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George Takei Opposes Gay Sulu In 'Star Trek Beyond' (hollywoodreporter.com)
HughPickens.com writes: Seth Abramovitch reports in the Hollywood Reporter that actor and LGBT activist George Takei says Paramount's plans to have Sulu's character in the upcoming 'Star Trek Beyond' the first LGBTQ lead character in Star Trek history is out of step with what creator Gene Roddenberry would have wanted. [Roddenberry] "was a strong supporter of LGBT equality," says 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." Takei says he'd much prefer that Sulu stay straight. "I'm delighted that there's a gay character," says Takei. "Unfortunately, it's a twisting of Gene's creation, to which he put in so much thought. I think it's really unfortunate." The timeline logic of the new revelation is enough to befuddle even the most diehard of Trek enthusiasts, as the rebooted trilogy takes place before the action of the original series. In other words, assuming canon orthodoxy, this storyline suggest Sulu would have had to have first been gay and married, only to then go into the closet years later. Simon Pegg, who has co-written the latest Star Trek movie, as well as starring as Scotty, has responded to criticism by the actor George Takei at the film-makers' decision to make the character he used to play openly gay. "He's right, it is unfortunate, it's unfortunate that the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn't featured an LGBT character until now. We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the 'gay character,' rather than simply for who they are, and isn't that tokenism?" says Pegg. "Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details. Whatever magic ingredient determines our sexuality was different for Sulu in our timeline. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere."
Its dead, Jim
Just like JJ Abrams, it's all about shoving things down people's throats, no pun intended
I suggest all fellow Star Trek fans boycott this production.... trash the muddies the name Star Trek, which is about science and exploration, not millennial "inclusive" bullshit.
Rather think that by the time of Star Trek in a Utopian society, they managed to get over this confused "sexual orientation" nonsense.
Not Simon Pegg's. George is the person that should define that character, alternate timeline notwithstanding. George IS Sulu.
Period.
I understand an applaud the intent behind this move, but honestly it's insulting to imply that George Takei, as a gay man, could not have portrayed a straight man. He's commented. He's shown his appreciation as it happens, and he has said that he does not think that Hikaru Sulu is gay.
That pretty much settles it for me. If George says it, that's the fact.
"Oh my God. This is terrible. This is the end of my Presidency. I'm fucked."; ~ Donald J. Trump
Disingenuous of Mr. Pegg to claim they're avoiding 'tokenism' here. Since most of the world knows George Takei is gay, this was the most cowardly option Hollywood could take if they 'had to' introduce a gay character. They want to hide behind the real actor's sexuality in justifying the character's new spin.
If they *really* wanted to avoid tokenism they could have chosen Scotty or Spock or Uhura or ... anyone else.
Introducing a new gay character just means there's a character who, among other traits, happens to be gay. Changing a character to make him gay means every single thing that character does or says will be defined by the fact that he's gay, and every other trait will be irrelevant.
Simon Pegg, who has co-written the latest Star Trek movie, as well as starring as Scotty, has responded to criticism by the actor George Takei at the film-makers' decision to make the character he used to play openly gay. "He's right, it is unfortunate, it's unfortunate that the screen version of the most inclusive, tolerant universe in science fiction hasn't featured an LGBT character until now. We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the 'gay character,' rather than simply for who they are, and isn't that tokenism?"
We could have introduced a new gay character, but instead we'll tell George Takei whether his character was gay or not, because we ought to know.
Guess we can call that straightsplaining
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's tokenism either way.
What's next?
Uhura wearing a hijab when she goes back to her quarters to be with her wife?
IRC, there was an episode planned for TNG that included a gay crew member or crew member couple, but it was scrapped by the studio. Does somebody remember the details offhand?
TOS pushed back against racism and bigotry in a big way. TNG was still an excellent show, and those principles still underlie Trek, but it did not do that in the same way.
Real lawyers write in C++
Christopher Pike able to talk and laugh... no problem. Vulcan destroyed... no problem. Spock and Uhura making out in the turbo lift... No problem. But make Sulu gay? THIS SHALL NOT STAND!
