Bonus! Who Thwarted Gene Roddenberry's Gay Vision for Star Trek?

A friend of mine did who lived next door to Cafe Flore did an interview with Ang Lee when Brokeback came out. I've lost touch with him, but the video is still up. I hope it helps, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuIW96I7ids

No Brokeback Mountain stuff, I’m afraid; I’m still entirely focused on giving as much material as I can for a possible C&W video (while also being entirely ready to shut up about it if I’m told to!) Okay, there is this book called A Glass of Blessings, published in 1958 by Barbara Pym (I think it’s unlikely you’d have heard of her, I don’t think her style of humour would travel very well, and even over here she’s more “hidden treasure” than “popular classic”), which does some stuff that you might possibly be interested in. The heroine, Wilmet, is married but develops a crush on this guy called Piers. She thinks it’s reciprocated, but then she meets his flatmate, Keith, who tidies up Piers’s room for him and whose own room is described as “painfully neat and unlived in, as if everything had been arranged for effect”. After meeting Keith, Wilmet is upset and says to Piers, “It would have been more friendly if you’d told me.” Later, while thinking about recent developments in her life, she puts Keith and Piers’s names into a mental list along with two hetero couples who are clearly, definitely romantically involved. At one point, Pym even manages to work in the phrase “friend of Dorothy” – not in direct reference to Keith or Piers, but it adds to the general atmosphere of queerness. There are some other things as well, but I think by this point you can see what I’m getting at. And this time I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who sees it! In the introduction to my edition, John Bayley writes “She is at first angry and jealous when she realises what is the real relation of Piers and Keith”; which isn’t explicit, but is pretty clear as hints go. Now, one of the reasons I’m mentioning this is that there is a minor character called Mary Beamish, who is very kind and self-sacrificing but has quite low self-esteem, and lives a loveless life until she is swept off her feet by a handsome, dark-haired man, despite the fact that she doesn’t seem the sort of person to attract someone like that. And it could be a coincidence that she has the same surname, personality type and basic plot arc as the sidekick/comic relief/love interest in The Buccaneers, but… well, it’s interesting. Another interesting thing: this isn’t the first time Pym has put a gay couple in one of her books. There was one in Crampton Hodnet, originally written in the 40s but not published until the 80s. Again, in the introduction to my edition, Louis de Bernieres comes up with reasons why this massive gap between writing it and getting it published might have happened, and these reasons may well have been what was going on. However, I would like to suggest the following theory, for which I have, as always, absolutely no direct evidence at all: Pym sends Crampton Hodnet to her publisher, who tells her that, if she wants it published, she’ll have to take the gay couple out (yes, there had been gay people in novels before, with Bullet in the Ballet and Goodbye to Berlin, but there may well have been some publishers who were more conservative than others, plus progress is never linear, there are always ups and downs). Pym either refuses, or agrees and then realises she can’t bring herself to do it. More than a decade later, she happens upon a kids’ tv show about pirates, and thinks, “Huh, that’s how to get gay people into a story; you have to be really subtle about it. Okay, I can do that.” The copyright dates on my DVD box set of The Buccaneers are 1957/1958, so the timing just about works if you assume that Pym was writing pretty fast, that she was sufficiently on the ball that she didn’t have to watch the whole show to see what was going on, and also that her publishers were fairly efficient at getting stuff out there. One thing I will say, though: I haven’t read everything by Pym, so it’s possible that she may have written about gay couples in some other book that got published before Glass of Blessings, in which case my whole carefully constructed theory goes up in smoke! In case you do check it out, there’s some stuff in Glass of Blessings about High and Low Church stuff, which I think was just a C of E thing so you might not be familiar, but I checked and there’s explanations of it online, so I won’t go into it. One thing that might be useful to know is that, in the 50s, “common” didn’t just mean “frequently occurring”, it could also mean “lower class” in a somewhat judgmental kind of way. I don’t think that’s a linguistic quirk that you guys ever had over there, and there are a couple of lines that wouldn’t entirely make sense otherwise. A few random scattershot