They're Taking Over, Dammit!

I'm not really interested in keeping up to date, but I figure I've dawdled enough on this one.



Given Takei's history of tongue-in-cheek video clips, I'm not sure how seriously to take this one. As a joke it's a good one. It works as a jape at the old sf trope that humanity would drop our petty international quarrels and band together if we faced an extraterrestrial threat, but given the current hysteria over Breaking Dawn's box-office success, and coming so soon after Anne Rice jumped on the same bandwagon, I fear that Takei may be inveighing seriously against the Bella/Edward threat to heroic values and our precious bodily fluids.

Then there was this article, linked on Facebook by a fellow-blogger. I hadn't even heard of most of these movies, and will be looking for some of them. But I don't get this at all.

What with so many vampire movies being essays on “the tension between a young woman’s compulsion to mate and her partner’s terror that doing so will unleash demonic forces” (David Edelstein, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1), it’s a relief to find one that just does what it says on the box.

"So many vampire movies", you say? What others fit Edelstein's description of the Twilight Saga? There's a good chance the series' success will spawn imitators: that is how the movie industry reacts to top-grossing products. (I believe I've seen the print knockoffs on the Young-Adult fiction shelves at the library, but that's a different industry.) But not always. Twilight is a chick flick, after all, and even though such films are reliable moneymakers, Hollywood (which is run by boys, often elderly ones) doesn't like chick flicks. The boys who run the industry and dominate the reviewing scene react to them like Dracula to garlic. (I always think of Thelma and Louise, a popular and critical success that wasn't followed up by Hollywood at all; the only movies that were compared to it -- Boys on the Side and Leaving Normal -- were more like clueless straight guys' misunderstandings of what Thelma and Louise was about.) And really, it's a bit late to attack a successful vampire franchise because its vampires are ssssssensitive; Anne Rice blazed that trail in Interview with a Vampire, whose Louis was a whining, self-pitying loser whose main concern was whether his boyfriend liked him. (I suspect she was forgiven because she eventually gave center stage to the strutting Lestat.) The tortured romance between Buffy and Angel also was a prominent theme in that series, but I guess it can be forgiven in the interests of the Alliance.

But for now, as I suggested, there really seems to be only one movie that fits Edelstein's stricture. So why "so many"? Because that's the way people react to things they don't like, I guess. Imagine someone writing "What with so many American Presidents being black these days." Or remember the old joke about two women at a corporate meeting: "Don't sit next to me," one says to the other, "or they'll say we're taking over." One is safe tokenism; two is a threat, the camel striding boldly into the tent, and there goes the neighborhood.

So I suppose the yammering is pre-emptive. But c'mon -- vampires have been sex symbols since the genre took off in the early nineteenth century. And since when were horror movies supposed to be any good? The fanboys I've seen shrieking online about the vileness of Twilight generally don't exhibit high standards in the films they treasure: many of them were weaned on "extreme" low-budget horror cheapies that make Twilight look like Shakespeare. Geysers of blood, dismemberment, and titties are the main criteria of quality they recognize, and if you can get a car chase with lots of crashes and explosions in there, so much the better.

Takei points elsewhere to a comparison of Bella with Harry Potter's Hermione: "When the love of Hermione's life left her, she continued to search for the keys to destroying the world's most powerful wizard." Unlike the hero of that series, who for most of the increasingly chunky volumes sits around moping until someone else does the studying and other work for him. Rowling has tried to cover for the fact that Hermione isn't the hero of the series by pointing to her competence, hard work, and courage -- but it's at least arguable that if she'd put Hermione at the center of the story and named the series after her, it wouldn't have become the worldwide phenomenon it has. Harry's the hero because of his destiny -- because of who he is rather than what he does -- and because he's a guy. Boy culture triumphs again. And though Rowling is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer, I don't mistake her work for great art either.

