Check Out Star Trek’s Queer Cast on the Cover of ‘Out’ Magazine
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The cover of the January/February issue of Out magazine features its queer cast members, highlighting Blu del Barrio and Ian Alexander, along with Wilson Cruz and Anthony Rapp.
Both sets of characters are couples. Del Barrio’s Adira and Alexander’s Gray as a non-binary/trans relationship and Cruz’ Dr. Culber and Rapp’s Stamets a gay one and ersatz parents to the younger.
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Out: This season, Paul Stamets and Dr. Hugh Culber, a gay couple played, respectively, by gay actors Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz, have embraced their responsibility as parental guardians of the teenage lovers Adira Tal and Gray. Del Barrio is a newcomer who made their television debut in the role of Adira, a human who came out last season as nonbinary, shortly before del Barrio did. Alexander plays Gray, a member of the alien species Trill and a young trans man. Previously, Alexander made history as the first out trans Asian-American actor on TV, in Netflix’s The OA. He’s become the representation that he’s always longed to see. “When I was really little, I didn’t have many very visible transmasculine people to look up to,” Alexander says. “And it wasn’t until I got into high school that I started seeing trans people on YouTube posting about their transition. So it makes me really happy that on such a mainstream franchise like Star Trek, there are two happy, successful trans people, and there’s more than two queer people on the show too.”
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In fact, there are seven in the current cast of Star Trek: Discovery: In addition to Alexander, del Barrio, Cruz, and Rapp, there are Tig Notaro, Mary Wiseman, and Emily Coutts, all featured in this issue. As far as is known, all of them except for Wiseman and Coutts play queer characters. There’s also their costar from seasons 1 and 2, Mary Chieffo, who came out as queer in September 2021. “It is a really queer show,” stresses del Barrio, “and it has a really big viewership. The world did not crash and burn, and we did not get stoned. I think it’s a really good example of a show that is very, very openly gay and is doing really well because of it, which is great.”
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But is Star Trek: Discovery deliberately advancing some kind of “LGBTQ agenda,” as some straight cisgender fans who criticize the series have complained? Paradise responds.
Pictured: Anthony Rapp as Stamets and Sonequa Martin-Green as Burnham of the Paramount+ original series STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/ViacomCBS © 2021 ViacomCBS. All Rights Reserved.
“Our agenda is to tell great stories and be diverse and reflect the world as it is, which is what the original series was built on,” says Paradise. “I think there will always be people who like a show or don’t like a show. But we feel really good about what we do. We feel good about the way we’re doing it. We feel like it’s important. We feel like it not only honors the foundation of Star Trek, but it’s incredibly important just in television storytelling, period, given the reach of these shows, to have them be diverse and have them reflect a diversity of experiences and characters and actors.”
Read the full story here.
