[Gerold] found that his script was in disfavor. The idealism of Roddenberry's inital intentions to push the limits of television story-telling had hit the wall of business concerns. Much of the change in perception of the script resulted from Paramount's concern that because the series was syndicated, in some markets it might air in the afternoon when younger viewers would be part of the audience. Thus the studio had to weigh the mandate to produce provocative, issues-oriented episodes against the possible reaction of parents who might not want their children to see issues they felt were more suited to adult programing hours.
In the October 1992 Cinefantastique article Tackling Gay Rights, Mark Altman goes into more detail:The reaction among the staff to Grerrold's idea was mixed, as memos began to circulate about the storyline. "The way the show worked at that time was that instead of staff meetings, everyone wrote memos," said Gerrold. "There was a paper trail yard wide and a mile long on everything and the memo on this was half that. People complained the script had blatant homosexual characters. Rick Berman said we can't do this in an afternoon market in some places. Well have parents writing letters. The other half of the memos were, from people like Dorothy Fontana and Herb Wright and Bob Lewin, who said this is a very strong script. "I'm not making Rick Berman a villain because he also acknowledged the technical aspects of the script were right on the nose for what the show needed to be. But Rick Berman was the studio guy. He was watching out for the studio's interests."
In a personal communication, Gerrold used the phrase "adamantly opposed" to describe the attitude of Berman and (Roddenberry lawyer) Leonard Maizlish. He also told Jonathan Kay for his 2001 Salon article on gay Star Trek that
(..) Maizlish was hardly sensitive to the gay issue. "The last time I saw [Maizlish] I was helping Herb Wright pack up his office," says Gerrold. "The lawyer came to make sure we weren't stealing anything. To my face, he called me 'an AIDS-infected cocksucker. A fucking faggot.'"
The Continuing Mission sumarizes
Though Gerrold fought for his script and it was slated for production, he also understood his responsibilities as a professional writer under contract to the series. Thus, he followed the producers' notes to revise the script by dropping the gay characters.
Though the revised script was not as powerful as the first, more and more revisions followed. While in television it is not unusual to have ten or more rounds of revisions on a script, eventually Gerrold's script was dropped from the production schedule.
Exasperated by the way he and his work had been treated, by Roddenberry's hypocrisy and duplicity (see Altman's article for more details on this sordid affair) and supposedly disappointed that Paramount had not given him an executive-level position in production of TNG as he had been lead to expect in the initial negotiations, Gerrold left.Not everyone agrees that Blood and Fire was a particularly good script. Richard Arnold (who was little more than a personal secretary for Roddenberry and never involved in the creative processes) says it was full of stereotypes, and points to the following scene:
FREEMAN
(to Eakins, very
conversationally)
Y'know it's funny.
EAKINS
What is -- ?
FREEMAN
How much I worry about you -- being
on Security Detail and all. I'm
always afraid that --
(stops himself)
Never mind.
EAKINS
(Shakes his head.)
Hey. There's nothing to worry about.
Really.
(a joke:)
We don't have bulls-eyes on our
uniforms any more.
FREEMAN
(gently)
Yeah, you can joke, but --
(shakes head)
I know the odds, Danny. I --
EAKINS
Hey!
(points, speaks firmly)
Don't talk like that.
Your host has difficulty being offended at that piece of dialog. Given the high mortality rate of "redshirts" on Star Trek, Freeman's concern does not seem exaggerated. It turns out that Freeman, the medical technician, not the security officer Eakins, dies later in the script - a clever twist on one of Star Trek's long-standing clichés. A more questionable element is a scene where, in an obvious parallel to AIDS hysteria on Earth, a crewman who claims to represent "some of the families" asks Picard to not proceed with the rescue operation in order to not risk exposing the Enterprise. Picard's answer that his ship is "not a democracy", and that he is not "throwing away half the human race because the other half is scared" is an impeccable response to bigotry and fearmongering. But both are highly inapropriate for Starfleet officers in the first place. Gerrold's characters slip back into 20th century behaviors for the sake of making a point.
