As fans of Star Trek continue to celebrate the groundbreaking LGBTQ storylines of the longtime franchise, as well as a number of performers who have come out of the closet, one longtime Trek actor has spoken out to make sure fans know his character was actually gay, even if the show never made his sexuality explicit.
Actor Andrew Robbinson, who played the duplicitous tailor Elam Garak on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine has finally set the record straight…or gay, in this case. In the 2018 documentary What You Leave Behind, Robinson wants fans to know that Garak was actually gay. He also confirmed that Garak had a longtime crush on the station doctor Julian Bashir (Alexander Siddig) during the series run.
Related: “I’m queer and proud!” ‘Star Trek’ star Mary Wiseman comes out
“At first, he just wanted to have sex with him,” the actor says of the Garak-Bashir relationship. “That’s absolutely clear. That’s all he wanted from him. … But then it really got complicated, especially when Garak’s addiction and despair began to surface.”
Producer Ira Stephen Behr corroborates Robbinson’s assertion.
“Garak was clearly gay,” Behr says in the film. “I mean, everyone knew it. And we never played it. What we should have done, after … the episode where Bashir helps [Garak] get over his addiction, we should have had Garak come out to Bashir as a gay Cardassian.”
Behr also states that he and other writers of the show never approached the producers about including the storyline in the series, as they figured doing so would be a futile gesture. During the 1980s, 90s and into the 2000s, Star Trek attracted a good deal of criticism and innuendo from fans as well as actors and other creative personnel from the franchise for the exclusion of LGBTQ related storylines.
nm4047
it’s a fantasy series, clearly anyone can be written as gay, but lets be real, it’s a character in a series, not an actual person. What is the stupid obsessions’ with there has to be a gay character in a fictional story.
Cam
What’s the obsession with having them NOT be LGBTQ?
curiobi
I swear I am going to start an appreciation fan wave for Cam! Throughout 2020 especially they called out troll after troll! You are appreciated Cam, thank you! Hopefully now Trump is gone we will see less of this russian troll bot BS!
shoop
I’m fat and I can’t believe this is even a thing . SMH
Bromancer7
Wait, there are ST fans that didn’t know this? Com’n now…
curiobi
I appreciate AR stating it explcity after all this time because I personally shipped them hard as a kid but could hardly tell my conservative family what I thought. It’s nice to know it wasn’t all me in my junior fangirl feelings 😀
irbaboon
How do the Cardasians feel about homosexuality?
They seems like a pretty uptight species
RyanMBecker
“…we should have had Garak come out to Bashir as a gay Cardassian.”
I’m not a Trekkie so I am making this comment as an outsider. Doesn’t the Star Trek franchise take place far in the future? As such, it’s kind of sad to think that “coming out” as gay will still be necessary. I understand that things may be different among non-humans, but if I’m not mistaken, that show takes place on a human space station. Hence, the only logical conclusion is that somewhere along human evolution, we regressed or stagnated in terms of gay equality.
As an aside, some geneticists believe that far into the future, males will cease to exist and reproduction will be possible between two females. It’s not just some militant lesbian fantasy. There’s actually hard science behind this. Google it.
RyanMBecker
[NERD ALERT]
Then again, ST:TNG already had a famous history-defying blooper. Well, at least it’s famous to us math nerds. In one episode, the intellectual Jean-Luc Picard was seen trying to prove the notoriously unproven Fermat’s Last Theorem. The simple 15th century theorem had defied resolution by our greatest mathematicians.
By the 20th century, it was widely believed to be Gödelian, or true but unprovable. In 1931, 25yo Kurt Gödel proved that there exists statements that are true but impossible to prove as true so we humans are doomed to forever wonder if the statement is true or not. It’s not just that we’re not smart enough, or don’t have the technology. It was literally impossible to prove that the statement is true even though it was. It was a shocking result whose implications are still debated today. Alonzo Church then showed that there’s no way to determine which statements are unprovable, further sealing our ignorance as inevitable. Since it defied the efforts of our greatest mathematicians, Fermat’s Last Theorem was believed to be one of those.
Then much to the shock of experts, Andrew Wiles proved the Fermat’s Last Theorem in 1993-1995 in a 129 page proof which consumed 7 years of his life. The proof was so difficult that it was understood by less than 10 people worldwide. It made headlines, including the front page of the NY Times. But apparently, Picard never read the NY Times since he still thought that it was unproven. In the show’s defense, the episode aired before the proof was made.
Google it for more info.
Sorry for the non-gay detour…
[NERD ALERT OFF]