We Won't Get by with Those Same Old Ways
One of the great drawbacks of the Star Trek franchise over the years has been its failure to acknowledge that GLBT identities were a part of its utopian future...
At first, that didn't make it terribly different from the rest of the television landscape, but as time went on and this reality was incorporated into other series--not just shows with a GLBT focus like Queer as Folk, but a lot of mainstream fare and even other genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who--without society falling apart, Star Trek started to seem overly conservative compared to its franchise neighbours, ignoring such expressions of equality when it could've been a trailblazer.
In a week when the good news out of Vermont can be mixed with this sort of continued idiocy, it would be nice to be able to point to some fictional examples from filmed Star Trek of GLBT humans (as opposed to some of the SF-analogy species they have shown) existing in the next few centuries...but thus far, there aren't any. :/ For many people, this seems to go against the series' portrayal of and advocacy for a better, united future for humanity as a whole.
Fortunately, the world of licenced Star Trek fiction has done quite a bit to make up for this shortcoming. A discussion on the TrekBBS forum about former franchise head honcho Rick Berman writing a memoir, and whether he might've been the cause of this lack of inclusion, led to this very cool thread about GLBT characters in Star Trek tie-ins. :)
If you're one of those people who wonder why you should bother reading the novels/comics when you could just be watching the episodes themselves, this is one of the more important reasons, from my perspective...sometimes, an official tie-in can provide what the official episodes lack.
At first, that didn't make it terribly different from the rest of the television landscape, but as time went on and this reality was incorporated into other series--not just shows with a GLBT focus like Queer as Folk, but a lot of mainstream fare and even other genre shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Doctor Who--without society falling apart, Star Trek started to seem overly conservative compared to its franchise neighbours, ignoring such expressions of equality when it could've been a trailblazer.
In a week when the good news out of Vermont can be mixed with this sort of continued idiocy, it would be nice to be able to point to some fictional examples from filmed Star Trek of GLBT humans (as opposed to some of the SF-analogy species they have shown) existing in the next few centuries...but thus far, there aren't any. :/ For many people, this seems to go against the series' portrayal of and advocacy for a better, united future for humanity as a whole.
Fortunately, the world of licenced Star Trek fiction has done quite a bit to make up for this shortcoming. A discussion on the TrekBBS forum about former franchise head honcho Rick Berman writing a memoir, and whether he might've been the cause of this lack of inclusion, led to this very cool thread about GLBT characters in Star Trek tie-ins. :)
If you're one of those people who wonder why you should bother reading the novels/comics when you could just be watching the episodes themselves, this is one of the more important reasons, from my perspective...sometimes, an official tie-in can provide what the official episodes lack.