As Hollywood scriptwriters put finishing touches on shows for the fall television season, participants in a grass-roots campaign to add gay and lesbian characters to TV's most popular science-fiction series are celebrating. This season, after four years on the air, Star Trek: The Next Generation will finally portray gay and lesbian crew members on the U.S.S. Enterprise, according to the show's producers.
The inclusion of gay and lesbian characters will expand on the tradition of minority representation that the first Star Trek series established in the '60s. The earlier series foresaw a universe where all beings were equal, and the crew of the starship Enterprise bore witness to that goal, with members of Asian, African, and Eastern European origins and a small number of aliens. The program also features the first interracial kiss on American network television.
In Star Trek: The Next Generation, which debuted in 1987, one main character is both black and blind (he sees with a prosthesis); aliens, including former arch-enemies the Klingons, are more common in the crew of the new Enterprise; and even the series's famous mission statement, "to boldly go where no man has gone before," has been changed to a gender-neutral form. But in over 150 episodes of both the old and new series, not one openly gay or lesbian character had been featured. That's about to change.
Adding lesbian and gay roles is an opportunity to expand on Star Trek's theme of utopian equality, according to Franklin Hummel, director of Boston's Gaylactic Network, an umbrella group of gay and lesbian science- fiction fans. "From the very beginning, the show was always very racially and ethnically mixed and very positive in its presentation of minorities," Hummel says. "It came out during the '60s, which was just prior to Stonewall and the gay liberation movement. When the new series came along, this struck us as an excellent opportunity to introduce a gay character as a crew member, possibly one of the main characters of the show."
Though all the primary and secondary characters have been decisively portrayed as heterosexual, the new series has twice made allusions to homosexuality. In one, a male android who serves on the Enterprise is kidnapped and forced to change from his uniform to the clothes his abductor wants him to wear. The thief, who is depicted as unctuous and unscrupulous, tells the android, "Personally, I'd be delighted to see you go around naked. I assume you have no modesty." More troubling was the episode "The Host," in which the ship's surgeon, a woman, falls in love with a symbiont whose human hosts have been dying. The doctor reluctantly endures a temporary change in body while waiting for a more medically compatible host; she reacts with stiff unease when that host turns out to be another woman.
"The Host," Hummel says, exemplifies the problems of ambiguity and invisibility that would clear up by adding gay or lesbian characters. The way the doctor apparently backs away from loving another woman troubled Hummel most. "In a way, I found it weakened the point of the story," he says. "Was the problem that the rapid changes were too much for her, or was it the fact that it was a same-sex relationship?" Hummel believes the episode would have been clearer had the final host been a prepubescent male or some other man the doctor would have rejected.
Issues like these prompted the Gaylactic Network to coordinate a letter- writing campaign supporting the inclusion of gay and lesbian characters in the show. The organization contacted its 500 members, who belong to the eight affiliate chapters that have sprung up since the first group formed in 1986. Far from being a special-interest group, Hummel sees the Gaylactics as a club for generalists in science fiction who happen to be gay. Gay science fiction is "only a narrow focus in the perception of the gay community," Hummel says, "but in some ways it's less narrow than a gay bowling group" because of the diversity of science fiction.
"The network does have a dual goal," Hummel explains. "Part of it is to reach our to the science-fiction community and help build an understanding of the gay community. "It was this role of education that the Gaylactics assumed in pressing for gay and lesbian roles on Star Trek.
Hummel says the campaign was a measure of last resort, coming after years of informally lobbying Gene Roddenberry, executive producer of all the Star Trek series and movies and the nexus of creative vision for everything starry and trekky.
"In the four years now that Star Trek: The Next Generation has been running," Hummel says, "I and others have constantly written to Roddenberry and the Star Trek office asking them to introduce a gay character--not necessarily to show a gay-themed episode, though that would be good, but just to introduce a gay character in the show. Nothing came of it. Basically, we had heard that the show would probably last, at the most, six seasons. After four years of trying, we figured it was now or never."
