‘Gayosity’ is Cheapening
That seems to be the point “CmdrR” makes about Phase II’s forthcoming “gay episode”:
“Blood and Fire” will suffer if gayosity becomes a plot point. It cheapens the meaning of acceptance, which really is to ignore homosexuality because it’s just commonplace. Don’t need or want Brokeback Trek. But, I do appreciate the fact that that line has long ago been crossed and we didn’t even blink.
Except there’s been a lot of blinking.
The “Gay Trek Scenes in [Blood and Fire]” thread on the Phase II forums is the longest ever in that board’s history. A similar thread on TrekMovie.com had to be cut off after 229 posts by Webmaster Anthony Pascale because of the excessive flaming on the topic.
He wrote, “I do not have time to police this so I am closing it down. A discussion about if and how Trek could deal with gay characters is one thing. However, this is not a place to flame any group of people. This thread is closed.”
On that thread, Phase II’s executive producer, James Cawley, explained the tack “Blood and Fire” will be taking:
“Blood and Fire” features a Gay couple, but it is not about being gay. They just happen to be gay and caught up in the unusual circumstances that are happening on the ship. To everyone else on the Enterprise, they are just a normal couple who are in love with one another. There have been many openly gay folks who have contributed to Star Trek’s creation over the last 40 or so years. It is time that they are included in Trek’s optimistic vision of the future, That is my prime reason in doing this episode, that and keeping Gene’s promise that gay people would be included in Trek.
So is “acceptance,” as CmdrR asserted, “really to ignore homosexuality”? Is that we want? To be ignored? To still exist in the future but to remain silent and unremarkable? More importantly, is that how we want to be portrayed today, regardless of the setting of the story being told?
When CmdrR refers to “Brokeback Trek” is he asserting that love stories featuring two people of the same sex has no place in Star Trek? Or is the depiction of affection between gay characters just too much “gayosity”?
These are troubling questions, and the homophobia underlying them won’t simply go away because we imagine a future in which being gay doesn’t matter. We have to fight such insidious, seemingly progressive views now. Today. Science fiction has always proudly taken this role in the past; the original Star Trek in particular used to do so all the time. Even Hidden Frontier and Odyssey creator Rob Caves acknowledges the need for this in a recent interview on TrekWeb:
Q. You were the first to introduce gay characters in a Star Trek series, fan made or not, a fact that made a lot of controversy among fans. What is your opinion on this and how this affects Odyssey‘s storyline?
A. We … let it stand on its own as just another normal part of what it means to be humanoid … to show that homosexuals are normal people, that they aren’t hyper-feminine, or other stereotypes, and that they weren’t genetically written out of the gene pool (assuming that is even possible; current science suggests that it is not), that they have a value to society, and everybody can live together without fear or inequality.
Given the long way we have to go to reach that lofty goal, isn’t it worth being proud of who we are right now?
[...] 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 [...]