

I especially remember how Ellen was cancelled when she came out because TV in the '90s wouldn't tolerate a lesbian charac...

oh.

The Southern Baptist Convention tried to have a boycott on disney, and found their considerable power in influence amongst their parishioners paled against the power of the House of Mouse

 

[cooleddie74]

And that was THEN. Which speaks volumes for the limited power of the Fundamentalist lobbies when it comes to pop culture "standards."

 

[Guy Gardener]

She did another sitcom, before the talk show, that lasted one season.

This is the quote I found...

It was not the studio’s decision. I know that when Gene (Roddenberry) was alive he was very ambiguous about the idea of a gay character or gay characters on the show. He felt it was the right thing to do, but never quite had any idea of how he was going to do it. As Michael Piller had said many times, the idea of seeing two men or two women in Ten-Forward holding hands was not really going to be an effective way of dealing with it. So Gene basically didn’t do anything about it, and then when Michael and I were involved with the concepts of the stories on the show, we just felt it would be better to deal with concepts of prejudice against homosexuality and topics like AIDS metaphorically, in ways other than human gays on board the ship. So we developed a number of different stories that dealt with same-sex relationships, that dealt with metaphorical diseases that were similar to AIDS. But they were all done in alien fashion to try to get people to think about these things as opposed to just hitting it right on the head, which would be having a gay character on the ship. It’s something that Michael and I discussed. It’s something that Brannon Braga and I discussed, that Jeri Taylor and I discussed, and we never really got around to coming up with a way of just adding a gay character. So we tried to deal with it in a more abstract science-fiction way.

But this is the quote I remember...

We always intended to do a gay episode, but we ran out of time.

 

[Mudd]

Around 1990, the AIDS pandemic was still a very real thing, and the resurgence of homophobia (even the press was demonizing male homosexuals in the mid-80's) that came with it, was less than a decade past. In a number of states, it was still illegal to have consensual sex with a same-sex partner. That essentially means that they could not get 50% of the voters in those states to even agree that what two consenting adults do in their own bedroom is their own damn business. The decades-long media campaign to gain acceptance for gays was in its early stages; Lynn Johnson (who wrote "For Better or For Worse") got death threats for having a minor character in her strip be gay. In short, it was a very different world. Introducing a gay character would please a small percentage of Americans, but infuriate a much larger percentage.

This is arrant nonsense, for reasons already cited by others. It has the ring of a rationalization advanced by people who have no real memory of those times.

Gay characters were beginning to appear on network television well before Enterprise premiered. Notably both Voyager and Enterprise were, like BTVS and Will and Grace and NYPD Blue and a host of others, network shows that didn't have to contend with the vagaries of local programming decisions and pressures.

The only think preventing Trek from having gay characters, certainly as late as the mid-90s, was studio timidity. Apologists for that kind of thing needn't try to throw ideological chaff about "cancel culture" into the conversation in attempts to distract from the narrow mindset of their arguments; it doesn't work.

Parenthetically, it's probably unfair to lay all of this on any of the Trek producers. The people they worked for did second-guess their decisions about content from time to time.

 

[XCV330]

there was a balancing act they might have had to follow with having gay characters on TV, perhaps, but that is true of anything "new" . The point was, Berman did not even try.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a gay character in the same year as Voyager season 5. Buffy would later move to UPN, so it clearly didn't put them off that show.
Instead, we got two more years of Voyager and 4 of Enterprise that go out of their way to be heteronormative. At a certain point, the excuses dry up.

There were rules from the Network for their first season with the gays.

No kissing.
No holding hands.
No hugging.
No bedroom scenes.
No one is using the words Gay, lover or girlfriend.

Other than that, the sky was the limit.

 

[cultcross]

There were rules from the Network for their first season with the gays.

No kissing.
No holding hands.
No hugging.
No bedroom scenes.
No one is using the words Gay, lover or girlfriend.

Other than that, the sky was the limit.

The Yoko Factor, 2000, from the first season "with the gays":

Willow : [to Buffy] We have to face it. You can't handle Tara being my girlfriend.

Xander : No! It was bad before that! Since you two went off to college and forgot about me. Just left me in the basement to- Tara's your *girlfriend*?

Giles : [off screen] Bloody hell!

It's made pretty explicit.

 

[cooleddie74]

Berman was a coward. He could have. He just didn't even bother.

 

[Oddish]

I believe you. And I don't pretend to know what Berman was thinking. Maybe he was afraid of alienating the conservative Trekkies (they really do exist), maybe he was homophobic. Or maybe he was just stupid: the whole "someone's gotta be an ensign" business on Voyager was his idea. That's not the product of an intelligent mind.

Maybe Star Trek was late to the party. But, with Stamets/Culber and family on Discovery, and Seven/Raffi on Picard, at least they've arrived.

 

[cooleddie74]

Lazy and more concerned with the breast sizes of his heterosexual female cast members, more like.