#DeleteChrome
making sulu gay is a key plot device then and not to force an agenda?
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
I suspect this is just manufactured controversy to generate a bit of buzz for Star Trek Beyond in 2 weeks.
If they can survive the mere existence of milo, they can handle that.
It's considered to be within the spectrum of normal human behaviour so that it doesn't even warrant attention. Perhaps 21st century ideas of "equality" are considered regressive in the 23th century, kind of like the 19th century pushing it's values onto us today?
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Have Kirk be gay - all his womanizing just a symptom of self-denial. I'm sure Chris Pine would love that...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
The tokenism argument doesn't make any sense to me. Let's look at TOS. Uhura wasn't in either of the pilot episodes. Was Uhura a token black character? Chekov wasn't introduced until season 2, and Russians certainly weren't viewed favorably in the West at that time. Was Chekov a token Russian? For that matter, was Sulu a token Asian? There certainly is latitude to introduce new characters in movies, such as was done very successfully with Saavik. Independent of whether Takei is right or wrong, the comment about tokenism makes no sense.
No amount of LGBT tie-ins can keep the spotlight from shining on what this movie appears to be: a Fast and the Furious knock-off. Who cares if Sulu is gay or not? The movie looks like shit that is completely out of touch with the Star Trek franchise, and there's no way I'm attending the theatrical release.
"Is not a sentence" is not a sentence. Well damn.
this really does feel forced and pointless. Not the fact that they're making Sulu gay this go-around. The fact that they're playing it up as some sort of accomplishment. Battlestar Galactica and Caprica were probably the best example of how to do it right: characters (without background baggage) had their genders and sexual orientations set every which way with ABSOLUTELY NO COMMENTARY ABOUT IT, in universe or out. If the message is supposed to be "you are expected to love your brother human beings, no matter their stripes," that's what does it. Changing an established character's sexual orientation just because you can just doesn't do that.
I bet Kumar is laughing his ass off that Harold has to suck a dick.
...Ohhh, didn't anyone tell you? If you use the transporter more than three times you become gay.
That was the turning point of my life--I went from negative zero to positive zero.
We're talking about a couple of centuries in the future, right? Surely by then, it would be possible for a person to change their sexual orientation the way we change a shirt. So Sulu starts off gay, decides he doesn't like it, and takes some trivially easy treatment to become heterosexual.
Who knows, maybe he had to hide his new un-gayness from judgmental friends. Either way, he'd be in serious tribble.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Stick true to the story ...
What true story? Its an alternate universe. If any fan base could be assumed to accept and understand that in parallel universes things can be a "little" different you would think it would be the Star Trek fan base.
... but don't be so foolish to talk about Star Trek "canon orthodoxy". This sort of "difference" is entirely within "canon".
Make all the comments you want about political correctness, pandering, etc
You are confusing actors with writers. Writers decide who a character is and what they are about. Actors implement the writer's vision, actors communicate that vision through their performance.
I daresay that was the first "reboot" and it set the bar for terrible.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Would it be:
- Humphrey Bogart
- Elliot Gould
- Robert Mitchum
- Dick Powell
- James Garner
- Robert Montgomery
- James Caan
- George Montgomery
- I think there's another couple or three actors that also have played the Mr. Chandler's detective.
Not to take away Mr. Takei's performance as "Sulu" in ST:TOS, but it's a role and when another actor performs it they should be allowed to put their own spin on it. That goes for the writers, the director and the producers.
I guess you could argue that the creator has the final say, but apparently Mr. Takei approach Gene Roddenberry about making Sulu gay and he refused saying that he was pushing too many buttons already and didn't want the show to get cancelled.
Unfortunately, Mr. Roddenberry is dead and the franchise has been moved onto others who have different ideas about the characters.
Personally, I think that's a good thing.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Of course, you could point out a number of inconsistencies going back to the original series that are just as large.
Maybe this is a function of, let me think of a word for it, "fiction".
It's not real so we can try out different ideas.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
...Is that this is what Trek has become.
We're talking about the series where men and women were passionate about each other whether they were white, black or green.
