An in-depth look at the star crossed lovers we didn’t get to see in DS9 including interviews with the cast and crew about why it didn’t happen. Includes some details about the origin of slash fic
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Robinson 110% played Garak as being sexually interested in Bashir in his first appearance. And in the (non-canon but very very good) novel A Stitch in Time that Robinson himself authored, he establishes Garak as having had relationships with men and women.
As the show developed the producers/writers/studio backed away from that idea (which, to be fair, I think is a spin that the actor himself put on the script, rather than being there on the page itself), hence giving Garak a girlfriend.
Personally I never read into any of their scenes together that Bashir was interested in Garak as anything more than a friend, but if the show had been more progressive in that respect I suppose it might have evolved into an explicitly romantic relationship. Early 1990s vs early 2020s I suppose.
DS9 was pretty progressive in that the idea of “being in the closet” wrt ones sexual orientation was never a consideration. In “Rejoined” for instance, nobody has an issue with Dax loving another woman - the taboo was about reassociation. And “Rules of Acquisition” people didn’t judge Pel (who people thought was a man at the time) for falling in love with Quark - the taboo was about Ferengi females wearing clothes etc. (Not sure if that Matt Baume video mentions this - it’s been a while since I saw it.)
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I mean, they could be bisexual.
As mentioned, I think there’s some evidence of Garak being queer, but not a lot of Bashir. That’s where fan theorising comes in. But even in fanon I don’t think people thought they were “in the closet”, ie hiding their sexuality. It was more a case of “what we see on-screen is not the whole story, the fun stuff happens when the cameras are off them”.
This is similar to how a lot of fans saw Seven as queer (even though I personally don’t think there was a lot, if any, evidence of it on screen). But there was sufficient momentum for this fan theory that the writers made Seven canonically queer in Picard.
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I do find it funny that the moment two blokes have a close friendship on screen people are confidently declaring that they’re gay all over social media now, as if blokes aren’t able to have deep and meaningful friendships that aren’t sexual at all. As you say it feels the opposite of progressive. We’ve seen it with Sam and Frodo, Cap and Bucky, Bashir and Garek, etc.
Bashir and chief O’Brien have also a deep friendship and no one has ever claimed they were in a romantic relationship. Or Picard and Riker. Or Geordi and Data. They have close and meaningful friendships and no one else sees more than that. Sure, there are fanfics, but it’s not something really accepted as fact by many in the fandom, as opposed to Bashir and Garak. The dynamics between Bashir and Garak really feel like flirting, specially in the first one or two seasons. And nothing really makes me think Andy Robinson is lying when he says he really intended to portray Garak like that.
There are also pretty decent writings explaining why the relationship between Frodo and Sam reads as homosexual, like this one. I mean, even when I read the book around a decade before the movies were released, I remember talking about it on IRC and people who had read it earlier were making constant jokes about how gay frodo and sam are. Even people who refuse to have queer content in their fiction saw them as queer.
Can’t talk about Captain America and Bucky because I know very little of the source material and didn’t enjoy these movies enough to care about any character and considered they made little sense, even heterosexual romance is pretty badly done in the MCU in my opinion.
Btw, the same thing you are complaining about could be said about male-female relationships, whenever there is a close friendship between a male and a female characters, a relationship is expected, and sometimes even forced between characters who had none in the source material when adapting it (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or the Hobbit for example). And we have tons of examples of forced heterosexual romances with far less chemistry than Bashir and Garak that harm their respective movies and shows (don’t get me started on Rey/Kylo Ren, Padme/Anakin, or Spock/Uhura in the Abrams movies, or the dumpster fire that is Passengers).
Complaining about a bunch of people just being happy with the few crumbles of non harmful queer subtext we could have in the 90s feels a bit petty.
I’ll be honest, I’m not particularly big in shipping in general, be it gay, straight it anything else. I don’t understand the impulse to look for these connections that aren’t intended by the creator. I do understand that prior to recent times LGBT people didn’t have much representation in the official canon of most media in the same way heterosexuals did so fair dos.
I never really saw the Frodo and Sam read as homosexual but that article was convincing. I always thought of them as being part of a loving friendship the kind that only exists when two friends go to war. The kind of friendship that can could only be forged when two people who lived in the same place had to go to hell and back together. However, I can see the romantic and sexual elements of a friendship within that context. What I never enjoyed was the dismissing of that kind of friendship as “gay” in the derogatory and dismissive manner. But that is the great part about art is that it is open to interpretation based on people life events and their context.
I do find it funny that the moment two blokes have a close friendship on screen people are confidently declaring that they’re gay all over social media now, as if blokes aren’t able to have deep and meaningful friendships that aren’t sexual at all.
You do make a good point that any two close male heterosexual friendships being labeled gay is a problem. Its important to show that as well. I feel like some pairings have friendship vibes than others but that’s the fun of the debate.
But what I think this video shows is how important representation is. Since there was no queer characters in Star Trek people made their own in their fan fictions. These become wildly popular and influential at fan conventions, zines and the internet. The whole genre is still referred to as Slash Fiction for the most popular pairing Kirk/Spook fiction. These types of fan fictions influences future writers, actors and showrunner who made it a reality. That is what I think is interesting about this video
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I never took it as them being “in the closet”, just that they never overtly showed that side of their sexualities outside of flirting.
It is a gay relationship, even if it is just flirting, but no one is denying that both characters also had meaningful straight romantic relationships.
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Garak definitely flirted. I think Bashir played it as liking the attention.
