Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Paul Stamets

It is very much the role of the Arts, in whatever form, to be a bastion of social justice. For the longest stretch of its run, however, Star Trek had arguably failed to live up to the high standards of representation and diversity that it had set itself in the 1960s. The fact of the matter is that allegory does not a gay character make, and allegory of homophobia is still homophobia. With radical queer politics and plays all around it in the 1990s and into the 2000s, Star Trek was straight in every sense of the word.

All of that changed in Star Trek: Discovery, with a small stepping stone in Star Trek: Beyond, although there, you still had to read between the lines. In season two, Stamets and Culber were going through a rough patch in their relationship, but that didn't stop them from breaking ground for the LGBTQIA+ community.

"Well, in my universe, and pretty much any universe I can possibly imagine, I'm gay. And so is he," said Stamets in Discovery's second season episode The Red Angel. In that, Stamets became the first character in all of Star Trek to refer to himself as such, and only the second person to use the word 'gay' — meaning 'homosexual' or even otherwise — the first being only moments before when Doctor Culber said of Stamets, "You do know he's gay, right?" "What just happened?" asks a certain ensign at the end of the scene. History, Tilly. History just happened!