We're talking about the series where long before the Internet in general represented as an Attack Helicopter, we had a non-binary gender right on prime time TV. (And naturally, non-binary genders dig Riker with a beard.)
We're talking about the series that, upon the whole, took every backward-facing societal convention it could get its hands on and threw it in our faces.
But this is what Trek has become. Lens flares and quick-but-safe pandering points.
...as to why the Captain's Log was always concave at one end.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
There's a whole galaxy, make Sulu into tentacled hermaphrodites from Alpha Reticuli.
Table-ized A.I.
This happened with Independence Day 2 as well.
"We have a gay couple in the film. We don't make a big deal out of it. You start small and then you get bigger and bigger and bigger, and one day you have a gay character as the lead and nobody will wonder at it no more."
-- Roland Emmerich, speaking of Independence Day 2.
So we have the director gently ushering society 'towards the light' -- some ideal that he has in mind. Great!
ID4 (the first film) had 2 writers: Dean Devlin, and Roland Emmerich (in that order). The second film has 4-5 writers, with Roland Emmerich credited as lead.
Roland, stick to your day job.
I like his stuff but it's so far from Trek that Jackie Chan may as well be doing it.
Then again I think the same about Abrams and his magic belt movie with a Trek name on it.
The fan-made movies referred to as Star Trek: Phase 2 did a much better job of capturing the original series. And they did _fantastic_ task of exploring social issues that would have been unthinkable for Gene Roddenberry. The response of Captain Kirk to an openly gay crew member in their "Blood and Fire" episode was priceless. These fan made episodes are much better than the last few movies. And they pay loving homage to the original seies' work, with cameos by actors involving their older selves such as Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nicholls, and the unforgettable scene of George Takei as a screaming leather clad barbarian swordsman.
The fans who made these episodes captured the conflict between low budget, limited time, wonderful young actors learning their craft, and the high ideals that Gene Roddenberry and his entire cast and crew brought to the series. _These_ stories are why Star Trek was great.
You too are caught in the same binary thinking. The whole point of not putting yourself into a box is that you should feel free to be attracted to whomever. If you’re only attracted to males or only females, that’s fine. If you’re attracted to both, that’s fine too. What if you’re attracted to lots of females but only the occasional man? That’s fine too. This is about FREEDOM by eliminating the boxes. It’s about freedom to not be judged, freedom to make your own choices.
Let’s say, hypothetically, that there’s a genetic bias for humans to be mostly straight. What I’m trying to say is that in the future I hope it’s not considered weird for a person to have any mix of genders in sexual partners. 50/50? 90/10? 100/0? All fine. All not weird. We need to eliminate these boxes that force us into artificial categories.
Please don't project the fact that *you* experimented in college and discovered you're happy with either onto the rest of us.
I, too, had the opportunity to experiment way back when and very rapidly found out that other guys don't do a thing for me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
I don't think my closet's quite big enough, but George and his husband are both welcome to sit on my couch and have coffee and cakes anytime.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Today’s binary sexuality is a cultural artifact. People are really on a spectrum. “Most people” are straight because they’re somewhere closer to the middle and therefore trainable to be straight. The people who are so gay or so straight innately that they can’t be trained are relatively rare (in the 10% range on either end).
That's gonna need a giant [citation needed]. Look, I really enjoyed Jack's character, but even in Who and Torchlight, he was an outlier.
How about peggs character be gay, since pegg is gay.
Except this reinforces a false narrative that sexual orientation is a choice, when it's really not. The point of divergence for the new Trek verse is after Sulu was born, and he was almost fully grown. That's not how the "magic ingredient" that determines our sexuality works.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
ST TNG did not shy away from this topic but presented it in the context of a genderless culture.
What are the goals of this move?
1) Trying to get free press and buzz for their action packed CGI movie with no plot
2) Being opportunistic by trying (and failing) to exploit the current "make all things gay" momentum and stuffing gay down everyones throat, just like the "Give Anna & Else a Girlfriend" and forcing something that doesn't fit into the timeline, plot, or story.
3) Trying to make something that appeals to the masses instead of making something clever, well thought out, and high quality.
This is not Trek.
This is not Gene's vision.
