Star Trek: Discovery -- General Discussion

The big deal about the whole 'we wanted it to not be a 'Bury Your Gays' thing, we wanted it to have nothing to do with his sexuality'... Honestly, it's really just missing the forest for the trees for me. It's saying that you understand that gays are dying on screen with unpleasant frequency, so you're killing a gay BUT NOT BECAUSE HE'S GAY OR ANYTHING!

It's not that gays are dying in media, so it's important to emphasize that he's not dying because he's gay. What the case ACTUALLY is is that every time that a gay character dies, so too does that representation of a group of people who have been systematically removed and ignored in media for a very long time and are only now seeing any effort to rebalance those scales, and that effort is a slow trickle.

It’s what we discuss all the time about BioWare’s characters. Okay, you’ve got non-heterosexual characters in your franchise. Now what are you doing with them? Because if you’re not having them bring anything new to the table in terms of their story, if you’re saddling them with the same old played out narratives, you’ve done nothing with them except filled a quota. Likewise, here, you’re maybe not telling a story about how a gay man died because he’s gay, but you have still written a story where a gay man dies.

In one swift motion, literally half of the representation that gay men had in Star Trek Discovery was the victim of a brutal act of violence. Whether or not it was done because he was gay or just in the way doesn’t matter, he’s still dead. We are still burying a gay. THAT is the problem. It’s particularly a problem given how Star Trek dragged its heels on even HAVING a gay character – on DS9, Voyager, even Enterprise, a gay character being part of the main cast would have been groundbreaking (Jadzia Dax was close, but her bi/pansexuality was really only brought up for one episode, her other love interests on the show being men). On Discovery, it’s a case of ‘well yeah, and?’ Considering that every major network has or has had at least one show with at least one gay character in the main cast at this point, the fact that Star Trek made a fanfare of this shows how Star Trek has fallen BEHIND the times on this front.

Like I said before, if this were any show that didn’t have the Star Trek name attached to it, this would have been the kind of reveal that made me drop it. Because this is Star Trek, I’m sticking around, but they missed the mark on this one.