The organized letter writing began in May, and by July its effect was being felt. Roddenberry's personal assistant, Ernest Over, testifies to the reach of the campaign, saying the Star Trek office has received "more letters on this than we've had on anything else." The letters weren't ignored. On the contrary, Over says, "We've been looking at the letters that came in, and some of them have had some interesting suggestions."
On July 1 Roddenberry released a prepared statement to The ADVOCATE saying, in part, "In the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, viewers will see more of shipboard life in some episodes, which will, among other things, include gay crew members in day-to-day circumstances." Initially, though, the flood of mail met with a stock response, summed up in another prepared statement from Roddenberry for The ADVOCATE. "I've never found it necessary to do a special homosexual-theme story," Roddenberry's statement says, "because people, in the timeline of The Next Generation, the 24th century, will not be labeled. I've always said that when a good script comes along, of course, we'll consider it."
Over, who is openly gay, says Star Trek: The Next Generation is in a unique position to fulfill Roddenberry's power-to-the-people philosophy. A Writers Guild guide for writers shows that Star Trek is alone in accepting scripts from the outside world. Over says that of 26 shows aired, four are written by our-of-house writers. People involved in The Next Generation say the right gay- and lesbian-inclusive script just hasn't reached their desks.
That doesn't mean that no scripts with gay themes or characters have been submitted. One story in particular, "Blood and Fire" by noted science- fiction writer David Gerrold, has become a cause celebre among gay and lesbian activists and on the Star Trek convention circuit. In the script, the Enterprise discovers a ruined ship whose crew was wiped out by a blood-borne infection, which Gerrold admits is an AIDS metaphor; the story also had two incedental gay male characters.
"All I had was a medical technician working with the doctor and a security guy," expailns Gerrold. "At no point do they do anything overt. But somebody turns to them and says, "How long have you two been together?" The other guy says, "Since the academy." That lets you know that they're gay, but if you don't know about gay people, like if you're under the age of 13, they're just good friends."
"Blood and Fire" never made it to the air, and activists have assumed homophobia was the reason for rejection. Fans reportedly have berated Roddenberry at conventions for years. "If you're telling us you never get any good gay scripts," activists charged, "why wasn't this one produced?" Over says, "Good scripts are accepted, and this script was deemed not to be a good script, for reasons other than the references, the characterization of gays."
Gerrold concurs, clarifying that he had written the gay characters out of the draft script by the time the decision not to air the story was made. "nobody ever told me why the script was shelved, but after the fact there was a small matter of a Writers Guild arbitration over some back wages I was owed, and I think there was some ill feeling on the part of Roddenberry's lawyer or someone; as a result, the script got shelved. But to the best of my knowledge, it was not shelved because there were gay characters in it, because the gay characters had already been written out before that."
Over hopes that predicaments like the "Blood and Fire" controversy will be avoided in the future by a growing awareness of gay and lesbian visibility among the show's writers and creative staff. He states, "Even though our stories are set in the 24th century, we still live in the 20th century, and things take time to change. It has taken four seasons, but I think the change is there now. The attitude is right for this to happen."
Over not only holds no grudges against the letter-writing campaign but also approves of the process. "You know, you effect change by talking about it and asking people to do it," he says. "That's how it happens." He draws a parallel with his own experience as an elected member of the city of West Hollywood's Lesbian and Gay Advisory Council. "We do the same thing with the city council and other groups," he explains. "When you have something you would like to see changed, you start by letting people know that. It's a basic and reasonable tactic for activists."
Hummel sees the promised introduction of lesbian and gay characters as benign at worst but also as a possible source of new-found strength for the show. "The vast majority of Star Trek fans would welcome it," he says, "and if not welcome it, they would accept it with no problem and no negative reaction. As Star Trek fans, we're trying to not only rationally but also emotionally say that this would be good for Star Trek. This is true to the theme of the series. This is not going to weaken the series. It will make it stronger."