Who would have thought that Star Trek, which has always been at the forefront of SJWism, could be further converged?
In the summer of 1968, George Takei attended a pool party at the Hollywood Hills home of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The actor, then 31 and famous for his role as Hikaru Sulu, helmsman of the USS Enterprise, swam up to his boss and “had a conversation with him, a very private one. I was still closeted, so I did not want to come out to him.”
Nevertheless, Takei — who announced he was gay in 2005 — was fully attuned to the gay equality conversation gaining momentum at the time. He felt it was a topic worth exploring on the socially minded science-fiction series, which had previously tackled issues like the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War through keenly observed allegory.
But the show had recently seen its lowest ratings ever, with an episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura, which NBC affiliates in the South refused to air. While sympathetic to his star’s pitch, Roddenberry felt he was in no position to take those kinds of risks.
“He was a strong supporter of LGBT equality,” recalls Takei, now 79. “But he said he has been pushing the envelope and walking a very tight rope — and if he pushed too hard, the show would not be on the air.” Alas, the show was canceled the following season anyway.
But Star Trek has lived long and prospered for studio home Paramount, spawning six TV series and 13 feature films. True to its title, the latest big-screen outing, Star Trek Beyond, has gone where none have gone before: Star John Cho — who assumes the Sulu mantle for the third time in the reboots — has told Australia’s Herald Sun that the character is revealed to be gay….
Except Takei wasn’t overjoyed. He had never asked for Sulu to be gay. In fact, he’d much prefer that he stay straight. “I’m delighted that there’s a gay character,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Unfortunately, it’s a twisting of Gene’s creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it’s really unfortunate.”
Takei explains that Roddenberry was exhaustive in conceiving his Star Trek characters. (The name Sulu, for example, was based on the Sulu Sea off the coast of the Philippines, so as to render his Asian nationality indeterminate.) And Roddenberry had always envisioned Sulu as heterosexual.
Straights attempting to virtue-signal on behalf of gays do their best, but they never get it right. I don’t know a single gay man who likes the Saint Gay couples that pervade Hollywood entertainment or think they are anything but dressed-up suburban married couples, about as convincing as urban fantasy’s kick-ass kung fu waifs, science fiction’s men with tits, and the Magic Negroes who like nothing better than to defy gangbangers and help out white folk in distress when they aren’t busy philosophizing, providing moral instruction, or being President.
One would think, at some point, someone would have asked George Takei, or at least understood that there is an insult implicit in the idea that he could not act.