this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2024
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It's not nonsense:
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-ds9-garak-queer-rick-berman-veto/
And I choose to headcanon that we just didn't see any of the physical affection on screen.
The novel (written by Andrew Robinson) A Stitch in Time also confirms this physical attraction, if not specific examples of physical affection.
And I would say that even if the novel is not considered canon, the way the actors (and I do not believe it was just Robinson who felt this way) chose to play the roles is valid as part of canon as long as it doesn't actually violate anything continuitywise.
If I found out that James Doohan had played Scotty as if he were an alcoholic... well, I wouldn't have personally seen it that way, but he notoriously loved booze, so sure. Scotty was an alcoholic.
There's a whole episode where Scotty drank a Kevlan under the table, the Kevlans were shown to be basically supermen, so.... I'm pretty sure it would take an alcoholic to do that.
Edit: Oh, and the TNG episode where he got mad because everyone drank synthahol...
Sure, but if, alternately, I found out that he played Scotty as if he wasn't an alcoholic- that he could go for months between scotches, he just had an amazing tolerance for alcohol when he drank, fine. It still doesn't affect continuity.
Exactly. The actors aren't robots or AI, running solely off the prompts of directors and writers. They are part of the collaborative art project that is the show. Their input, motivations, intentions behind the character are just as valid as the writer's. Garak is queer, because Robinson says so. During the pandemic, Bashir and Garak did a video where they exchanged letters, and they made it clear that they romantically involved in that. Regardless of if physical sex occurred during the timeline of the series, suggesting that it could not have because none of the characters, in the tiny fraction of a percent's time we actually see them during that year run, never outwardly exclaimed "bee tee dubs, me and Garak are banging" is such an insult to the actors who put so much of themselves into that role.
I said basically the same thing too. We see a fraction of their life for part of the about 45 minutes the episode is on. For all we know, everyone was complimenting Garak and Bashir on what a cute couple they made as they strolled down the promenade holding hands. Just not at the time we see them. Which makes sense because most couples aren't about PDA all the time. Even if they're on a date.
Especially Julian, tbh. He strikes me as the "but what would people think!" Type when it comes to dating a Cardassian. Lol. Not that he's prejudiced... But simple Garak may well be a spy for the obsidian order!
You're right. If there were any reason to not make that relationship public, if that was the case, it would have nothing to do with both of them being men, it would be because of who Garak is and who Julian is and the whole security issue there. I'm sure they wouldn't want Odo checking up on them when they were trying to have a romantic moment.
But in the end, I know the look of two people who have a mutual attraction.
If Alexander Siddig wasn't supposed to be attracted to Garak, at least in the minds of he and Andrew Robinson and their motivations in that scene, he did it very wrong.
And I think he knows what it's like to be attracted to a man, because he apparently described himself this year as "not quite straight."
Oh my God, you've just given me the idea for the best trek fanfic ever. Julian and Garak keep trying to secret away for a date, and whenever they do, Odo interrupts them to question their behavior. They sneak into a supply closet, Odo is the door. They slip away to a cargo bay, and suddenly a crate of self sealing stem bolts morphs into the familiar security officer. They finally get a nice table at a Holo restaurant under someone else's name and Quark's promised discretion, and lo and behold Bashir tries to take a drink of his champagne for it to suddenly become the changeling, relentless in his need to discuss this aberrant behavior. Finally they give up.
Bashir: yes, Odo, what can we do for you?
Odo: I need to discuss this sneaking around. It has become a security concern.
Garak: Trust me, Mr. Odo, had we been involved with anything concerning to the security of this station, you would never have discovered us.
If you've never seen the WWII-era Looney Tunes cartoon where Daffy gets drafted into the army, you should. Because it's almost the same idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb6VAT6Ymi8
Ha! You're right, very similar. I haven't thought of that episode in years
I think I somehow missed this! Do you happen to have a link? A quick YouTube search didn’t help me out.
After I posted this, I tried to find it and I can't. Either I'm using the wrong search terms, or I dreamt it. Lmao.
Iirc, it was a reading of a portion of a stitch in time. I mainly remember it because it was the first time I'd seen someone other than me think that Garak was queer. I wasn't big into online trek communities at the time, and my brother didn't twig to it.