But these are minor flaws that a rewrite could have fixed. The argument that "Blood and Fire" was a bad script is apparently part of a mythology created by Roddenberry and his apologists to explain away the inconvenient fact that Roddenberry said one thing and did another, and that a good script was dismissed because of conservative studio politics - for featuring gay characters and tackling the issue of AIDS.
Kay concludes in the Salon article that
Roddenberry's subordinates have deliberately kept the official "Star Trek" canon free of any explicit mention of homosexuality since the creator made his comments to the Gaylaxians 15 years ago.
and relates the following story Arnold told him about the filming of the Ten Forward scene of "The Offspring" where Guinan teaches Lal about human love and dating:
"According to the script, Guinan was supposed to start telling Lal, 'When a man and a woman are in love ...' and in the background, there would be men and women sitting at tables, holding hands," Arnold says. "But Whoopi refused to say that. She said, 'This show is beyond that. It should be "When two people are in love."' And so it was decided on set that one of the tables in the background should have two men holding hands -- or two women, or whatever. But someone ran to a phone and made a call to the production office and that was nixed. [Producer] David Livingston came down and made sure that didn't happen."
But the idea of gay characters on Star Trek refused to die. Hummel and the Gaylaxians started a very succesful letter writing campaign that caught the attention of the mass media and was endorsed by Trek celebrities such as Leonard Nimoy. Initial reactions from Paramount were hostile. Susan Sacket, Roddenberry's executive assistant, wrote in a letter to Franklin Hummel dated March 12, 1991:
During the course of our production, there have been many special interest groups who have lobbied for their particular cause. It is Gene Roddenberry's policy to present Star Trek as he sees it and not to be governed by outside influences.
Such was the non-understanding of the issue that Trek's most loyal fans, who were only trying to make Star Trek a more perfect representation of its own ideals, were dismissed as a "special interest group" and an "outside influence". Then, as now, the issue is not homosexuality. It is the moral credibility of Star Trek's utopian vision itself.
But Roddenberry's view of gay people seemed to evolve, and he apparently came to realize that a mere issue episode like Blood and Fire would not be sufficient anyway. In August 1991, The Advocate carried an offical Roddenberry statement that the fifth season of Star Trek: The Next Generation would see identifiable regular gay characters. Unfortunately, Roddenberry died a few months later, and his heir, Rick Beman, had no intention of ever making good on that promise. Gay characters, regular or otherwise, never materialized on The Next Generation, nor was it ever acknowledged in dialogue that gays and lesbians even exist in the Star Trek universe.
Instead, a single "problem" episode was produced (The Outcast), which, in a highly metaphorical way, could be construed as advocating acceptance of gays and lesbians. In that episode, an alien was oppressed
by her androgynous society for being female and heterosexual! Berman wanted The Outcast to finally and permanently dispose of the annoying gay issue. Jenkins writes in Science Fiction Audiences
"The Outcast" would put the issue behind them once and for all, carefully containing its implications within a single story set on an alien world which had no previous contact with the Federation and, under the circumstances, probably wouldn't want to get into communication again."
Most gay and lesbian Star Trek fans rejected that episode as ambivalent at best, and a cynical slap in the face at worst (see this for a typical review). They had demanded nothing but to be represented on the Enterprise like everyone else. They positively, emphatically, had not wanted an issue episode that portrayed their sexual orientation as a problem to be solved, or themselves as misfits or, well, outcasts. By not permitting even the smallest allusion at the existence of same-sex relationships, and simultaneously producing the morally vacuous Outcast, the Trek producers added insult to injury. Gay fans had demanded the unique positive vision of their future place in society that only Star Trek could offer and were handed a depressing commentary on their suffering and social persecution in the present, which, to complete the injury, was not even recognized by straight viewers as such.
