In the penultimate episode of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, “Subspace Rhapsody,” the show goes somewhere no other Star Trek show has gone before: the world of musicals. I’m not always your most typical gay man and don’t always follow stereotypes, unless I’m camping it up for one reason or another, but I am an embodiment of one stereotype: I love musicals and always have. With that being said, I’ll have to admit, even I was a little skeptical about a Star Trek musical episode. Could they pull it off? Would it be incredibly cheesy or silly? Could the cast even sing?

However, the producers of Star Trek surprised me. I know there will be some naysayers, and there are plenty of Trekkies who seem to actually hate everything Star Trek, yet still consider themselves “fans.” Said naysayers either nitpick one very minor thing and claim it goes against “canon” and ruined the whole show (and I mean show not just episode), or they will claim that Star Trek should always be serious scientific exploration. Leonard Nimoy, the original Spock, said in a 2009 interview with Reuters, “Canon is only important to people because they have to cling to their knowledge of the minutiae. Open your mind! Be a ‘Star Trek’ fan and open your mind and say, ‘Where does Star Trek want to take me now?’”

Nearly every episode has had its critics, but just as many have people who were enthusiastic about it. Facebook fan groups are already having debates about the merits of the episode. The same naysayers hated the recent Strange New Worlds/Lower Decks crossover episode “Those Old Scientists.” I thought it was one of the best episodes of the series, but I’ve also liked the Spock-centric episodes: “Spock Amok” and “Charades.” The best Star Trek series have had a balance of fun and wacky episodes and serious and scientific episodes. For example on Deep Space Nine, there are the serious “O’Brien Must Suffer” episodes and the humorous “Ferengi” episodes. In both Strange New Worlds and Deep Space Nine (the two series I know the best), a serious episode was usually followed by a fun episode or vice versa. Picard and Discovery, both of which I liked in their own way, tend to stick to serious episodes and use a serial story arch format for the season. Strange New Worlds and Deep Space Nine often follow the episodic format similar to Star Trek and The Next Generation. Both formats have their advantages, but I think I often prefer the episodic format.

One of the things I enjoy about Strange New Worlds is that there are certain subtle commentaries and traditions about Star Trek in each of the episodes. The writers/producers seemed to give a nod to the Leonard Nimoy quote above in “Subspace Rhapsody.” When Uhura plays Cole Porters “Anything Goes,” I suspect it was a message from the producers and writers to say, “Where does Star Trek want to take me now?” The bottom line is they did pull it off. Yes, it was cheesy and silly at times, but it’s a musical and by the nature of the genre, people break out into song when normal people wouldn’t. Also, like many musicals, it had its emotional moments and plenty of humor along the way. That leaves the last question: Could the cast even sing? The answer is, some can, others are OK. Rebecca Romjin (Number One) and Celia Rose Gooding (Uhura) have beautiful voices as does Jess Bush (Nurse Chapel). As for the others, the lack of being a music virtuoso makes sense in the way it was done or they sing as part of the chorus. I’m not sure anyone would want to hear Carol Kane sing with that voice of hers. I also liked that the style of music that various characters sing fit their characters. For example, Anson Mount’s Captain Pike has an almost county twang to his songs. Ethan Peck’s Spock is more serious.

I’ve tried not to give too much away, so I don’t think I’ve given any spoilers. Forgive me if I have. Of course, my enjoyment of “Subspace Rhapsody” is just my opinion (but I’ve already watched it twice since it was released yesterday). Trekkies everywhere will have strong opinions one way or another. I liked it and wanted to share my own opinion. Overall, if anyone was going to do a “Star Trek Musical” this was the way it should have been and was done. The “Subspace Rhapsody” official cast recording will be available for purchase starting today, though Apple Music accidentally released it early and then took it down. If/when you watch it, I’d love to hear your opinion of the episode (I know those outside the United States aren’t yet able to watch the episodes).

For the past six weeks and for the next four, I look forward to Thursday because a new episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds premieres each week. The show is great, and I think it’s the best iteration of Star Trek since Deep Space Nine. It is especially fun to watch SNW for two reasons: Anson Mount (above, left) and Ethan Peck (above, right). Anson Mount makes the best looking Star Trek captain since the original Star Trek Captain Jeffrey Hunter, who also played Captain Christopher Pike. However, the main reason is Ethan Peck, the grandson of Gregory Peck. Ethan Peck plays Spock and is incredibly handsome. He also has a fantastically shaped butt and a great body overall. I mean, look at this man:

The show itself is well worth watching, but thankfully there is also plenty of eye candy, including Paul Wesley as a young Lt. James T. Kirk.

The bridge of Star Trek’s U.S.S. Enterprise was surpassingly diverse for a 1960s television show. The first officer was an alien, the helmsman was Japanese, the navigator was Russian, and the communications officer was an African woman. Actress and singer Nichelle Nichols, played communications officer Lieutenant Uhura, whose name came from Uhuru, the Swahili word for “freedom.” At age 89, Nichols died Saturday night of heart failure in Silver City, New Mexico. Nichols was one of the first Black women featured in a major television series. 

It was a groundbreaking role that Nichols did not realize just how groundbreaking until she met a particular fan of hers. It was 1967, and reviews for the first season of Star Trek were not great. Nichols had bigger issues with the show. She found it demoralizing to see her lines cut and cut again. She had to deal with racist insults off set, as well as from executives who conspired to keep her from seeing her fan mail. At the end of the first season, Nichols recounted in her autobiography, she told the show’s creator she was done.

But the next day, at an NAACP function, a fan greeted her: Martin Luther King Jr. He told her how important her role was and how he and his family watched Star Trek faithfully and adored her in particular — the only Black character. Nichols thanked him, but said she planned to leave. 

