Scott Bakula gets the point perfectly. He told Metrosource, a New York gay magazine in early 2002
As the fifth Star Trek show was being launched, a familiar pattern once again emerged. Rumors circulated that now, finally, there would be a gay character. Specifically, it was said that Lieutenant Malcolm Reed would be gay. For an August 2001 story on Enterprise, TV Guide writer Michael Logan confronted Rick Berman with that rumour, only to get the usual lukewarm denial, the kind that slams the door shut except for a tiny crack to keep the gay fans hoping. Reportedly, Berman said
"That's totally untrue. Well I shouldn't say totally untrue. It has not been discussed. One of these characters may turn out to be gay. We've just decided not to make an issue of it for the time being."
And here we go again. 15 years of discussion have apparently left Mr. Berman completely and utterly clueless as to what this whole thing is about. To repeat it for the zillionth time, it is not about making homosexuality an issue. It is about having a gay character who's sexual orientation is not an issue. Maybe this zen-ish idea of making a point by not making a point is just too much for Berman to comprehend, or maybe he's just a professional cynic who counts on the short attention span of the public and the mass media to get away with this kind of insult to our intelligence. The bottom line is, as far as Berman is concerned, we're apparently still on square one.
Scott Bakula gets the point perfectly. He told Metrosource, a New York gay magazine in early 2002
"I'm not really familiar with the history of this particular issue with regards to Star Trek; in fact, the first I ever heard of it was at our first junket when somebody asked if there was going to be an opportunity for a gay or lesbian character on the show. I was surprised at the question, because I had just assumed that over the course of the years that it had been addressed. I was surprised it was even an issue. Since then I haven't sat down with Rick and Brannon to discuss it. It does seem awkward [that nothing has ever happened].
I haven't heard anything coming down the pipeline, but I would be in favor of it. I would hope it would be handled in a great way. It would be wonderful, in my opinion, if it was not such a huge issue, but was just there.
Andy Mangels asked Dominic Keating at the Creation Star Trek Convention in Portland, January, 2002, whether his character would be gay, and Keating said that it had been discussed and rejected. Only days later, in the episode Silent Enemy, Lt. Reed was established as heterosexual, and one week later, in the episode Dear Doctor the same was done for (to?) Dr. Phlox.
Ensign Mayweather and chief engineer Tucker had their coming-out as heterosexuals in the pilot, T'Pol in the episode Breaking the Ice, and Captain Archer is of course straight by default. That leaves Ensign Hoshi Sato.
So what do the gay male trek fans have to look forward to? Once again, apparently nothing, except seeing Connor Trinneer in underwear.
At least these days there is one lame excuse less to explain away the lack of GLB characters. In March 2002, Brannon Braga told Cinescape Online that he and partner Rick Berman aren't shying away from sex in the new Star Trek series:
"Sensuality is sexual tension, and there's a lot of sexual tension between Trip and T'Pol and Archer and T'Pol. Trip got pregnant. There was a lot of sensuality in that one, and we have a show coming up where T'Pol gets nasty with a Vulcan. And that's a real sexy show."
He further revealed that "Rick and I have been allowed to bring our own sensibilities to the show in a more natural way, which we haven't been allowed to do in some of the other shows."
If what we have seen so far on Enterprise represents the true Berman and Braga, than Star Trek's leading men are social Neanderthals. In terms of racial, gender and social politics, Enterprise represents a giant, reactionary step backwards. As if Berman and Braga had taken their own idea of creating a show that precedes the original show a little too literally, Enterprise feels like a 1950s vision of white, male America conquering space. Five out of seven main characters are male, five out of seven are white, and three out of five human characters are Anglo-Saxon. The only human woman on the bridge once again holds the secretarial post of Uhura, and she's duely scared by aliens and by space travel. A female captain? Been there, done that in Voyager. A black captain? Been there, done that in DS9. A non-American captain? Been there, done that in TNG. Now that previous shows have disposed of the charge that Star Trek was not living up to its own philosophy, the captain can default to being a white American man again.
In the March 25, 2002, issue of The Nation, in an article titled Beam Us Back, Scotty!, Donna Minkowitz writes
The titles, set to a hymn that combines the first Christian references ever heard on Star Trek with some boasts about resisting alien domination, show drawings of the ships of fifteenth-century European colonial powers and European maps and globes from the same period. On one is scripted "HMS Enterprise." This jibes neatly with the plot, the first ever on Star Trek in which racism is applauded. The normal, virile, white spacemen of Earth are being held back by the ridiculous sensitivities of the Vulcans, pushy, geeky aliens who want them to respect the cultural differences of all the alien races.
The Vulcans have withheld scientific information from "us" because they are envious, effete dominators who can't stand our vitality, our creativity, our closeness to life. Want me to spell it out? What they really hate is our balls. In this way, they are straight out of Nazi propaganda about Jews, so that I almost expected to see little comics of Vulcans poisoning the wells of Aryans and strangling Nordic farmers with their moneybags. Mr. Spock, the Vulcan in the original series, has been widely read as either a Jew or an Asian, but he was also the sexiest and most popular character on the show. If he represented a nonwhite race, he was one that the viewers desperately wanted to be. No such luck here. T'Pol, the Vulcan science officer that the humans are forced to serve with as a condition of getting Vulcan astronomical charts, is a caricature of a bitter woman of color, obsessed with human (i.e., white) evils, bleating endlessly about self-determination for Klingons and other people whose names sound dumb to humans. She's the unworthy affirmative-action hire foisted on "us" by cowards and spineless administrators.
Enterprise fares little better in the sexism department. In the pilot, Tucker and Mayweather drool like 20th century adolescents over alien dancers- all female, no males. T'Pol has been built up by Paramount as the show's resident 'sexy character' from day one, while Tripp Tucker has been given no such treatment. In 'Shuttlepod One', we learn that Lt. Reed is having sexual fantasies about T'Pol, while we have yet to see a crewmember fantasize about one of the male characters.
The disparity confirms that the show is being written, produced and marketed exclusively from a heterosexual male perspective. It seems unlikely that Star Trek would make one step forward (include GLBT characters) after just having made three giant steps backward.
For the producers, the idea of gay characters seems to have become mainly a laughing matter, a subject for cheap jokes. In a July 2002 Interview with Dominic Keating, Trekweb contributor Steve Krutzler describes the following scene that happened at the Florida Vulkon convention in Tampa:
Brannon isn't left out. Keating wasn’t exactly amused to hear rumors last year surrounding his character’s sexuality; he had just recently finished playing a bisexual ghost (!) for another production, and Braga was more than happy to make him sweat at the prospect.
”When the TV Guide came out with the launch I was lining up at the checkout and thought ‘oh look at that…Dominic Keating, British actor, will be joining the cast of ENTERPRISE… as the first gay character in STAR TREK!’”
The room erupts at the setup. After a moment, he continues. ”I rang up Brannon and said ‘what’s this about me being a homosexual?’ He says ‘It’s going to be wonderful Dominic. You’ll be outed in November; TV Guide wants to give you the cover, The Advocate wants to do a huge spread on you at Christmas. The publicity will be amazing!’”
Leaving aside the mocking nature of the comment, it is actually quite accurate. Introducing a gay main character would indeed have generated considerable publicity for the ailing franchise. A large number of people would have subsequently started to watch the show just to see how the gay characters is developed, and given good writing, many of them could have become regular viewers. It is sad that Braga considers gay characters to be so beyond the pale that he would rather have Star Trek be gay-free than succesful.
More recent comments made by Berman and Braga can be found here.