The question of gay characters on Star Trek has been bouncing around ever since the original series. Star Trek: The Next Generation was supposed to feature gay characters but controversy remains over whether it ever did. David Gerrold's AIDS script, Blood and Fire was never filmed. Succeeding spinoffs, particularly Star Trek: Deep Space Nine featured lesbian kisses but then again a kiss between two women has always been more acceptable to a male dominated popular culture than one between two men since the former serves as sexually arousing material for male viewers and the latter as sexually threatening to male viewers. This same split has regularly occurred all across network television and Hollywood movies which will feature lesbian kisses and sexual encounters as titillating while suppressing homosexual displays of affection.

Star Trek's gay legacy began with Star Trek The Original Series and the birth of the K\S or Kirk and Spock relationshipping. This involved stories and fan artwork featuring a romantic and sexual relationship between Kirk and Spock.Such stories involving desired relationships between characters have since then become commonplace in fandom and entire websites today exist built around proposed heterosexual and homosexual pairings between couples both within Star Trek's varied spinoffs and in other Science Fiction and Fantasy TV series including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Farscape. These pairings run the gamut from existing relationships that the producers eventually acted on such as P/T Paris and Torres to extremely unlikely ones such as Wesley Crusher and Commander Worf.

Such fanfic is routinely a way for fans of a television series to 'acquire' a portion of the TV series' mythological landscape for themselves by subverting the narrative of the series and recreating it along their own desired patterns. This sort of writing is typical for fans who dedicate sizable portions of their time and energy devoted to the story of a particular television show desiring to expand and embed their connection to the television show on a deeper level by sometimes inserting themselves into the story, as in for example the Mary Sue story that has the writer inserting himself or herself into the story as a major character who interacts with the existing characters. This subversion of the narrative represents part of the ongoing struggle for control between television producers, directors and creators with the fans whom they are dependent on but nevertheless resent. As the writers and producers draft their story, fans respond by drafting their own counter-story reshaping the commercial corporate narrative into one that suits their emotional needs.

The K\S fiction seemed to be a prototype of precisely that sort of fandom with one exception. Curiously the majority of these stories were produced by heterosexual women rather than gay men. While in later years, gay men would take over K/S fiction before outrightly dismissing it as a joke, the role that heterosexual women played in pioneering gay fanfic on Star Trek is a significant one. While many explanations have been advanced for this phenomenon, the simpler reality is that the two series leads of the original classic Star Trek series, Kirk and Spock were essentially unavailable men.

Spock was physically unavailable, engaging in sex as a frenzied mating drive only once every seven years. He was also emotionally unavailable, suppressing all his feelings including love, as illogical. Christine Chapel might hopelessly pursue Spock, standing in for all the women who hopelessly longed for the tall pointy eared Vulcan but it was a clearly hopeless and humiliating pursuit. Kirk was physically available with a girl in every port but clearly emotionally unavailable, showing no real affection for anything but the Enterprise and occasionally Spock. There was simply no plausible scenario it seemed in which Kirk and Spock would be both emotionally and physically available to a relationship with a woman and yet they displayed great and enduring feelings for each other. To some female fans the solution for creating romantic fanfics involving Kirk and Spock became quite plain. If they were not available to any woman, they were still available to each other.

The irony is then that Star Trek's gay fanfic evolved in part because the characters of Kirk and Spock were so duty driven and the atmosphere of the Original Series too sexist to allow any real worth for women that a homosexual pairing between the series' two leads became the logical alternative. The fraternity of male companionship that displayed a love deeper than for any woman that was promoted as an ideal in the Anglo-America of the 19th and 20th centuries left only one choice. It was certainly not what Gene Roddenberry or Gene Coon or William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy had in mind but it was nevertheless surprisingly inevitable. And so the sexist suppression of one minority led to their energy being channeled along a line that would promote another minority.

By the era of Star Trek's spinoff, Star Trek The Next Generation, things were supposed to have changed. Having an interracial kiss on TV was no longer shocking. The old network monopoly on television viewers with its sanitized programming was shaky and Star Trek The Next Generation's syndication launch helped demonstrate the power of syndicated programming. Gene Roddenberry had himself expressed a desire to see gay characters on Star Trek The Next Generation. Yet did it ever happen?

While Blood and Fire was never produced, The Outcast was. The Outcast featured Riker falling in love with a person from an androgynous society which deemed such relationships as immoral and evil and reprogrammed those who engaged in them. While Riker makes a passionate case for love and The Outcast's parallels to gay rights are about as unsubtle as possible, many fans remained unsatisfied because Riker played opposite a female actress. Yet it is worth nothing that The Outcast served as Star Trek's real and outspoken defense of people to love whom they chose, rather than whom society tells them to choose. It did not feature a relationship between two male actors but it was making a far more important statement about love and sexuality that transcended merely making a statement about gay rights.

Aside from various lesbian scenes in future spinoffs, often involving possession or body transfer, much as in the notorious Turnabout Intruder, this ended the matter for a gay character on Star Trek. With the cancellation of Enterprise, there is no real reason to except that to change any time soon. However fandom continues to subvert the narrative with stories about gay characters and has moved beyond pen and paper and artwork into the realm of video. The fan produced series Hidden Frontier featured gay characters and if the future of the Star Trek franchise is to rest with the fan created series, the ultimate triumphant subversion of the narrative may occur as the fans may become the creators and finally open the gates to all those excluded from the vision of the future by the narrow specifications of studios and producers. The same energy that initially drove the fanfic writers and artists to create their own vision of what Star Trek should be may ultimately flower into their presence as not merely viewers but creators.