10 Star Trek Moments More Important Than You Realised

Data had a number of important steps on his quest to become more Human over the course of The Next Generation. One thing that was very important for him in this regard was exploring his sexuality.

When the entire crew was suffering from the intoxication virus in The Naked Now, Data was (somehow) also affected, which led to him and Tasha Yar sleeping together. As far as we've seen on screen, this was Data's first time being intimate with someone.

It was revealed during one of the court scenes in The Measure Of A Man that Data actually kept a hologram of Tasha after her death and greatly appreciated her for helping him explore this part of himself. Even though it was all because of a weird space virus and Tasha asked him to keep it a secret, this was still one of the formative moments in Data's quest to be Human. After all, according to Data, Dr. Soong designed him to be "fully functional and programmed in many techniques'' (whatever that means), so clearly this was something that was always a possibility for Data, though it likely took the influence of the intoxication virus to get him to want to experiment.