And frankly, m'dear George, neither Star Trek nor Star Wars are all that great either, to put it diplomatically. Star Trek was good for television science-fiction, which sets the bar pretty low; what made the Flash-Gordon knockoff Star Wars stand out was its special effects, not its story, dialogue, or acting/character development. (Yeah, The Empire Strikes Back was better, but it was written by an actual professional science fiction writer -- a woman, by the way -- and had a competent director.) Fans of either franchise, of course, are likely to respond by pointing to their enduring popularity, but that's their complaint: Twilight is also enormously popular, shoving aside the boy-culture competition like a snowplow. Whether its popularity will endure will have to be seen, but I'm betting it will. (And, as I wrote before, in twenty-five years its fans will be fuming at whatever popular-culture phenomenon their daughters are embracing.) The trouble with Twilight isn't that it's so bad, though of course it is; the trouble is that it's trash for girls, pandering to their fantasies and not to boys' -- and for that it can never be forgiven.

They're Taking Over, Dammit!

I'm not really interested in keeping up to date, but I figure I've dawdled enough on this one.



Given Takei's history of tongue-in-cheek video clips, I'm not sure how seriously to take this one. As a joke it's a good one. It works as a jape at the old sf trope that humanity would drop our petty international quarrels and band together if we faced an extraterrestrial threat, but given the current hysteria over Breaking Dawn's box-office success, and coming so soon after Anne Rice jumped on the same bandwagon, I fear that Takei may be inveighing seriously against the Bella/Edward threat to heroic values and our precious bodily fluids.

Then there was this article, linked on Facebook by a fellow-blogger. I hadn't even heard of most of these movies, and will be looking for some of them. But I don't get this at all.

What with so many vampire movies being essays on “the tension between a young woman’s compulsion to mate and her partner’s terror that doing so will unleash demonic forces” (David Edelstein, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn—Part 1), it’s a relief to find one that just does what it says on the box.

"So many vampire movies", you say? What others fit Edelstein's description of the Twilight Saga? There's a good chance the series' success will spawn imitators: that is how the movie industry reacts to top-grossing products. (I believe I've seen the print knockoffs on the Young-Adult fiction shelves at the library, but that's a different industry.) But not always. Twilight is a chick flick, after all, and even though such films are reliable moneymakers, Hollywood (which is run by boys, often elderly ones) doesn't like chick flicks. The boys who run the industry and dominate the reviewing scene react to them like Dracula to garlic. (I always think of Thelma and Louise, a popular and critical success that wasn't followed up by Hollywood at all; the only movies that were compared to it -- Boys on the Side and Leaving Normal -- were more like clueless straight guys' misunderstandings of what Thelma and Louise was about.) And really, it's a bit late to attack a successful vampire franchise because its vampires are ssssssensitive; Anne Rice blazed that trail in Interview with a Vampire, whose Louis was a whining, self-pitying loser whose main concern was whether his boyfriend liked him. (I suspect she was forgiven because she eventually gave center stage to the strutting Lestat.) The tortured romance between Buffy and Angel also was a prominent theme in that series, but I guess it can be forgiven in the interests of the Alliance.

But for now, as I suggested, there really seems to be only one movie that fits Edelstein's stricture. So why "so many"? Because that's the way people react to things they don't like, I guess. Imagine someone writing "What with so many American Presidents being black these days." Or remember the old joke about two women at a corporate meeting: "Don't sit next to me," one says to the other, "or they'll say we're taking over." One is safe tokenism; two is a threat, the camel striding boldly into the tent, and there goes the neighborhood.

So I suppose the yammering is pre-emptive. But c'mon -- vampires have been sex symbols since the genre took off in the early nineteenth century. And since when were horror movies supposed to be any good? The fanboys I've seen shrieking online about the vileness of Twilight generally don't exhibit high standards in the films they treasure: many of them were weaned on "extreme" low-budget horror cheapies that make Twilight look like Shakespeare. Geysers of blood, dismemberment, and titties are the main criteria of quality they recognize, and if you can get a car chase with lots of crashes and explosions in there, so much the better.

Takei points elsewhere to a comparison of Bella with Harry Potter's Hermione: "When the love of Hermione's life left her, she continued to search for the keys to destroying the world's most powerful wizard." Unlike the hero of that series, who for most of the increasingly chunky volumes sits around moping until someone else does the studying and other work for him. Rowling has tried to cover for the fact that Hermione isn't the hero of the series by pointing to her competence, hard work, and courage -- but it's at least arguable that if she'd put Hermione at the center of the story and named the series after her, it wouldn't have become the worldwide phenomenon it has. Harry's the hero because of his destiny -- because of who he is rather than what he does -- and because he's a guy. Boy culture triumphs again. And though Rowling is a better writer than Stephanie Meyer, I don't mistake her work for great art either.

