A Brief Guide to Star Trek

real-world human rights struggles – such as the 1960s racial equality and gender equality battles – why was it shying away from the topic of non-traditional sexuality?
    Despite his sometimes reactionary views, Roddenberry was enlightened enough to promise the depiction of gay characters in
The Next Generation
– although his promise was never properly fulfilled. ‘My attitude toward homosexuality has changed’, Roddenberry admitted in an interview in the
Humanist
in 1991. ‘I came to the conclusion that I was wrong. I was never someone who hunted down “fags”, as we used to call them on the street. I would sometimes say something anti-homosexual off the top of my head because it was thought in those days to be funny. I never really deeply believed those comments, but I gave the impression of being thoughtless in these areas. I have, over many years, changed my attitude about gay men and women.’
    He went on to add that ‘in the fifth season [of
Star Trek: The Next Generation
] viewers will see more of shipboard life [including] gay crewmembers in day-to-day circumstances’, although this statement came at a time when his actual influence over the show was virtually non-existent and he was entering the final few months of his life.
Star Trek
– the forward-looking,groundbreaking, taboo-busting show that depicted a ‘perfect’ future – had fallen way behind in television portrayals of diverse sexuality by the 1990s. The majority of pre-1970s negative portrayals of homosexual characters had been eliminated, with shows taking positive steps to depict gay characters as they would any other. Spoof soap opera
Soap
had been more ground-breaking than
Star Trek
, featuring a gay character in 1977, while other similar shows followed suit –
Dynasty
in 1981 and
Melrose Place
in 1992. Prime-time sitcom
Ellen
featured a lesbian main character from 1997, leading to
Will and Grace
and a same-sex kiss in teen show
Dawson’s Creek
. Series that followed often featured gay characters and relationships without comment.
    Where was
Star Trek
in all this? The show was stuck in its own past, refighting old battles over racism (a regular theme in
Deep Space Nine
, via Sisko and other characters) and gender equality (through Captain Janeway in
Voyager
, and countless other female characters).
The Next Generation
had made some rather half-hearted attempts at addressing the issue, as if from a sense of duty. In the romance episode ‘Qpid’, omnipotent alien trickster Q realises that Vash has the key to Picard’s heart. He comments that ‘She has found a vulnerability in you . . . a vulnerability I’ve been looking for, for years. If I had known sooner, I would have appeared as female’, making a lame joke of his potential sexual polymorphism. In the episode ‘The Host’, the
Enterprise
doctor (and sometime love interest for Picard) Beverly Crusher strikes up a relationship with an alien ‘male’ who comes from a species (the Trill, later featured as regular characters on
Deep Space Nine
) capable of co-joining with different genders. The Trill symbiont inhabits a willing human-oid host, and so can exist within a male or female body. When the male body is killed (and after a period inhabiting Commander Riker), the Trill Odan is reinstalled in a female body, and Crusher feels unable to continue the relationship she had developed with the male version of Odan. Episode director Marvin Rush rejected the idea that this represented a form of homophobia. ‘Some commented that they were unhappy with theending because it left a question. There was, or could have been, a sort of homosexual aspect to it and we chose not to go that route. I felt it was more about the nature of love, why we love and what prevents us from loving. To me the best analogy is if your beloved turned into a cockroach, could you love a cockroach? Rather than deal with the fact it was because of any homosexual bent per se, it’s just that in our culture and our society people who are heterosexual want the companionship of a male because they are female, [and] wouldn’t be able to deal with that opposite situation.’
    Another fumbled attempt to tackle the issue in
The Next Generation
concerned the J’Naii, in the episode ‘The Outcast’. This time Riker falls in love with a member of an androgynous race of aliens who has chosen, against custom, to be female. The J’Naii were all played by female actors, a crucial decision that resulted in the