Angry Puppy

It reportedly made Simon Pegg cry, but most of us still haven’t seen the trailer for J.J. Abrams’ upcoming foray into the Star Trek franchise. You know sci fans, though: already we’re lining up on one side or the other based solely on some recently released photos.

“The bridge looks like an Apple store, but at least they kept the Beatle boots and miniskirts!” vs. “I love the new bridge! They should’ve updated those sexist miniskirts!”

“Why is everyone so young and glossy?” vs. “Wow, the cast is hunkarrificly perfect!”

“How come Zachary Quinto still looks like Sylar?” vs. “Quinto was born to play Spock!”

I think we’ll have to wait to really evaluate (or ignore) those points, but one thing keeps jumping out at me. Maybe it’s just the particular blogs I read, but several times I’ve noticed the term “homoerotic” used to describe these new pictures, particularly the EW cover of Spock and Kirk. According to io9, it’s “it’s unthinkingly homoerotic”. And have a look at many of the comments on this post at /Film:

“Sweet Jesus those dudes are still standing WAY too close together. Who in the world would want to see this movie now? Fetishists?”

“Kiss now please !”

I just don’t see it, and I’ve come up with three explanations:

1. My threshold for “homoerotic” is much higher than the general public’s due to years of gayness and homosexualism.

2. This stuff is being written by straight people who wouldn’t know homoerotic if it was dancing in front of them naked in a Laura Bush mask.

3. This stuff is being written by gay people who are injecting their own slashfic wishful thinking into the picture.

We’ll be bringing it up in episode 38, but I’d love to get your thoughts before then. Do you all see anything particularly homoerotic in these pics?

This Saturday was National Coming Out Day, though that’s an odd name for an increasingly international observance.

We’ve both been out since the Carter administration, so in lieu of coming out (again), we’re celebrating with this list of our favorite out actors in sci fi and horror. And just think, not too long ago we would have had trouble coming up with a list half this size!

As usual, pick your favorites and tell us in the comments who we might have overlooked.

Read the rest of this entry »

Deep Space Nine is our favorite Star Trek series, so we don’t need the escapism of the mirror universe anywhere near as badly as we do in its sister franchises. And we love Major Kira in our universe too.

Nevertheless, it’s always a pleasure to watch the adventures of Kira’s “evil” bisexual counterpart, Intendant Kira. Well, they say “evil,” we prefer to say “colorful”.

See her and other “colorful” characters in the gallery.

Fortunately for us, they spend it making fan-videos.

Picard Song

This Sims-style music video, featuring some of the best Picard quotes and some New-Orderesque music, must have taken forever to make. There’s a shirtless Jean Luc if you’re into that sort of thing.

Locutus of BORG

Woot woot! It’s 1996 at The Connection in Louisville. [Achtung: Link plays music.]

Da Shatner Funk

For you TOS fans, here’s an epilepsy-inducing Shatner funk that I think I’d actually buy if it were on iTunes.

How can you not love William Shatner?

[Via Star Trek Movie Forum]

Over on the Star Trek Forum, user Andrew86 asked:

“Is there going to be a gay character in Star Trek XI? [...] The producers have gone out of their way to make it clear that every main character we have had so for has been heterosexual. [...] No issue needs to (or even should) be made of homosexuality - a character should just so happen to have a same sex partner or love interest.”

The first response is, inevitably, from someone who doesn’t support the “Gay life style” (or “murder, sex before marriage, adultry [sic]“). Further down, though, a commenter has this to say:

“In the future, nobody will care! I mean, only a handful of major characters have gotten their sexuality defined in ANY way, let alone had a romance on-screen.”

I don’t have any interest in arguing with people who honestly don’t see the moral difference between murder and being gay. But that second point needs addressing (mostly because I’m lazy, and heterosexism is easier to re-butt with bullet points than homophobia is).

I chose The Next Generation as representative of all of the series and compiled a list of the ten main cast members and their known orientations:

• Jean-Luc Picard - Captain Picard has several relationships with women, including Beverly Crusher, Vash and Nella Daren. So, unless you count that touching scene in which the Cardassian interrogator strung him up naked, he’s squarely in the straight category.
• William Riker - I find Riker disturbingly heterosexual. This generation’s James T. Kirk is fond of 70s-style pleasure planets, 70s-style lounge wear, and 70s-style hopping into bed with any female-seeming alien. That includes the androgynous Soren, who was punished by her society for secretly preferring a gender in the fifth season’s homophobia allegory “The Outcast”. Oh, and there’s his on-again, off-again relationship with Troi, but I prefer not to think about it (see below).
• Geordi La Forge - I hate to put two of them in a row, but Geordi’s brand of heterosexuality scared me a little. Remember when he made a holographic copy of Leah Brahms, fell in love with it, then got upset with her when he finally met the real woman, because she didn’t live up to his expectations and love him back? I got the feeling that we were supposed to think, “oh, that Geordi and his shenanigans!” All I could think was “where’s my restraining order?”
• Worf - There’s no doubt that Worf is heterosexual, though he did marry Jadzia Dax. The Dax symbiont’s host, Jadzia, identified as a female at that point, so while we can give Worf cool credits, he gets no gay points. He loses those cool credits because of the whole Troi thing, but I don’t want to think about it (see below).
• Beverly Crusher - Speaking of joined Trills, Dr. Crusher proved her heterosexuality when she was unable to love Odan after he was implanted into a female host. I would have no problem with this except that she was able to love him while he was temporarily inside Riker’s body. I know some of you like the Commander, but given those two options, even I choose the female Trill.
• Deanna Troi - I don’t really want to think about it, but, having dated both Riker and Worf, Troi is pretty much on the hetero side.
• Data - He’s an android, but let’s consider Data male, since he was “fully functional” as a man. Apparently, though, androids have a heterosexuality sub-routine in the Star Trek universe. Data’s only known romances involved Tasha Yar (however brief), Jenna D’Sora (however un-consumated) and the Borg Queen (however WTF?).
• Wesley Crusher - I don’t want to think about the sexuality of everyone’s favorite Mary Sue any more than I want to think about Troi’s (see above), but all signs indicate that Wesley is, fortunately for my tribe, straight.
• Tasha Yar - See Data.
• Katherine Pulaski - She’s been married and divorced three times, so she either really likes this heterosexuality thing or really hates it.

It’s fairly clear that, far from having their sexuality undefined, Star Trek characters’ orientations are completely out in the open. The commenter above just doesn’t notice it the way he would notice two male ensigns holding hands as they walked down the corridor, since all that sexuality is of the male-to-female/female-to-male (or reasonable facsimile thereof) type.

You’d get similar results with any of the series, though I still pretend that Seven of Nine and Captain Janeway were hot and heavy when no one was looking.

And why shouldn’t they be?