Many heterosexual viewers had no clue that this was supposed to be about homosexuality and felt rather strongly that the episode was on freedom of choice and human rights in general. Indeed, one can read into The Outcast almost anything one wants to see, and if the intention is to see a a rebellion of a brave heterosexual against a society dominated by fascist homosexuals (a paranoid fantasy that is popular in right-wing circles these days), than that is what The Outcast will be.
Atara Stein, an associate professor of English literature at California State University Fullerton, comments on this obvious ambiguity in an article titled Minding One's P's and Q's: Homoeroticism in Star Trek: The Next Generation.:
Star Trek is notorious for its tentative treatment of sexuality, most notably in two episodes, "The Host" and "The Outcast," which operate in a twilight realm in which sexuality can only be hinted at, and in an ambiguous fashion at that. In "The Outcast," a member of an androgynous society falls in love with the male first officer and declares her desire to adopt a female gender identity; ultimately she is brainwashed by her own people into an acceptance of their enforced androgyny. This episode could be read, of course, as a reverse allegory of discrimination against gays and lesbians, but the fact that it is reversed (the character's rebellion consists of affirming heterosexuality) testifies to how careful Star Trek's creators are to maintain a level of deniability. In addition, the androgynous species, presumably representative of gays and lesbians, turn out to be the bad guys, enforcing their "deviant" sexuality by means of brainwashing. In "The Host," the female chief medical officer falls in love with an apparent male, a member of a species known as the Trill, who is the host of a symbiont, a parasitical creature that coexists with willing humanoid hosts. When the symbiont is implanted into a female body, Dr. Crusher (Gates McFadden) is unable to accept her lover. Again, this episode disappointed gay and lesbian fans in its suggestion that Crusher (frequently featured in lesbian slash stories) would be so restricted by her heterosexuality. As Henry Jenkins notes, these episodes "can be seen as similar plays with connotation, often threatened with being swamped by some larger, more 'universal' concern" than gender and sexuality.
An analysis of sexuality in Star Trek by Kathleen Moran and Joe Sartelle titled A Kiss is Still a Kiss ... or is it? remarks that
(..) at the level of representation, "The Outcast" is positively reactionary. Theoretically, the J'Naii could have been played by either male or female actors, or both, since they were supposed to be androgynous. In actuality, they were all played by women. The Planet Without Gender turns out, upon visual inspection, to be an offensive stereotype: the Planet of the Lesbian Separatists -- drab, grim, oppressive, unattractive beings who regard attraction to men as an intolerable sickness. When Riker and Soren finally got around to the inevitable Kiss of Forbidden Love, it wasn't controversial in the slightest: we knew that Riker was really kissing a woman, not just an androgynous being who thinks she's a woman. In that sense, "The Outcast" reversed the approach taken by the kiss in "Plato's Stepchildren." Although the context of Kirk and Uhura's kiss was conservative (they didn't want to do it), the visual image of that kiss was not -- it transcended the plot and demanded to be "read" as a controversial, even daring, social and political statement. In "The Outcast," in contrast, the seemingly radical context of Riker and Soren's kiss was overwhelmed by the conservative casting choices. Apparently Jonathan Frakes, who plays Riker, lobbied to have a man cast as Soren -- a decision which would have made all the difference, and turned "The Outcast" into a truly radical and controversial treatment of the complex issue of sexual desire and identity.
GLAAD commented on the transparent hyprocisy of the episode by noting that
On the one hand, Soren gave an impassioned speech saying "I am female. I was born that way . . . All of the loving things you do with each other, that is what we do. And for that we are called misfits and deviants and criminals." But in the end she is "cured," or maybe brainwashed, and rejects Riker. Many found the conclusion ambiguous and disturbing. While there were elements to praise, no mention was made of gays or lesbians in the future or about anti-gay discrimination in Earth's past. Both would have been natural to mention.
