Set phasers to . . . fabulous.
J.J. Abrams’ Big Gay ‘Star Trek’ Fail — ThinkProgress
In a deeply odd interview with AfterElton, J.J. Abrams sets new standards in equivocating when he discusses whether he’d have an openly gay character in a subsequent Star Trek movie:
I would say that it is, you know, something that I would love to do, but just the way I would be careful doing a story that would involve any of the characters and their personal lives. The balance is always, what how does that story relate to sort of the bad guy, which by the way is always going to be that critical thing, what are they up against? The question how do you get into literally these are personal sexual lives of these characters?
I guess I must have missed something where Uhura and Spock’s relationship is integral to embodying the fight against Nero because dude came through a black hole to ban interracial relationships in the Federation. And Abrams, who says here that “I don’t know who’s assuming characters aren’t gay or are gay” in expressing concern about how fans picture the characters, doesn’t seem to have been so vastly concerned about the original conception of Spock and Uhura — in which Uhura hits on Spock and he blows her off — that he resisted pairing them up in his alternate continuity.
What worked about that pairing, in fact, was that Abrams and Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci did something that movies rarely do, but that is, in fact, totally natural: showed two characters in a relationship using sexual contact as a means of expressing tenderness rather than desire. The fact that Spock needed comfort in the wake of extreme trauma was specific to the plot, but there was no reason the person he got comfort from also needed to illuminate the Romulan threat. The same could easily, and comfortably, be true of a gay character. Someone should tell Abrams that it’s not a victory over tokenism to keep gay people invisible, especially when that invisibility is increasingly obviously at odds with the Star Trek vision of a progressive future.