Star Trek Fans Rejoice! The Franchise Gets Its First Openly Gay Character

Navin Noronha

8 years ago

Keeping up with its gritty, real-world feel, the Star Trek film franchise will be introducing us to the first openly gay character from the franchise. Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu, formerly played by the amazing George Takei, and currently by Harold and Kumar’s John Cho, will be seen with his male partner and daughter in the upcoming film by Justin Lin. Actor John Cho, along with director Justin Lin and writer Simon Pegg, confirmed the news.

The decision to portray Sulu as a gay man is a nod to real-life LGBT activist George Takei, who is known for his amazing pun skills, shutting down rampant homophobes, and dissing Donald Trumpevery once in a while. Takei, who first shot to fame through the Star Trek TV series back in 1966, is a prominent figure not only in pop culture, but also in the equality rights debate.

Now given the fact that the series suffered a lot due to audience expectations back in the day, even going ahead and cutting the inter-racial kiss between Kirk and Uhura to appease certain factions, the film franchise has indeed come a long way.

With several new franchises and Sci-Fi universes accepting characters of different sexual orientations and integrating positive messages about race and gender, we can only hope the mainstream audiences finally get to accept characters without any prejudices.

For now, things are happy and gay aboard the USS Enterprise!

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Navin Noronha

Navin Noronha is a writer and stand-up comedian based out of Bombay. He has a penchant for rolling his eyes over most things and secretly wants to marry James Corden. He loves absorbing pop culture in all its glory and nerds out with people who read Harry Potter or have watched That 70's Show. He likes to think he's a quasi-liberal but to be honest, he doesn't really know what quasi means. He also strongly dislikes pigeons.