Fuck Rick Berman for a lot of reasons, but I think some people who weren't alive then don't realize how deeply unpopular homosexuality was around that time. Still room to grow, but the fact even that homophobia just isn't the accepted norm now... It's amazing how much progress we've made in my lifetime. Sad and still a coward, but back then Rick was probably 100% correct.
I don't agree. Firstly because Roddenberry himself wanted queer representation on TNG in the 80s, but also because there was a lot of precedent with queer characters becoming more normalized on TV going all the way back to the 70s when Billy Crystal played a decent, caring gay man on Soap with toned-down stereotypical mannerisms.
But also, Garak was introduced in 1993. Look how many queer-themed TV episodes had happened in the 90s by then on mainstream shows like Roseanne and L.A. Law. Even gay recurring characters were on TV by then. Roy's gay son on Wings showed up multiple times and did not fit any gay stereotypes, which was kind of the point of the character. The, again not stereotypical, gay couple that opened the bed and breakfast in Cicely in Northern Exposure debuted in 1991 (the town's founders were also revealed to be a lesbian couple that year). I already mentioned Roseanne above. Sandra Bernhard's character, a member of the main cast, came out as gay in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1990s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes
Berman was just a bigot.
No disagreements on Rick Berman being a bigot, he was pretty shitty for a lot of other additional reasons too, don't have to limit to being a homophobe, but... LGBT themes doesn't mean openly LGBT characters. We did definitely have some, but a lot of those characters lived in the realm of plausible deniability to let them have mass appeal. Publicly, they could just be 'two roommates'. If you were a rare character who got to be openly gay, you tended to fall victim to the 'bury your gays' trope and probably were not long for this world.
Ellen came out in 97, on her show and then in real life, and they responded by slapping a parental advisory warning on her very family friendly show and then cancelling it as soon as they could. It may have made Will & Grace more acceptable though in 98... I feel like that was one of the first shows where they were okay having gay men regularly on US TV, but even then only as long as it was for comedy.
I know we like to put that black and white filter on it and pretend it was a long time ago, but it was a rough time, and a lot more recent than any of us like. Gay sex was technically illegal in over a dozen states until 2003 and a few of the less progressive states hadn't even had those laws that long. A full 28 states went out of their way to explicitly ban gay marriage, most of them did so in the early 2000s. DS9 had it's last episode in 1999.
The DS9 writers and actors also had workarounds for Berman. They would write a scene and then a close but Berman friendly version. He would ok it and then the actors would "improvise" the original script.
Dukat was another case of the writers and actor colluding. Berman wanted him to be straight up evil. The writers and actor wanted to give him respectable motivations for his evil acts.
So he is not a good guy but you can respect the love for family and state that drives his terrible crimes.
Except ds9 literally rolled during the Queer renaissance, when we got back all the ground we lost due to AIDS. Ffs, Beverley Hills 90210 had more LGBTQ chars than trek.
The Garak -> Bashir -> O’Brien -> Keiko -> Worf -> Jadzia -> Kira -> Odo -> Changeling Orgy love polygon (polyline? graph?). Truly a classic. Everybody is doing it and nobody is happy.
The term I've used for graphs of poly relationships is "polycule" because they look a lot like chemical diagrams: Multiple nodes connected in different ways, different kinds of bonds.
Polycule is, indeed, the term we use in the polyamory community.
Wait, Bashir liked O'Brien?
I thought nobody liked O'Brien, not even his wife. That is why he was in the jeffreys tubes and teleporter rooms so often.
Well O'Brien did say he preferred Julian to Keiko
Yes Robinson played Garak as gay despite that not being the character. However, Bashir was skirt chasing throughout the entire series until finally setting down with Ezri.
You can have a gay friend without being gay.
Just because Bashir preferred women doesn't mean he didn't also have a romantic interest in Garak. They absolutely played it as though it were more than just friendship, at least at the beginning.
We all know that once Bashir's gene modification secret was out, he would want to share himself with everyone just to show off.
For all we know, Bashir fucked anything he could like Mariner. Like I said to someone else, we see these people's lives for less than 45 minutes at a time. And only even close to that if they're in every scene, which rarely (maybe never) happens. So all we know is that we see Bashir going after women. He could have been going after everyone else, he could have made an exception for Garak because it's the 24th century and people aren't restricted to heterosexuality like that anymore... who knows?
But they sure as hell played it as if it was more than just friendship, at least at first.
And remember, Garak was shown as being interested in women as well.