Over the last couple of years, I’ve stumbled into a microgenre that I might call “queer takes on cultural artifacts that I hadn’t realized were impactful to me in a distinctly queer way” – last year’s essay on on Nick Drake, for example. One day I’ll write the ur-text of this genre, about the 1989 film Dead Poets Society, but today being “Star Trek Day” — and the sixtieth anniversary of the first episode’s air date — that venerable science fiction franchise is my subject here.
Now, in recent years, Star Trek has gotten very queer, with gay characters, non-binary characters, and characters whose relationships to gender are shifting, evolving, and trans-coded. None of this is new, or subtle, and it’s been the subject of discussion among fans and haters alike.
But my experience of Star Trek is very particular, and inseparable from my earliest memories of it: watching the original series on reruns in the 1970s and early 1980s in my family living room. Thanks to AI, I now know that I watched the show on New York’s WPIX, Channel 11, which (I just learned) aired the episodes in late afternoons and early evenings precisely to attract kids like me. I was their target audience.
And yet, at that young of an age, most of Trek’s appeal must have been subconscious. Somehow, I realized: this is a show about nerdiness, queerness, and Jewishness, and those things are connected somehow, and this is the only place on television where I belong. Where, in fact, my people run the fucking galaxy.
In contrast to Star Wars (which came out when I was six, and which I saw in the theaters in the original run), Trek’s battles were mostly won by the smartest, not the strongest. In one early episode, for example, a gigantic spherical spaceship totally disables the Enterprise, but Captain Kirk escapes defeat by bluffing, saying/lying that the Enterprise contained an element called “Corbomite” that would destroy the larger ship if it was attacked.
Contrast that with how the rebels handled their enemy’s gigantic spherical enemy: with a young man’s metaphorical sex act backed up by a fleet of X-Wings and the Millennium Falcon.
Of course, the queerness of TOS was only partial, and Kirk himself was often the worst example of its opposite: chauvinistic, impulsive, violent, he was a man’s man, even if by contemporary standards he could pass as a twink. It’s kind of amazing to consider afresh: here’s the starship captain, boldly going and exploring strange new worlds… and fucking dozens of women who he meets along the way.
But then, of course, there was Spock.