Bashir was noticeably nervous in “Past Prologue”, their first meeting. It’s interesting that fans ignore that, or chalk it up to him being nervous because Garak might be a spy, as opposed to accusing the actors and writers of extracting humour out of the “gay panic” trope. I guess it’s because now people know theirs turned into a real friendship (or even more. ;-) ) Although I suspect if “Past Prologue” had aired today, there’d be a lot more outrage.
The Trill story line with Dax has it’s own video but is mentioned in this one. It’s fascinating to see the details of the rest of TV at the time. I steamed it after it aired
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I’ve always liked the pair of friends but this answers my question of why they were even a pair to begin with. Always thought it was weird Bashir just let this incredibly suspicious tailor hover around him. I chalked it up to the writers wanting to make an unlikely friendship situation.
Have any of the show runners like Ira Stephen Behr or Ron Moore actually confirmed that or is it just Andrew Robinson’s take on the scripts? I always got the impression that Garek was cracking onto Bashir until he started seeing Leeta and then he moved on.
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Andrew Robinson wrote Garak as bisexual in A Stitch in Time so it’s an idea he’s had since shortly after DS9 ended at the very least.
@echo @startrekexplained
He said it was his intention from the very beginning.
https://comicbook.com/startrek/news/star-trek-deep-space-nine-garak-gay-andrew-robinson/Yeah, I know, and I think it definitely shows in the first scene between Bashir and Garak, but I was just pointing out that even if you thought he was lying about it being his original intention for the character, it’s something he put down in writing 23 years ago, so it’s definitely not something “new” he came up with to seem progressive.
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I don’t think he ever claimed that the writers of DS9 thought Garak was bisexual, just that that was how he played him, and his novel proves that that’s not just an idea he recently came up with.
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The powers that be didn’t want it, so they played it low key
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@startrekexplained @BobKerman3999 Doesn’t seem that hard to me. It’s entirely possible an entire room of writers would have considered existing apolitical and wanted to cast a gay couple as not even being remarkable, even back then.
I was also in the closet back then. Mostly because there’s people out there who want to make existing political, and want me dead now because of it.
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You do have a good point. We shouldn’t give credit to almost and maybes the same credit as actual content. Regardless of what happened afterwards but it’s still interesting to see what could have been
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@startrekexplained Let me clarify. I believe the writers wanted to openly ship them, and didn’t because Paramount was trying to make it a political issue. I firmly believe existing is not political and trying to make it that way is pretty cowardly.
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Have any of the writers ever confirmed that? People are quick to jump on Rick Berman tlaboti anything they didn’t like in 90s Trek, but outside of Robinson’s take, I’ve never seen any indication that anyone on the show saw the characters this way.
I think Garak was canonically pan/omni or at least the actor playing him played him that way.
The video said that the queer coding went down as the seasons went on to downplay the flirting.
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Is it ever stated that Kirk is “heterosexual” in the show? I mean, i’m trying hard to find a “heterosexual” explanation to Kirk’s reaction here https://youtu.be/Fw11Ak0mxyI
That scene is amazing.
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@Maho @startrekexplained or: most bisexuals just aren’t comfortable enough around you to reveal anything to the contrary 😊
There are a lot of us and we can be very invisible when needed.
Bell curve on Kinsey scale: centers around 2.5 with exclusively hetero or homosexual people being uncommon
@startrekexplained: “Most people are straight”
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He’s a spy, even if he wasn’t, he probably would have slept with anything if it was in furtherance of his goals.
That is what made the acting choice so brilliant. Every interaction had this tension, charm and plausible deniability in tone. Deciding to play it similar to Gay Men trolling for other men from the 50s made this possible. It was all undertone and body language
Did any of them ever state any preference explicitly? Until then it’s a matter of interpretation. Bisexuality is a thing btw.
I mean characters aren’t heterosexual by default. Sexuality is a matter of interpretation when it comes to fictional characters, and it is definitely possible to interpret Garak as pan or bi.
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I do remember reading that they did want to have those two characters being gay but the studio really pushed back on that. This is why it took so long for ST to have characters that are LGBT.
Yeah. There are a lot of interviews of them saying they were both interested but was stymied by the system
Can you cite the interview as I’ve never seen anything more than Robinson’s head canon to suggest anyone on the production intended this. Not that I care about LGBT rep in Trek, I just don’t like misinformation.
The video has lots of clips and interviews. Its an interesting look at everything
Didn’t Alexander Siddig and Andrew Robinson do a screen-read during quarantine of their respective characters as an old, married couple? Or was that something I just imagined? Obviously, not canon, but it’s something that the fan base has certainly gotten behind!
I’ve found the playlist – it’s called Alone Together. I’ve just started on the first episode and it’s pretty cool. It’s a fanfiction radio play!
They did and it was glorious.
There’s a small clip from them doing it in the video. It’s pretty glorious
Interesting background knowledge that they were supposed to be gay, puts a lot of things into new perspective.
That being said, I don’t really like the idea, I enjoyed them as these unlikely but good platonic friends. I don’t think adding a romantic aspect to them would have improved their characters. For example Garak has many traits that could be interpreted as stereotypically gay, especially within the time period the show was produced. Him being a flamboyant and well spoken heterosexual works better to subvert cliches. Come to think of it, Bashir also isn’t the manliest of men. Which i also find more interesting for a heterosexual character.
I’ve seen DS9 SO many times… I never picked up on that subtext in their first meetings. So obvious now and nice to see the actors got together to right some wrongs
Fuck Rick berman btw
So much for fully automated luxury gay space communism.
Gashir is my favorite ship and one that was deeply done dirty by the show’s writers and producers. It needs to be canonized.
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