And frankly, m'dear George, neither Star Trek nor Star Wars are all that great either, to put it diplomatically. Star Trek was good for television science-fiction, which sets the bar pretty low; what made the Flash-Gordon knockoff Star Wars stand out was its special effects, not its story, dialogue, or acting/character development. (Yeah, The Empire Strikes Back was better, but it was written by an actual professional science fiction writer -- a woman, by the way -- and had a competent director.) Fans of either franchise, of course, are likely to respond by pointing to their enduring popularity, but that's their complaint: Twilight is also enormously popular, shoving aside the boy-culture competition like a snowplow. Whether its popularity will endure will have to be seen, but I'm betting it will. (And, as I wrote before, in twenty-five years its fans will be fuming at whatever popular-culture phenomenon their daughters are embracing.) The trouble with Twilight isn't that it's so bad, though of course it is; the trouble is that it's trash for girls, pandering to their fantasies and not to boys' -- and for that it can never be forgiven.

In the Future Everybody Will Be Queer -- Except Me

I've finally begun reading Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008), and am in the middle of a contribution by one of the editors, Wendy Gay Pearson. She begins by describing the 1998 call by fan groups for a boycott of an upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek: Insurrection.

After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group had has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last holdout in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the 'real' world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect ...

Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, 'it is just as important to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future'. The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek reject demands for visibly non-straight character: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem; in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it. Clearly, logic is not a prerequisite for would-be television gurus.

Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, right-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it is worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to 'queer' that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of 'cognitive estrangement' (to use [Darko] Suvin's term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little -- and one might suggest that it would only take a very little -- imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a 'problem' [14-15].

It should take a very little imagination to do so, since the producers would have before them the example of Star Trek's handling of race, with Lt. Uhura, a character of African descent whose skin color was not treated as a 'problem'; and if they wanted, they'd have the example of a great deal of print SF which already by 1998 had shown lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters whose sexuality was not a problem. That's why Star Trek always left me feeling dissatisfied from its first season: it was good for TV science fiction, but not very good compared to print science fiction. Where sex and gender are concerned, the lag between TV/film and print just widened as time went on.

But I disagree with Pearson's take on the producers' circular logic. They're quite right to insist that a non-homophobic future would not regard lesbian and gay Starfleet personnel as a problem; they could even have argued that in such a future, "gay" and "lesbian" would have no meaning. Queer theorists like to talk about "homosexuality as we think about it today" by contrast with the past, but they seldom consider how people might think about homosexuality in the future. In a nonhomophobic society, it seems to me, there would be many people who would become involved erotically / romantically with persons of their own sex, but they wouldn't think of themselves as lesbian, gay, or even bisexual, because there would be no need for such labels. Samuel R. Delany likes to cite a Thomas Disch story which contains the line (I'm quoting from memory here), "Father married again, a man this time and somewhat more happily." This sentence, all by itself, tells us that the narrator and his father live in a society where men can marry other men, where there's not an assumption that because one currently has a partner of one's own sex, all of one's partners have been or will be of one's own sex. That's not to say that in a non-homophobic society everyone would be "bisexual," as some have claimed. It would be homophobic to object if someone preferred partners of one sex or the other. The anthropologist Margaret Mead notoriously said that exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality, which is true only in the narrow sense that zero equals zero, because neither pattern is "sick."

I can't tell so far whether Pearson is unaware of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "universalizing" vs. "minoritizing" conceptions of homosexuality, or whether she merely misunderstands it. At one point she refers to her "own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of 'identity politics' influenced by an ethic of gayness" (17). She doesn't mention Sedgwick here, but if she has her in mind, she misunderstands what Sedgwick meant. A universalizing view doesn't assume that "all gays are alike" -- that would be the minoritizing view, which holds that homosexuals are a stable, discrete group, not all identical perhaps but still possessing the same gay or lesbian essence, which heterosexuals lack. A universalizing view holds that anyone might have homosexual feelings, desires, overt experiences. This is not necessarily either a hostile or an accepting view, just as the minoritizing style can be either hostile or accepting. Sedgwick was interested in exploring and unraveling the tensions and contradictions between the two styles, which aren't mutually exclusive. It's hard for me to figure out just what binarism Pearson is trying to define here.