This is simply rebooting and hi-jacking to try and make a buck by people who have no business producing content for the Trek.
Gene would explored the topic at a non-hostile level in the context of another civilization just like we see in TNG's "The Outcast" episode. He would not have been one to overly push a social agenda. Just like in TOS Uhura did not sport an afro and spoke with a midwestern accent. This is how Gene played it, subtle. Challenging your to think of what could be possible in the future or in the context of another civilization. It was clever. It was not overt or in your face.
To slightly change Pegg's quote:
"Our Trek is an alternate timeline with alternate details and poorly thought out stories. We know Sulu in real life is LGBT so we are trying to exploit that in our timeline to make a buck and get publicity. I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities filled with lame Star Trek reboots just like this one."
Count me out on this one. I am glad we had this conversation ahead of time so I can ignore this movie.
I like this idea because it suggests that in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere."
So, what he is saying is that sexual preference is not something one is born with? Until now, thought has been in alternate universes, differences between who we are and who we would be elsewhere was based on circumstances. If we are born gay or straight, then if in an alternate universe we have a different sexual preference, we wouldn't be we, would we?
We could have introduced a new gay character, but he or she would have been primarily defined by their sexuality, seen as the 'gay character,' rather than simply for who they are, and isn't that tokenism?"
By their own admission, they can't introduce a credible gay character would be defined by something other than their sexuality, so instead they change an existing character to be gay, is the epitome of tokenism. Not only is it tokenism, it is insulting. As anybody who is LGBT would tell you, their sexuality isn't a choice. Evidently it is for the writers of Star Trek and it can be changed at will. Instead of a victory of the LGBT community in having a a main stream movie with a viable identity beyond their sexuality, they will have a token gay by taking an established character and making him gay.
In short, regardless of the success of the movie, this will be remembered as the movie where Sulu is defined primarily by his sexuality. The very thing they said they were trying to avoid. Then again, maybe it isn't tokenism and simply hypocrisy.
1. George Takei has reportedly said that he asked Simon Pegg and Justin Lin not to turn Sulu into a gay character while the film was in production. John Cho has been quoted as saying this was intended as a tribute to Takei, even though Takei asked the writer who came up with it and director not to do it.
2. Simon Pegg is saying that he knows what Gene Roddenberry intended better than Takei, despite being born after TOS was made and having never met Roddenberry.
They have changed so much in the Star Trek reboot just to change things that the change itself doesn't surprise or bother me. But they should admit that JJ Trek is their thing and they can do what they want and stop the disingenuous "we're just doing what Roddenberry would have done if he could have gotten away with it in the 60s" schtick.
And admit it is tokenism.
Two films ago, they destroyed Vulcan, a planet that existed in TOS.
How often would a modern navy send one ship to beat another modern navy's one ship?
And by send one ship, I mean 2 or 3 guys to kill the other ship's captain?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I'm pretty sure the Enterprise being able to travel underwater in Into Darkness is more of a "a twisting of Gene's creation".
ralphbarbagallo.com
Textbox rejects string '1234'
Requiem for the American Dream
"It's a different timeline" - So Sulu is now gay because Nero went back in time. That's lame, Pegg.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
"in a hypothetical multiverse, across an infinite matrix of alternate realities, we are all LGBT somewhere" No. There are an infinite number of values between 1 and 2, but none of them equal 3.
Shit.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't want to watch anything with gay characters.
I find it repulsive and I don't watch what I find repulsive.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
If Gene wanted Sulu to prefer penises, he would have given him a vagina.
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
So, suddenly, because Spock came back in time and changed history, Sulu instead of being married with kids, is instead gay? What changes did Spock cause that led to the character changing their sexual preference so profoundly? How did this huge change come about when Spock didn't even happen to be in the area where Sulu lived?
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
Who said time line change? I said alternate universe. Or in the phrasing of the original series a "mirror" universe, or in actual theoretical physics a "parallel" universe where massive differences can originate from a single quantum event.
Neither the universe that Spock originated from nor the universe he influenced history in are necessarily the universe of the original series. Do I really need to mention the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of the original series to demonstrate how there is no "cannon" violation?