simon pegg: hey so sulu is gay, married, and has a kid.
homophobes: what the FUCK you can’t just make Sulu GAY fuck you
simon pegg: you know what, come to think of it, everyone is gay. all of them. every last one of them. gays in space.
Why did it take 50 years to do this cross-promotion? Seriously! It’s so obvious!
OKAY normally i hate all commercials forever but guys this one is actually really awesome i don’t know how to feel.
(Source: http://underorange.tumblr.com/)
Okay like I’m not gonna lie.
It’s really upsetting to me that George Takei is openly against Sulu being gay in Star Trek Beyond.
Like I respect he’s allowed to have opinions on a character he once played but I 10000% agree with Pegg that introducing a new character and making them gay ran the very likely risk of them becoming The Token Gay. It takes a lot of time to establish a new character and if you introduce a character and the first thing you know about them is that they’re The Gay One then that’s all the average audience is gonna absorb about them. They’re the Gay Character. That’s it.
But when you reveal that a long standing, established character, with a long history, also happens to be gay, like that’s a big fucking deal.
And not only that but this great, well loved character is a POC, and not only is he gay but he’s married, with a child.
That makes a statement. That sends an important message to the audience. Queer people are everywhere. They’re your barista and your taxi driver and your doctor and your lawyer and your neighbor and your friend.
And now they’re the senior helmsman of the USS Enterprise.
I mean, I think a lot of it comes from George Takei being from a different generation. No, really, it applies to gay men too. I run into a lot of older gay male Sherlockians, for instance, who don’t get shipping. They’re perfectly happy with that “close friendship” thing. It’s a very important relationship to them, but they don’t always really get why it would be important for the relationship to be explicitly romantic. The desire for media representation is very generational.
Also, I think Takei is also looking at it like this: if Sulu is gay, and was never shown as being so in TOS, than Takei was playing a closeted character, which he’s not happy about.
That’s how I’m thinking it through, anyways.
And that’s what George said, that he wouldn’t have wanted to play a closeted character.
Personally I think we could just say Sulu is bi and cover both bases…
Hopefully Sulu being gay will mean that Lucasfilms will feel like they have to one up Star Trek and add more gay characters. A chain reaction of making every character LGBT+ just because of rivalry.
This is the space race we want.
Sulu Revealed to Be Gay in ‘Star Trek Beyond’
“Helmsman of the USS Enterprise, Hikaru Sulu, played by John Cho, is shown in Star Trek Beyond as the loving father of a daughter with a same sex partner. And in typical trailblazing Trek fashion — it’s just not a big deal.
Cho visited Sydney to promote the third movie in the franchise successfully rebooted by JJ Abrams in 2009, along with cast mates Chris Pine (Captain Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock), Karl Urban (Dr McCoy) and director Justin Lin. He said the decision by writer Simon Pegg and Lin to make Sulu gay was a nod to George Takei, who played the character in the original 1960s series, and was a sign of what he hoped were changing times.”