things: This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lu6UBCrKkQ&t=109s) doesn’t have much in terms of information that you won’t find anywhere else, but a lot of the photos are really quite lovely. I tried leaving a comment asking where they were from, but didn’t get any useful info; still, maybe a fellow YouTuber, especially a significantly more successful one who has a proven history of crediting his sources, might be able to get a bit more out of the creator? Could provide some nice pictures to add extra visual interest to any potential video which you might or might not intend to make… E M Forster wrote a novel about gay people called Maurice, but never published it in his lifetime. It was published after his death and later adapted into a Merchant Ivory film. Turns out I owe you an apology: I’ve been rewatching Adventures of Robin Hood, and it turns out that, in the episode where Little John first appears, the Earl does not voluntarily touch him at any point; I could have sworn he did, but I was wrong about that, sorry! But he does order Little John to strip, seem pretty excited at the thought of him having sex, and come out with a possible double entendre when he first walks in the room, plus I still think John’s reaction is way too extreme for someone who is just experiencing the kind of humiliation that would have been routine for serfs (he’s dooming himself to a life outside the law at best and a painful death at worst, and he must know that’s what he’s doing), so my theory that this is essentially an earlier version of the deleted scene from Spartacus stills stands. (Also, it’s quite interesting how reluctant he is to go into the room in the first place. He’s a serf, he would have been very used to both hard labour and obeying orders, so why does the guy who orders him to take the log into the room have to tell him repeatedly, and ultimately threaten him with death, to get him to go in? Unless of course he already knows that the Earl has a habit of getting horny for muscular male serfs, and therefore that going into that room, all big and strong and sweaty from carrying heavy stuff as he is, would be asking for trouble. I know he’s pretending to be all humble, like he just can’t see someone as lowly as him going into the Earl’s own bedroom, but if he was really that humble, wouldn’t he have just meekly obeyed orders without asking any questions?) In Adventures of Sir Lancelot, I have a somewhat tenuous (even for me) theory that C&W are not only implying that Lancelot is gay, but may also be implying that Guinevere is a lesbian (or at the very least bi), meaning that their affection for each other is less tragic doomed love and more queer solidarity. In the opening scenes of Episode 3, a pretty young girl makes a wreath of flowers and puts it on Guinevere’s head; they smile affectionately at each other, and the girl sits down at G’s feet. If you imagine a young man doing the exact same thing, that would be very clearly a love scene, right? Very last thing: if you ever do end up doing a video on C&W, or even one which references them briefly, it would be amazing if you mentioned my blog (https://firstgaytvshow.wordpress.com/), even more amazing if you did it somewhere in the middle of the video (because sometimes people start to click away towards the end), and extra-super-doubly amazing if you could provide a link to it somewhere, maybe in the description? I realise that this probably comes across as pretty pushy, but I swear I would not be doing this if I didn’t believe very strongly that C&W did some amazing things with their shows, that The Buccaneers in particular is their absolute masterpiece, and that as many people as possible should know that. That’s why I’m doing the blog in the first place, and that’s also why I’m currently being significantly more pushy than I’m entirely comfortable with!

Among my friends when we hear the name Rick Berman, we throw up a little bit in our mouths. e couldn't even leave Enterprise alone. The 4th season was excellent history of The Federation (thank you Manny Coto RIP) so of course Berman had to take over the finale and turn the episode into shit.

If you aren't Star Trek'd out yet, you should speak to my friend in Portland, openly gay writer Andy Mangles. He co-authored a number of Star Trek novels back in the 90's, and included several gay characters in his Star Trek books. I'm sure he'd have some interesting stories (good and bad) about his experience dealing with the powers that be at Paramount.

Never heard of the Galactic Network so I checked out their Wikipedia page. Crazy thing, they had a link on the page for their organization that apparently changed hands to a gay porn company’s website. 😂 Needless to say, I edited the page.

I wish I could go to Seattle and see that Frasier presentation. If you end up, recording it (even audio only) I’m hoping you’ll share it with us.