this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
473 points (99.4% liked)
TenForward: Where Every Vulcan Knows Your Name
3740 readers
1009 users here now
/c/TenFoward: Your home-away-from-home for all things Star Trek!
Re-route power to the shields, emit a tachyon pulse through the deflector, and post all the nonsense you want. Within reason of course.
~ 1. No bigotry. This is a Star Trek community. Remember that diversity and coexistence are Star Trek values. Any post/comments that are racist, anti-LGBT, or generally "othering" of a group will result in removal/ban.
~ 2. Keep it civil. Disagreements will happen both on lore and preferences. That's okay! Just don't let it make you forget that the person you are talking to is also a person.
~ 3. Use spoiler tags. This applies to any episodes that have dropped within 3 months prior of your posting. After that it's free game.
~ 4. Keep it Trek related. This one is kind of a gimme but keep as on topic as possible.
~ 5. Keep posts to a limit. We all love Star Trek stuff but 3-4 posts in an hour is plenty enough.
~ 6. Try to not repost. Mistakes happen, we get it! But try to not repost anything from within the past 1-2 months.
~ 7. No General AI Art. Posts of simple AI art do not 'inspire jamaharon'
~ 8. No Political Upheaval. Political commentary is allowed, but please keep discussions civil. Read here for our community's expectations.
Fun will now commence.
Sister Communities:
Want your community to be added to the sidebar? Just ask one of our mods!
Honorary Badbitch:
@[email protected] for realizing that the line used to be "want to be added to the sidebar?" and capitalized on it. Congratulations and welcome to the sidebar. Stamets is both ashamed and proud.
Creator Resources:
Looking for a Star Trek screencap? (TrekCore)
Looking for the right Star Trek typeface/font for your meme? (Thank you @kellyaster for putting this together!)
founded 10 months ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.