But maybe Pearson meant something else. Whatever. What I was getting at is that the producers of Star Trek were using the idea of a non-homophobic society as a way of erasing same-sex eroticism. Their logic wasn't necessarily circular, just dishonest. The way to resolve the problem would be to have characters who interact romantically with partners of their own sex without labeling them gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This would probably be too much for television, let alone science-fiction television, but that's the way it has been handled in print science-fiction. I'd say that the producers Pearson quotes were using this valid logic to veil their own homophobia.

What got my attention in Pearson's discussion was that bit about "If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck ..." Pearson alludes to the problem of how you show a lesbian officer on the bridge -- what signifiers would tell us that a woman officer on the bridge is a lesbian? a labyris? Doc Martens? -- but doesn't seem to see the trouble with her image of a gay male couple holding hands on the holodeck. Two men holding hands would spell h-o-m-o to an American TV audience, of course, but not to people in every culture. The editors of Queer Universes pay lip service to postcolonial theory in their introduction, but Pearson gives me the impression that she doesn't know much about other cultures in the real world. She certainly hasn't taken them into account here.

In many cultures, from Africa to the Middle East to East Asia, men are physically affectionate with other men and women are physically affectionate with other women to a degree that often makes visiting Europeans uncomfortable. (This despite the fact that such effusive affection between men was not unknown in Europe or America in the recent past.) Men hold hands walking down the street or while having a conversation in a cafe, for example. There's a tendency among some Anglo observers to romanticize this behavior (Jeremy Seabrook on Indian men, for example), which I want to avoid here. Such societies are not less "homophobic" than "Western" societies -- indeed, they are often very homophobic. I have the impression that this same-sex affection flourishes in sex-segregated societies, and that as the culture changes and men and women are allowed to be affectionate in public, affection becomes eroticized and homophobia makes it harder (and eventually impossible) for it to be expressed between same-sex friends.

But there's also a tendency for homophobic spokesmen of those societies to insist that such affectionate displays are not "homosexual", in an attempt to deny that homosexuality exists in their cultures; I reject that tendency too, along with the contemporary "Western" academic tendency to de-eroticize this affection with terminology like the "homosocial." There's no clear line to be drawn between the affectionate and the erotic in general.

To postulate two male characters holding hands on the holodeck as "a gay couple" is a textbook example of that Eurocentric gay imperialism that post-colonial theorists often complain about, though they often try clumsily and ineffectually to "queer" those non-Western patterns -- that is, to claim them for queerness. (I hereby claim this island and its exotic folkways for Queer Nation!) It will take more than just "a very little imagination" to come up with depictions of lesbian and gay characters for Star Trek or other vehicles that don't fall into that trap, yet would work on American television with all its taboos. In a non-homophobic society, how would a lesbian officer or a gay male couple behave? What would two men holding hands on the holodeck signify? I see no reason to assume that such affection is only and always an expression of eroticism, though the erotic is as welcome to me as the non-erotic. What happens to pride and honor in a non-homophobic society? In a homophobic society, men must defend their honor against imputations of sexual receptivity, even (or especially) if they are sexually receptive to other men in private. Will men in the future be accepted not only if they have sex with other men, but if they hold hands with them? Ditto for women.

Questions like these are too much for the likes of Star Trek, of course, but queer theorists and science-fiction writers interested in sexuality, gender, and culture had better start exploring them; they seem to be very interesting, to me. The matter of affection and its relation to eroticism is something I hope to write about more before long.

In the Future Everybody Will Be Queer -- Except Me

I've finally begun reading Queer Universes: Sexualities in Science Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2008), and am in the middle of a contribution by one of the editors, Wendy Gay Pearson. She begins by describing the 1998 call by fan groups for a boycott of an upcoming Star Trek film, Star Trek: Insurrection.

