Gay Extinction?
I admire the notion that humankind will have sufficiently progressed by the 24th century to make sexual orientation a non-issue. But a notion — a hope, really — is all that it is. And buying into that notion in the 21st century is dangerous because there’s no guarantee that we will have advanced like that unless we deal with the issue forthrightly right now.
We aren’t making science fiction today for audiences of the future; we’re making it for present-day society, where we continue to suffer from profound prejudice and hatred. It’s fine and dandy to gloss over this controversy by claiming it all doesn’t matter in the 24th Century. But we don’t live there. We never will. This issue and our audience and the prejudices we strive to confront exist in the here and now, where the labels still matter a lot. Today, people’s lives are torn apart, threatened, and even terminated based on those labels.
I’m a person of color, as well as gay, and I have the same visceral reaction to the well-intentioned comment many white people make, “I don’t see color, I just see people.” But when you refuse to see my color you’re also refusing to see a big part of who I am. The challenges, heartbreaks, the joy I derive from my heritage — these things are all bound up in who I am and how I look. To “not” see that denies a vital part of who I am. While I may not always like to be thought of as “the Latino guy,” it’s still who I am. Yes, in Star Trek, we see people of color and their treatment is what you’d call colorblind. But as so many people of color who love Trek have said, simply seeing Uhura or Sulu on the bridge meant so much.
The same is true for gays, except we look just like everyone else, so “seeing” us means we need the label. No, on Hidden Frontier we never hung a sign around Ro’s neck saying “”GAY” or “REALLY ONLY INTO DUDES BUT SEXUALLY CONFUSED AT THE MOMENT,” or had any character explicitly say those things. That’s what we screenwriters call “on the nose” writing — being too obvious, too explicit in what your characters say. It’s bad form. So we simply portray it on screen as you would any other characters’ love stories. But it’s in the real world where we should be unafraid to state who Ro or Peter Kirk or Alex Freeman are because it matters to people struggling with their own sexual identity in families and communities still all too willing to reject or strike them down for it.
Don’t misunderstand: I have nothing against bisexuality, and I’m comfortable with people seeing how I wrote Ro and interpreting that he’s bisexual rather than gay. If the character’s struggle best speaks to them within that framework, great. As a writer it’s most important to me that my work resonate within a viewer as deeply as possible, even if the resonance is different from my intention. But just like I was glad to hear J.K. Rowling announce that Dumbledore was gay, I needed to state that everything I wrote and planned for Ro was informed by my rock-solid commitment to him being gay. People have reacted differently to the notion of Dumbledore being gay, some even saying that because he was never explicitly shown to be gay, it’s therefore irrelevant and they’ll take their Harry Potter with no cream in their coffee, as it were, thank you very much.
[...] Peter as one part of the male couple. Interestingly, two decades later, that portrayal proved controversial when “Blood and Fire, Part 1″ debuted a year [...]