A Brief Guide to Star Trek

episode appearing to be set on a planet of lesbians. ‘We had wanted to do a gay rights story’, said teleplay writer Jeri Taylor of ‘The Outcast’. ‘We’d not been able to figure out how to do it in an interesting science fiction,
Star Trek
-ian way. As a woman, I know what it feels like to be disenfranchised’. Despite that positive intention, Riker actor Jonathan Frakes felt the point would have been strengthened if the role of Soren, his love interest, had been played by a male, not a more televisually acceptable female. ‘I didn’t think they [the producers] were gutsy enough to take it where they should have’, he said. ‘Soren should have been more obviously male.’ Michael Piller thought the episode had finally done the job of addressing the gay issue in
Star Trek
: ‘We decided to tell a story about sexual intolerance.’ However, many fans continued to feel that a previously ground-breaking show had simply continued to sidestep a key issue of the late twentieth century.
    Picard faced similar gender cross-dressing trouble in ‘Liaisons’, as he found himself involved with an alien male Lyaaran disguised as a female human who uses Picard to ex -perience the emotion of ‘love’. The episode was more of a spoof of Stephen King’s
Misery
– as Picard is essentially kidnapped byan obsessed alien – than a serious look at cross-gender relationships. It was further watered down by the introduction of two of the same species, who spend time on the
Enterprise
experiencing other human emotions via the crewmembers.
    This was the problem with
Star Trek
in the eyes of the LGBT community, the majority of whom simply wanted the series to introduce an otherwise unremarkable gay character or two. Instead, the series attempted to produce ‘issue’ stories, written (or more often ‘constructed’) by people who did not have a clear understanding or any personal involvement in the issues.
    One person who did understand from his personal experience of being gay was David Gerrold, writer of
The Original Series
episode ‘The Trouble With Tribbles’, who’d also been involved in establishing
The Next Generation
. He’d developed a storyline for an early episode entitled ‘Blood and Fire’, an allegory about the then-prominent explosion of AIDS among the gay community. The outline featured a clearly gay male couple and the effect on them of alien bloodworms, and Gerrold was confident of getting it made as at the time Roddenberry was saying positive things about how the new show should continue the diversity of
The Original Series
. Returning from holiday, Gerrold found that his story was not to be made after all, as Roddenberry’s idealism had run up against the reality of broadcasting business concerns. Paramount felt that as the show was syndicated and could be seen in the afternoon in some markets, such subjects were not suitable for ‘family entertainment’. This incident was a major contribution to Gerrold’s leaving the series early in its run.
    Some progress was made on
Deep Space Nine
with the first romantic same-sex kiss in the episode ‘Rejoined’, further exploring the nature of the co-joined Trill. In the mirror universe episodes the alternate Kira Nerys, the Intendant, is clearly bisexual. Even the once comic Ferengi got in on the act, with the female Pel disguising herself as male to progress in society, but falling in love with Quark. The bartender rejects Pel’s advances – even when he discovers she is female – on thegrounds that having a female business partner is frowned upon in Ferengi society. In ‘Profit and Lace’, Quark is himself surgically altered to become female in an attempt to enlist the help of a powerful businessman in reshaping Ferengi society. In this guise the show depicts
Star Trek
’s first male same-sex kiss, although Quark’s exact gender status is ambiguous at that point. Sometimes the issue was addressed in throwaway lines, such as the comment that a character in the episode ‘Field of Fire’ has a ‘co-husband’ as well as a wife, although the sexual implications of this are not explored.
    Deep Space Nine
writer Ron Moore suggested in an interview from 2000 that an executive on the show was against exploring the issue of sexuality. ‘There is no answer for it other than people in charge don’t want gay characters in
Star Trek
, period . . . The studio is not the problem here. The studio is going to let you go wherever you want to go, as long