After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group had has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last holdout in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the 'real' world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect ...

Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, 'it is just as important to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future'. The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek reject demands for visibly non-straight character: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem; in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it. Clearly, logic is not a prerequisite for would-be television gurus.

Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, right-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it is worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to 'queer' that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of 'cognitive estrangement' (to use [Darko] Suvin's term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little -- and one might suggest that it would only take a very little -- imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a 'problem' [14-15].

It should take a very little imagination to do so, since the producers would have before them the example of Star Trek's handling of race, with Lt. Uhura, a character of African descent whose skin color was not treated as a 'problem'; and if they wanted, they'd have the example of a great deal of print SF which already by 1998 had shown lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters whose sexuality was not a problem. That's why Star Trek always left me feeling dissatisfied from its first season: it was good for TV science fiction, but not very good compared to print science fiction. Where sex and gender are concerned, the lag between TV/film and print just widened as time went on.

But I disagree with Pearson's take on the producers' circular logic. They're quite right to insist that a non-homophobic future would not regard lesbian and gay Starfleet personnel as a problem; they could even have argued that in such a future, "gay" and "lesbian" would have no meaning. Queer theorists like to talk about "homosexuality as we think about it today" by contrast with the past, but they seldom consider how people might think about homosexuality in the future. In a nonhomophobic society, it seems to me, there would be many people who would become involved erotically / romantically with persons of their own sex, but they wouldn't think of themselves as lesbian, gay, or even bisexual, because there would be no need for such labels. Samuel R. Delany likes to cite a Thomas Disch story which contains the line (I'm quoting from memory here), "Father married again, a man this time and somewhat more happily." This sentence, all by itself, tells us that the narrator and his father live in a society where men can marry other men, where there's not an assumption that because one currently has a partner of one's own sex, all of one's partners have been or will be of one's own sex. That's not to say that in a non-homophobic society everyone would be "bisexual," as some have claimed. It would be homophobic to object if someone preferred partners of one sex or the other. The anthropologist Margaret Mead notoriously said that exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality, which is true only in the narrow sense that zero equals zero, because neither pattern is "sick."

I can't tell so far whether Pearson is unaware of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's schema of "universalizing" vs. "minoritizing" conceptions of homosexuality, or whether she merely misunderstands it. At one point she refers to her "own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of 'identity politics' influenced by an ethic of gayness" (17). She doesn't mention Sedgwick here, but if she has her in mind, she misunderstands what Sedgwick meant. A universalizing view doesn't assume that "all gays are alike" -- that would be the minoritizing view, which holds that homosexuals are a stable, discrete group, not all identical perhaps but still possessing the same gay or lesbian essence, which heterosexuals lack. A universalizing view holds that anyone might have homosexual feelings, desires, overt experiences. This is not necessarily either a hostile or an accepting view, just as the minoritizing style can be either hostile or accepting. Sedgwick was interested in exploring and unraveling the tensions and contradictions between the two styles, which aren't mutually exclusive. It's hard for me to figure out just what binarism Pearson is trying to define here.

But maybe Pearson meant something else. Whatever. What I was getting at is that the producers of Star Trek were using the idea of a non-homophobic society as a way of erasing same-sex eroticism. Their logic wasn't necessarily circular, just dishonest. The way to resolve the problem would be to have characters who interact romantically with partners of their own sex without labeling them gay, lesbian, or bisexual. This would probably be too much for television, let alone science-fiction television, but that's the way it has been handled in print science-fiction. I'd say that the producers Pearson quotes were using this valid logic to veil their own homophobia.

What got my attention in Pearson's discussion was that bit about "If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck ..." Pearson alludes to the problem of how you show a lesbian officer on the bridge -- what signifiers would tell us that a woman officer on the bridge is a lesbian? a labyris? Doc Martens? -- but doesn't seem to see the trouble with her image of a gay male couple holding hands on the holodeck. Two men holding hands would spell h-o-m-o to an American TV audience, of course, but not to people in every culture. The editors of Queer Universes pay lip service to postcolonial theory in their introduction, but Pearson gives me the impression that she doesn't know much about other cultures in the real world. She certainly hasn't taken them into account here.