Henry Jenkins writes in Science Fiction Audiences, with more than a trace of irony:
If allegory depends upon the readers' abilities to fill its silences with their own voices, to complete the statements the text has left unfinished, the fans saw only the gaps and the evasions. Nowhere do any of the characters make explicit reference to the possibility of homosexuality nor do they directly confront homophobia. Homosexuality remains a connotative ghost, still that form of sexual desire that dares not speak its name. The Gaylaxians recognized that what made this episode particularly dangerous was its insubstantiability, its refusal to state directly and explicitly what its message was intended to be:
"The depiction of Soren's society seemed to be something taken right from Rush Limbaugh's show or Pat Buchanan's campaign literature. If you listen to those people, you'll hear them talking about how the feminist and homosexual political agendas want to destroy the traditional family and make society into a sexless, genderless collection of politically correct clones, and if you don't toe the line, you'll be censored. Soren's society was a depiction of those people's worst nightmares. It seems to me that if you were of that mindset to begin with, this show did nothing but confirm those unfounded fears, and nothing to challenge them. It was so ambiguous, so valueless and empty, as to leave it open for this interpretation."
The denotative dimensions of the story - the literal level of the narrative - had such force, they feared, that it would completely swamp the connotative meanings of the allegory. What appears on screen, at the most basic denotative level, is an 'outspoken' defence of heterosexuality, including that daring moment when Riker and Soren, Jonathan Frakes and Melinda Culea, break all social taboos and kiss each other on the lips, right there on television.
Franklin Hummel reacted to the episode with understandable disgust:
They said basically, "we should be accepting and tolerant of people who have different sexual preferences but we aren't going to show any on our show.We aren't going to include any on the crew." .
Note that the original show did not have a "black" episode that was directed against racism, an episode that featured black characters interacting positively with an all-white crew. Such condescending treatment would have been nothing but racist itself. The original show had an ongoing black crewmember, Uhura, who was neither a servant nor a comedic side-kick. She was simply one of the bridge crew, which was a more powerful statement against racism than any number of issue episodes could have been. The character of Uhura inspired self-esteem and self-confidence in many black teenagers at the time, some of which went on to become movie stars (Whoopi Goldberg), astronauts (Dr. Mae Jemison, first black American woman in space) or Star Trek actors (LeVar Burton).
Gays and lesbians, too, are not an "issue", but people, who live real lifes. One cannot convey that reality from the zoo perspective of an "issue" episode. One can only do that with an ongoing, fully-developed, positive gay character whose sexual orientation is just another facet in a complex, engaging personality, and who would be just as interesting even if he or she was heterosexual.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has demonstrated that simple concept beautifully. Between late season 4 (1999-2000) and late season 6 (2001-2002) Willow (one of the main characters) is in a same-sex
relationship. Her girlfriend Tara is seamlessly integrated into the plot, and the relationship is not singled out for special treatment. Willow and Tara are not gay
characters, they are simply characters who happen to be gay. Likewise, their relationship is not about being lesbians, it is about being in love.
Some TV executives fail - or pretend to fail - to grasp that concept, and instead believe - or profess to believe - that what is being asked of them is a stereotypical token character who is only one thing and nothing else - gay - and is only given screen time to discuss issues related to homosexuality, but otherwise invisible. Such a thing is of course blatantly offensive to true liberal sensibilities, which is why they cannot show gay or lesbian characters, not now, not ever. Such was the holier-than-thou response I received from Majel Barret Roddenberry to a letter I wrote in 1998, asking why there were no gay characters on Earth: Final Conflict. Ronald D. Moore has made similar comments, arguing that homosexuality will be a non-issue in the future and thus can be ignored. Nothing new here: the same straw man has been built and demolished by the defenders of the status quo ever since gay Star Trek fans started asking uncomfortable questions. "What would you have us do, put pink triangles on them? Have them sashay down the corridor?", Richard Arnold rhetorically asked gay trekkers at a Boston Star Trek convention in Februrary 1991.
