Kevin Ahearn writes about...

George Takei and Cultural Change

BWS:

George Takei’s recent revelation that he is gay, while it may have surprised many Star Trek fans and disgusted others, further expanded and reinforced Gene Roddenberry’s vision of humanity’s future in the universe.

“The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay,'' said Takei, who defined his nation’s view of homosexuality as “against basic decency and what American values stand for.”

In the 1960s there was much more to it than that — being gay was not simply a sexual or social issue, but one of “national security.”

Ironically, Takei, a Japanese-American, had lived in a U.S. internment camp from age 4 to 8. Following the “dastardly attack” on Pearl Harbor in 1941, wartime paranoia led to confining all West Coast Japanese-Americans. Fearing an invasion, we could not trust “those Japs” living among us.

In the Cold War against the Soviet Union, paranoia took a different turn when in 1960, William H. Martin and Bernon F. Mitchell, two cryptographers with the National Security Agency (NSA) defected to Russia, doing “irreparable damage to national security” and “causing [NSA] to completely overhaul its organization and institute a rigid internal security force.”

Martin and Mitchell were homosexuals and like the Japanese-Americans before them, suddenly a whole group of American citizens was branded as “untrustworthy.”

During the mid-60s, I was an Air Force intelligence analyst in Europe with a Top Secret Codeword security clearance assigned to analyzing Soviet air defense. In my three-year tour, two fellow airmen were reported as “having feminine characteristics.” Both simply disappeared — shipped back to the States immediately and reassigned.

One night, two of my units most flaming heterosexuals got stinking drunk and passed out. The next morning they were discovered in the same bed. Instantly stripped of their Top Secret clearances, they were confined to base as a vigorous investigation ensued to confirm the sexuality of the two suspects.

“How does it feel, now that two hundred and fifty million Americans no longer trust you?” became the question of the month. Only after sworn testimony by their commanding officers were the pair reinstated.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, did the U.S. military finally find a cure for its willful and wasteful homophobia? Such is fantasy, sci-fi fans!

On April 19th, 1989, the battleship Iowa was engaged in a special exercise in the Caribbean when a massive explosion from inside one of its main battery turrets killed more than a dozen sailors. The initial Navy probe called the disaster “sabotage” as the result of a “love spat” between two homosexual sailors who had been killed in the blast. The victims’ parents were outraged and threatened to sue the Navy to clear the names of their fallen sons. The Navy dug deeper to find out that lack of ordered training, disregard for mandatory maintenance and low crew morale brought on by the ship’s captain all contributed to the accident.

The “homosexual” sailors were cleared, but their sexual preferences were never proven — the stigma remained: “Those ‘homos’ can’t be trusted.”

In the classic Star Trek, Roddenberry went where no TV show had gone before by staffing his military-like, though not militaristic, Starfleet with an effortless mix of races and cultures. But had the “Big Bird of the Galaxy” gone further than even the most diehard Trekker could have imagined?

Africans, Asians and Latins are relatively easy to show on television. Skin color does much of the showing. White Europeans can be distinguished by their accents: “Soviet wessels.” But if the humanity of future had defeated all the prejudices of their ancestors, wouldn’t it be “logical” for at least one of the crew to be homosexual? But how does one show homosexuality without cruel clichés? Could it be that in the centuries to come, homosexuals could be imagined and portrayed as “regular people” just like us?

I am glad that George Takei stood up to be himself. Whether or not Hikaru Sulu is gay will be debated for all eternity. Or maybe not, because his sexuality really doesn’t define the content of his character, does it?

I trust Trekkers to get that straight.

Kevin

Copyright © 2005 by Kevin Ahearn

If Edmond Rostand had known that Cyrano de Bergerac was gay, would he have written his play as he did? Would he have written it at all? Probably not; the knowledge completely changes the meaning of the triangle of Cyrano, Christian and Roxanne.

Likewise, Cyrano’s contemporaries would have read L’Autre Monde as daring in religious terms but otherwise as an instructive, pleasant and often funny story. For his own security, Cyrano made sure that only a few would see that parts of The Other World were written in code. It was safely ambiguous to all but a few then, but it is transparent to us now.

The majority’s attitude toward gays hardly changed at all since the 17th century; only in recent years has modern culture begun to peek out of its own closet. At last we can say for George Takei or anyone else, “What does it matter?” To those who cling to the mentality of the ancien régime it matters a lot for some reason; they are psychologically and ideologically at war with those who “get it straight,” as you say, and who find persecution incomprehensible. Once again, Cyrano the “time traveler” par excellence comes to us from more than three centuries in his own future, and society has only begun to catch up.

Don