In many cultures, from Africa to the Middle East to East Asia, men are physically affectionate with other men and women are physically affectionate with other women to a degree that often makes visiting Europeans uncomfortable. (This despite the fact that such effusive affection between men was not unknown in Europe or America in the recent past.) Men hold hands walking down the street or while having a conversation in a cafe, for example. There's a tendency among some Anglo observers to romanticize this behavior (Jeremy Seabrook on Indian men, for example), which I want to avoid here. Such societies are not less "homophobic" than "Western" societies -- indeed, they are often very homophobic. I have the impression that this same-sex affection flourishes in sex-segregated societies, and that as the culture changes and men and women are allowed to be affectionate in public, affection becomes eroticized and homophobia makes it harder (and eventually impossible) for it to be expressed between same-sex friends.

But there's also a tendency for homophobic spokesmen of those societies to insist that such affectionate displays are not "homosexual", in an attempt to deny that homosexuality exists in their cultures; I reject that tendency too, along with the contemporary "Western" academic tendency to de-eroticize this affection with terminology like the "homosocial." There's no clear line to be drawn between the affectionate and the erotic in general.

To postulate two male characters holding hands on the holodeck as "a gay couple" is a textbook example of that Eurocentric gay imperialism that post-colonial theorists often complain about, though they often try clumsily and ineffectually to "queer" those non-Western patterns -- that is, to claim them for queerness. (I hereby claim this island and its exotic folkways for Queer Nation!) It will take more than just "a very little imagination" to come up with depictions of lesbian and gay characters for Star Trek or other vehicles that don't fall into that trap, yet would work on American television with all its taboos. In a non-homophobic society, how would a lesbian officer or a gay male couple behave? What would two men holding hands on the holodeck signify? I see no reason to assume that such affection is only and always an expression of eroticism, though the erotic is as welcome to me as the non-erotic. What happens to pride and honor in a non-homophobic society? In a homophobic society, men must defend their honor against imputations of sexual receptivity, even (or especially) if they are sexually receptive to other men in private. Will men in the future be accepted not only if they have sex with other men, but if they hold hands with them? Ditto for women.

Questions like these are too much for the likes of Star Trek, of course, but queer theorists and science-fiction writers interested in sexuality, gender, and culture had better start exploring them; they seem to be very interesting, to me. The matter of affection and its relation to eroticism is something I hope to write about more before long.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a Hollywood Movie Director, Not a Miracle Worker!

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Okay, this is satire, right? Maybe not. I'm not a big Star Trek fan. When it first appeared on TV in 1966, I was fifteen. At that age I'd already read a lot of science fiction, and I soon recognized that while Star Trek was good for television SF, it wasn't very good SF. When it went off the air, I didn't celebrate but I didn't mourn either. I still haven't seen the first Star Trek movie, but I did see the rest, more or less as they came out, and I thought they were better than the series. I have not watched the succeeding series, but then I've hardly watched anything on TV in the past thirty years; the few episodes I stumbled on didn't make me want to call my local cable company to be hooked up.

Some fans are excited about the new film. Others are not. I've browsed through some entertainment industry magazines at the local Borders, and while the casting looks good, why would I want to see the origin story of Captain James T. Kirk? Maybe if Kirk had a post-adolescent affair with Spock, or better, Spock with Sulu, that would draw me in to a theater. Brokeback Starship. (But then, this review could almost persuade me.)

I've often noticed fans going berserk over remakes of their favorite franchises, and even reasonably intelligent ones fall back on readymade talking points like Hollywood's lack of ideas, or Why Do They Have To Ruin Everything I Love?

Item: you don't have to go see these movies, and thanks to home video the versions you love will continue to be available, so you can sit at home stroking yourself over them if that's what you want.

Item: Hollywood has never had ideas -- most of your favorite movies and TV shows are probably remakes to start with, or spinoffs from plays or toys or foreign movies or books or short stories.