With "liberals" like these, who needs conservatives? They see gays and lesbians only as laughable stereotypes, as victims of discrimination, as token characters in coming-out dramas, and as dying of AIDS. When they hear the words "gay, lesbian & Star Trek" in a row, they no doubt envision the Captain declaring shipwide "gay pride day" over the comm system, male officers wearing rainbow-colored or leather uniforms and refering to each other as "she", raunchy same-sex holo-orgies and designated cruising decks. They seem honestly, positively incapable of imagining gay and lesbian human beings as simply living their lifes like everyone else - dating, being in relationships, breaking up - experiencing the same ups and downs of human love and companionship as everyone else. "But how can we show gay or lesbian characters if homosexuality is no longer controversial and without resorting to stereotypes?", they ask. The answer is obvious - the same way heterosexual characters are portrayed as undeniably heterosexual, even though the label is never used and sexual orientation is a non-issue. The same way Section 31: Rogue shows gay characters in a dignified and matter-of-fact way. The same way Babylon 5 pain- and effortlessly established the existence of gay marriage.
The "we can't show gay people exist because homosexuality is no longer controversial" arguments ties into another common argument: "Star Trek is not about sex!" Besides being based on the conservative myth that any mention of homosexuality is in itself sexually explicit and thus akin to heterosexual pornography, this argument is also factually incorrect. For proof, I refer the reader to 'Sex in Star Trek: A quantitative comparison of indications of heterosexuality and homosexuality, a little study written by gay Star Trek fan Michael Roeder in 1997 that documents about 70 overt references to the heterosexuality of about three dozen Trek characters and no overt references to homosexuality. Roeder concludes:
Clearly Star Trek considers homosexuality so normal, so average, so utterly boring that it doesn't need to write or say anything about it. Meanwhile, it feels the need to reassure its 20th Century Earth audience that heterosexuality is a normal, natural, and acceptable alternate lifestyle, so it liberally sprinkles minor hints and allegations of heterosexuality throughout all of its stories.
If sexual orientation is a non-issue in the future, and if the sterotypes are gone, you show that gay characters exist either by introducing a continuing gay or lesbian character, or by simply putting an off-hand reference to a same-sex relationship or marriage into dialogue. Jenkins quotes a fan who puts it very eloquently:
I want to see men holding hands and kissing in Ten-Forward. I want to see the smile of joy on Captain Picard's face as he, as captain, joins two women together in holy union, or pain across his face when he tells a man that his same-sex mate has been killed in battle. I want to hear Troi assure a crew member, questioning their mixed emotions, that bisexuality is a way to enjoy the best of what both sexes have to offer. I want to see crew members going about their business and acting appropriately no matter what their sexual orientation in every situation.
But if it has not happened in over 10 years, then it is probably not going to happen in the future. Other TV shows now have gay leads, so what could Mr. Berman and Paramount possibly be afraid of? The boycott-hungry christian-right crowd is not exactly known to watch "liberal" shows anyway. When Babylon 5 revealed two of its lead characters to be bisexual or lesbian in its second season, and established that gay marriage is legally recognized, and generally accepted, on Earth in the 23rd century, there was no uproar, no drop in ratings, and no boycotts.
Responding to a religious viewer who objected to Babylon 5's inclusiveness, J. Michael Straczynski said
My job is not to reinforce your personal political, social or religious beliefs. My job is not to reinforce MY personal political, social or religious beliefs. Then it isn't art or storytelling anymore, it's simply propaganda. My job is to tell this story, about these people, AS people, as mixed and varied as they are today. And there is no outside objective criteria as to what is, or isn't necessary in a story; that is the sole province of the author. You may or may not like it. You may or may not choose to watch it. Just as people who don't like to see religion and god discussed on TV may dislike it or choose not to watch it.