this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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I don't agree. Firstly because Roddenberry himself wanted queer representation on TNG in the 80s, but also because there was a lot of precedent with queer characters becoming more normalized on TV going all the way back to the 70s when Billy Crystal played a decent, caring gay man on Soap with toned-down stereotypical mannerisms.
But also, Garak was introduced in 1993. Look how many queer-themed TV episodes had happened in the 90s by then on mainstream shows like Roseanne and L.A. Law. Even gay recurring characters were on TV by then. Roy's gay son on Wings showed up multiple times and did not fit any gay stereotypes, which was kind of the point of the character. The, again not stereotypical, gay couple that opened the bed and breakfast in Cicely in Northern Exposure debuted in 1991 (the town's founders were also revealed to be a lesbian couple that year). I already mentioned Roseanne above. Sandra Bernhard's character, a member of the main cast, came out as gay in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1990s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes
Berman was just a bigot.
No disagreements on Rick Berman being a bigot, he was pretty shitty for a lot of other additional reasons too, don't have to limit to being a homophobe, but... LGBT themes doesn't mean openly LGBT characters. We did definitely have some, but a lot of those characters lived in the realm of plausible deniability to let them have mass appeal. Publicly, they could just be 'two roommates'. If you were a rare character who got to be openly gay, you tended to fall victim to the 'bury your gays' trope and probably were not long for this world.
Ellen came out in 97, on her show and then in real life, and they responded by slapping a parental advisory warning on her very family friendly show and then cancelling it as soon as they could. It may have made Will & Grace more acceptable though in 98... I feel like that was one of the first shows where they were okay having gay men regularly on US TV, but even then only as long as it was for comedy.
I know we like to put that black and white filter on it and pretend it was a long time ago, but it was a rough time, and a lot more recent than any of us like. Gay sex was technically illegal in over a dozen states until 2003 and a few of the less progressive states hadn't even had those laws that long. A full 28 states went out of their way to explicitly ban gay marriage, most of them did so in the early 2000s. DS9 had it's last episode in 1999.
The DS9 writers and actors also had workarounds for Berman. They would write a scene and then a close but Berman friendly version. He would ok it and then the actors would "improvise" the original script.
Dukat was another case of the writers and actor colluding. Berman wanted him to be straight up evil. The writers and actor wanted to give him respectable motivations for his evil acts.
So he is not a good guy but you can respect the love for family and state that drives his terrible crimes.
I don't know what to tell you. I gave you a bunch of examples that predate Garak's debut on DS9 and a link that had a lot more.
Aight, give me an openly gay man on TV before deep space nine that had a role where they had even half as many appearances as Bashir or Garak because I didn't see one there.
I checked, Roy's son was apparently in 2 episodes, the answer is there aren't any who come close. We've made truly gigantic strides in LGBT representation, it was a dark time.
Queen as Folk (UK). This life (also UK)
Ooh, you know I meant US TV, but technically correct potentially and that's my failure for not specifying, so I can't call you on that piece too much.
However, Queer as Folk and This Life both started well after DS9 and I did explicitly specify before Deep Space Nine. You're coming up on the time when we started to get over ourselves and things started to get better. The AIDs epidemic wasn't exactly... good... but people were starting to make an effort to understand it more and were at least less terrified.
My bad, I didn't realise DS9 was as old as it is :)
I guess there's also Nancy and Leon in Roseanne?
They didn't know that Garak would have that big a role when he started.