“Star Trek” blazed some trails in its early days with women in leadership roles and the first inter-racial kiss on television, but how was it at portraying queer stories and characters? This is a question that we began wondering about when working on the National Air and Space Museum’s recent QueerSpace project. It may have been being a leader in terms of gender and racial integration, but it turns out this environment of inclusion did not extend to queer identity. 

Star Trek’s groundbreakingly diverse cast helped signal that the show took place far in the future, making the delay in introducing LGBTQ+ characters even more pronounced. Surely this future society wouldn’t be exclusively heteronormative and cisgender?

In the 1980s, science fiction fans began calling on “Star Trek” for queer inclusion in the series. The late 1980s-early 1990s tv show “Star Trek: The Next Generation” released a few episodes with allegories to queer experiences, including “The Host” which involved a character falling for an alien who changed bodies — and gender presentations, and “The Outcast,” which uses gender identity as an allegory for homesexuality in a way that disappointed fans at the time and doesn’t hold up today.

The first openly gay characters in the “Star Trek” television universe weren’t introduced until 2017. On “Star Trek: Discovery,” Paul Stamets and Dr. Hugh Culber, portrayed by LGBTQ+ actors Anthony Rapp and Wilson Cruz, are the first openly gay characters and the first gay couple portrayed in the central cast of a “Star Trek” tv show. Later, the show also introduced a non-binary teenager named Adira and their boyfriend Gray, who is trans.

Although we cannot change the past and the time it took for queer representation on “Star Trek,” what we can do is continue to establish science fiction as a realm that is welcome to people of all backgrounds because, after all, the future — real or imagined — is what we make it.

In one of the episodes of our QueerSpace podcast limited series, we explore just that through an interview with a local bookseller about queer worldbuilding in science fiction literature. Other episodes explore the community of gay flight attendants in the 1970s, the Air Force and Space Force’s LGBTQ Initiative Team, and how themes of space and queerness intersect in art. 

Read our full exploration of LGTBQ+ inclusion in “Star Trek” and listen to episodes of the QueerSpace podcast at airandspace.si.edu/QueerSpace