Director J.J. Abrams says that for the upcoming Star Trek sequel, he’d consider taking the franchise where it’s never been before.
“You know what’s funny? As someone who was never a huge Star Trek fan and I didn’t watch the shows. And my experience with the movie was the first in the series and then watching and re-watching some of the movies that I’ve seen. I’m frankly shocked that in the history of Star Trek there have never been gay characters in all the series. In Deep Space Nine and all the Enterprises that that’s never come up,” he tells After Elton.
The web site spoke to screenwriters Robert Orci and Alex Kurtzman about it, and they responded that they “were open to the idea, but had no plans to include a gay character as of yet.”
Abrams went on to add that if a decision for a gay character was made, he’d want it to be done in a way that organically worked for the story and didn’t feel like it was brought in just to make a statement.
Fans of the novels may recall that Ensign Hawk from Star Trek: First Contact was featured in a tie-in novel in which it was revealed he was gay. There have also been several same-sex couples in various Trek tie-in novels over the years.
You can certainly tell he’s never watched the shows or he would know that Trek has addressed all sorts of “different” sexual relationships. No, there’s never been an actual human “gay” person on the show (that we know of) but they’ve tackled all sorts of other themes.
Frankly, putting a gay character in just to put a gay character in seems silly. You’d better have a really good reason for doing it.
Garak on DS9 was bi. Yes, that is considered canon. Does that count?
Star Trek Phase II (a.k.a. New Voyages) has been there & done that with Kirk’s nephew. There were also episodes in DS9 & TNG that had characters who were gay, bi a& asexual. J.J. needs to catch up on his Trek trivia. Thankfully, headwriter Orci is a big Trek fan & knows the franchise quite well.
I envision a character like Johnny on the movie Airplane (Stephen Stucker, Than you Google).