Thirty Years Later, Star Trek Deep Space Nine's Queer Coding Has Aged Remarkably Well

thegamer.com:

Star Trek managed to predict mobile phones, headsets, and Alexa, but it couldn’t quite predict gay people. Well, that’s unfair, it tried. The studio was clearly aware that the queers were coming, they just struggled to place them in the future they had crafted. Oh, and they wanted to pander to homophobic viewers. That didn’t help either.

This was something writers of the time had to adapt to - getting the gays in their shows without offending the conservative crowd, or providing enough subtext for queer viewers to pick apart and claim as their own as a slight form of representation. Even more so if you were writing for one of the biggest shows on television at the time. As a result, media of the 1990s and 2000s is filled with allegories for gay people, but few actual concrete examples of them. The other option was to queer code your characters, giving them traits that an audience would perceive as “queer”, so they could simultaneously count as representation, while leaving the studio with plausible deniability.

Related: Every Star Trek TV Series Ranked By How Cosy It Is

The latter option gave us the best and worst “gay” characters in media. From walking caricatures to much-loved queer icons, this messy time in LGBTQ+ history is fascinating to look back on with a modern lens – particularly with the series which should have got it perfect right off the bat, Star Trek. However, for all of the praise its original run received for breaking down barriers, it really really struggled with queerness and gender fluidity when it first had a go at it in 1992.

Season 5, episode 17 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, The Outcast, is bad. It means well, showing a willingness to approach queer issues long before other franchises. But