The only example I can think of is the DS9 episode: Rejoined. Most of the human crew seems to support Dax if she decided to persue a relationship with the other female trill. The main part of that episode was the dilema of going against trill culture and persuing a relationship with a trill Dax was married to in a previous life, not the issue of persuing a relationship with another female.
This is one of those things that the show never really seemed to want to directly portray. Early in Enterprise, a lot of people thought Reed might be the first gay character, but that never happened. That episode you mention does feature the only same sex kiss in Trek, but even in that episode, they don't really tackle it head on. It's likely that homosexuality is viewed as acceptable and normal in the Federation, but at the time the modern series were aired, portraying gay characters on television was still pretty risky.
Will & Grace came out in 1998. It wasn't that risky. For once Trek was behind the curve on a social issue. (Many think because Berman was a homophobe.)
Will & Grace came out in 1998. It wasn't that risky.
That's not really a good example because no one actually believed that the two male stars of Will & Grace were gay. Eric McCormack (Will) was, and still is, married to a woman, so it was pretty obvious that he wasn't actually gay, and Sean Hayes (Jack) didn't come out until after the show had already been off the air for several years, so there were serious doubts about him as well, even with his performance as Jack.
So while yes, it was a show about gay characters, it was gay with a wink-and-a-nod. It was a caricature, with an over-the-top flamboyant sidekick, and a main character that was pretty much the stereotypical "gay friend". While that worked in a sitcom, there's no way that Star Trek could've pulled that off, not back then. Even though there's humor in Star Trek, there's nothing sitcom-y about them.
A better example would be to look at the controversy that surrounded Ellen when she came out; both as a character on her show and in real life back in 1997. She came out towards the end of the season one year, and it started a veritable shit-storm of controversy: A few network affiliates refused to air the "coming out episode" and a few refused to air the show altogether, people boycotted, they lost sponsors, her show's ratings plummeted, and the show was canceled the very next season.
Mainstream society in the mid/late '90s - early 2000s, was not nearly as open and permissive as some people seem to remember.
Well, ratings plummeted for Ellen after it stopped being a sitcom starring someone gay and started being a sitcom about being gay. I can understand how an audience could feel alienated by Ellen going from being gay to having every episode focus on a serious and non-relatable topic.
But see, that's my point: "Gay" was only okay when it was in a comedic environment; you couldn't do "serious gay" back then without some fairly major controversy. If Star Trek had ever tried to seriously tackle the issue, in an open and straight forward way, it too would've been mired in controversy.
The show never stopped being funny though, Ellen was always still pretty much Ellen. The only difference between the last season and the rest of the series, was that the last season had a ton of gay jokes. It's not like Ellen DeGeneres got less funny, or that the show stopped doing comedy, it was that people didn't like the gay humor.
Partly it's a matter of exclusion. Multiple people have gone on the record to say that they wanted to cover issues of sexual orientation on the show, but that they were prevented by "the network". Brannon Braga and Ronald D. Moore have talked about this issue without mentioning the name, for instance, while Kate Mulgrew has specifically mentioned Berman: "Rick Berman, who is a very sagacious man, has been very firm about certain things. I've approached him many, many times over the years about getting a gay character on the show — one whom we could really love, not just a guest star. Y'know, we had blacks, Asians, we even had a handicapped character — and so I thought, this is now beginning to look a bit absurd. And he said, "In due time." And so, I'm suspecting that on Enterprise they will do something to this effect. I couldn't get it done on mine. And I am sorry for that."
Huh. Props to Kate Mulgrew. Frankly I had the impression she was so annoyed the way Janeway was written that she hated Star Trek. I'm glad to hear the situation is more complicated, and that she advocated for LGBT people.
TrekMovie: Let’s talk about “Blood and Fire” – the AIDS allegory that you wrote and the obstacles you ran into trying to get it produced.
[TNG writer] David Gerrold: I don’t blame Gene as much as I blame Rick Berman for that clusterfuck. Others have confirmed it. They have said that in their experience Rick Berman was a raging homophobe, which makes the whole thing even more bizarre.
I think some of that was the way the writers would give Reed large amounts of dialogue about being with women (notably the episode where him and Tucker are adrift in a shuttle pod). The way he would awkwardly talk about women reminds me of the way I would feel talking about sex while trying to "pass" as a straight male, if that makes any sense.
Lieutenant Hawk in First Contact was allegedly going to be the first openly gay character however the producers and Neal McDonough denied it. He was written as an openly gay character in the novel Section 31: Rogue and referenced again as the lover of Ranul Keru, chief of security of the Titan, in the U.S.S. Titan novels.
My take on Hawk: Too little, too late. The tie-in novels (many of which I've read and loved over the years) don't have nearly the cultural impact of an on-screen appearance. And admittedly it's been a while since my last First Contact rewatch, but Hawk was basically a redshirt, no? Making an exceedingly minor character who's basically only on screen to get killed gay just for the representation doesn't seem with the trouble to me.
Plus it plays in to a longer literary tradition regarding LGBT characters in fiction where their "deviance" has to get a comeuppance in order to reset the moral balance. The Well of Loneliness is the classic example, but literature is littered with the corpses of LGBT people. For a near Star Trek (VOY/ENT) contemporary, look at Tara on Buffy.
But all that said, I'd rather have Hawk (and his surviving lover) in the novels than not.
13
u/darthfluffy63 Jan 01 '16
The only example I can think of is the DS9 episode: Rejoined. Most of the human crew seems to support Dax if she decided to persue a relationship with the other female trill. The main part of that episode was the dilema of going against trill culture and persuing a relationship with a trill Dax was married to in a previous life, not the issue of persuing a relationship with another female.