Item: a bit of historical/cultural perspective please -- Star Trek, like Transformers or The Hulk or The Thing or Speed Racer, is not a monument in the great artistic heritage of the West. John Caruso says sarcastically (I think), "Transformers, Star Trek, whatever—it's all just product, people!" Transformers, of course, was never anything but product -- a children's TV show that was essentially product placement, to market toys to little boys. Yet when the Transformers movie was announced a couple of years ago, the now grown-up (more or less) little boys fretted that They were going to ruin another precious, meaningful experience of their youth. Star Trek always had commercial tie-ins, from the novelizations to the plastic models of the Starship Enterprise to the fan cons to the publication of the starship blueprints and so on. Like the English language, Star Trek never had any purity to be ruined.

I know what you're thinking: They came for the Transformers but I was not a Transformers fan so I did nothing; They came for Star Trek but I was not a Trekkie so I did nothing; and then They came for ... ? To be honest, I'm drawing a blank. I can't think of any past Hollywood product that I'd throw a hissyfit over when the crummy remake was announced. Or a favorite book from childhood that could be ruined in the filming. E. B. White's Stuart Little was the first book that showed me the complex emotional power of literature, in third grade. I've never seen the 1999 movie version (scripted by M. Night Shyamalan), which by all accounts is utterly faithless to the original, nor worried about it. Throwing tantrums over the corruption of one's favorite commercial product seems to be part of the core fan experience, which may be why I've never joined fan culture.

Dammit, Jim, I'm a Hollywood Movie Director, Not a Miracle Worker!

Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable'

Okay, this is satire, right? Maybe not. I'm not a big Star Trek fan. When it first appeared on TV in 1966, I was fifteen. At that age I'd already read a lot of science fiction, and I soon recognized that while Star Trek was good for television SF, it wasn't very good SF. When it went off the air, I didn't celebrate but I didn't mourn either. I still haven't seen the first Star Trek movie, but I did see the rest, more or less as they came out, and I thought they were better than the series. I have not watched the succeeding series, but then I've hardly watched anything on TV in the past thirty years; the few episodes I stumbled on didn't make me want to call my local cable company to be hooked up.

Some fans are excited about the new film. Others are not. I've browsed through some entertainment industry magazines at the local Borders, and while the casting looks good, why would I want to see the origin story of Captain James T. Kirk? Maybe if Kirk had a post-adolescent affair with Spock, or better, Spock with Sulu, that would draw me in to a theater. Brokeback Starship. (But then, this review could almost persuade me.)

I've often noticed fans going berserk over remakes of their favorite franchises, and even reasonably intelligent ones fall back on readymade talking points like Hollywood's lack of ideas, or Why Do They Have To Ruin Everything I Love?

Item: you don't have to go see these movies, and thanks to home video the versions you love will continue to be available, so you can sit at home stroking yourself over them if that's what you want.

Item: Hollywood has never had ideas -- most of your favorite movies and TV shows are probably remakes to start with, or spinoffs from plays or toys or foreign movies or books or short stories.

Item: a bit of historical/cultural perspective please -- Star Trek, like Transformers or The Hulk or The Thing or Speed Racer, is not a monument in the great artistic heritage of the West. John Caruso says sarcastically (I think), "Transformers, Star Trek, whatever—it's all just product, people!" Transformers, of course, was never anything but product -- a children's TV show that was essentially product placement, to market toys to little boys. Yet when the Transformers movie was announced a couple of years ago, the now grown-up (more or less) little boys fretted that They were going to ruin another precious, meaningful experience of their youth. Star Trek always had commercial tie-ins, from the novelizations to the plastic models of the Starship Enterprise to the fan cons to the publication of the starship blueprints and so on. Like the English language, Star Trek never had any purity to be ruined.

I know what you're thinking: They came for the Transformers but I was not a Transformers fan so I did nothing; They came for Star Trek but I was not a Trekkie so I did nothing; and then They came for ... ? To be honest, I'm drawing a blank. I can't think of any past Hollywood product that I'd throw a hissyfit over when the crummy remake was announced. Or a favorite book from childhood that could be ruined in the filming. E. B. White's Stuart Little was the first book that showed me the complex emotional power of literature, in third grade. I've never seen the 1999 movie version (scripted by M. Night Shyamalan), which by all accounts is utterly faithless to the original, nor worried about it. Throwing tantrums over the corruption of one's favorite commercial product seems to be part of the core fan experience, which may be why I've never joined fan culture.