“You cannot and you must not,” she recalls him saying. “Don’t you realize how important your presence, your character is? … Don’t you see? This is not a Black role, and this is not a female role. You have the first non-stereotypical role on television, male or female. You have broken ground. “… For the first time,” he continued, “the world sees us as we should be seen, as equals, as intelligent people — as we should be.”

Nichols stayed for the next two seasons of the series, lent her voice to an animated version, and appeared in a half-dozen Star Trek movies. She had the first interracial kiss in American television. She recruited for NASA. Through her work, she influenced Mae Jemison — the first Black female astronaut.

Nichols suffered a stroke in 2015 and was diagnosed with dementia in 2018. Last December, at San Diego’s Comic Con, Nichols made her last public appearance and was celebrated by NASA.

With the passing of Nichelle Nichols, one of Star Trek’s brightest stars has gone out. Hailing frequency closed.

There are certain actors that make my heart go pitter patter and can take my breath away when I see them on the screen. Wilson Cruz as Dr. Hugh Culber on Star Trek: Discovery is one of them, and the new uniform this season makes him even hotter. There’s something about these new uniforms that just look great, no matter who is wearing them, but back to Cruz. When he played Enrique “Rickie” Vasquez, a troubled, gay teen, in the short-lived series My So-Called Life, Cruz was the first openly gay actor to play an openly gay character in a leading role in an American television series. That was in 1994, and I was a junior in high school. While I may not have been out, or even understood that I was gay back then, Cruz still made an impression on me. So when he was cast in Discovery as a gay doctor, I was thrilled. Who better to play one of the first two openly gay Star Trek characters than such a groundbreaking actor. Also, while over the four seasons of Discovery Cruz’s role has become more important each year, his character in the fourth season seems to have really hit its stride. Dr. Bashir on Deep Space Nine and Dr. McCoy on the original Star Trek have always been my favorite Star Trek doctors, Dr. Culber has surpassed them.

There are other actors that always get me hot and bothered. One of those actors is Luke Macfarlane. You’re probably all going, “Who?” Macfarlane first notable role was as Scotty Wandell on ABC’s Brothers & Sisters from 2006-2011. He was the husband to Kevin Walker (played by Matthew Rhys), one of the “brothers” of the show. He was also a main character in the Sci-Fi Channel (and Canada’s Space Channel) show Killjoys from 2015-2019. Also, if you watch any Hallmark Channel Christmas movies, he’s on of their go-to actors. Most recently he was in the Micheal Urie and Kathy Najimy Christmas movie on Netflix Single All the Way as the gorgeous fitness/ski instructor James (see above picture). I watched the movie last night and enjoyed it. I have not seen Macfarlane in a lot of stuff since I had seen him in Killjoys, but when he came on the screen in Single All the Way, I think my heart literally skipped a beat.

There are many gay actors that I love, and a few that aren’t gay, that make my heart go pitter patter. One that never fails me is Colton Haynes. I have been in love with him since I first saw pictures of him making out with another male model in the now defunct XY Magazine. Years later, he was in Teen Wolf and Arrow. What’s amazing about Haynes is that he’s been a successful model and actor but has also suffered from severe anxiety all of his life. Sadly, he dealt with that anxiety with drugs and alcohol, but as I understand it, he is finally sober and doing well these days.

So what actors, particularly gay ones, make your heart go pitter patter?

For Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman, Canada’s Drag Race (CDR) should have been a dream come true. He was raised in a tiny town in Alberta and had no previous major television credits to his name. The 36-year-old actor and model — whose biggest credit was playing a manipulative reality TV producer on Lifetime’s UnREAL — was chosen to sit among its panel of judges. The openly gay and biracial Bowyer-Chapman already was familiar to CDR fans the world over having appeared a handful of times as a guest judge on VH1’s RuPaul’s Drag Race (RPDR) and RuPaul’s Drag Race All-Stars. “There’s something about drag that I’ve always been so enamored by,” he said. “Drag is magic.”

But the dream quickly turned into a glittery nightmare. In a recent interview, Bowyer-Chapman discussed his exit from the program where he alleged racism from the CDR producers, as well as a toxic fanbase that prompted his abrupt exit from the program. Bowyer-Chapman had served as one of the permanent judges in the first season of the series, a spin-off of the popular American show, RPDR. He exited the job prior to Season 2 following a campaign of online blowback for his comments as a judge although he cited “scheduling conflicts” as the official reason for his departure. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Bowyer-Chapman explained that American producers convinced him to accept the job as a judge on the Canadian show, but that the toxic work environment drove him to leave.

Upon arriving on the Canadian set, Bowyer-Chapman encountered a new group of local producers, and very different attitudes about his involvement. “I came into CDR with a false sense of security because I had built trust with the producers of the American show,” he said. “But this was a different set of producers. And I think they were trying to create something impactful and prove themselves along the way. There were many instances where I should have paid attention to my intuition and spoken up. And I didn’t.”

The problems began almost immediately when a “white, gay, male showrunner” pulled Bowyer-Chapman aside and told him just before he was to meet the queens for the first time that he was the “man-candy for the queens to drool over.” Apparently, all the judges had signed very ironclad contracts stating they would not fraternize with any of the contestants or the crew off-set. They were to have no personal relationships, dialogue, or contact with the queens whatsoever other than when they were filming. Bowyer-Chapman said in his introduction to the drag contestants, “the queens were flirting with me and being suggestive in some ways. My walls went up immediately. I realized there were different expectations being put on me that were not being placed on the rest of the cast, and nobody was going to protect me.”

The harassment from the showrunner continued, as Bowyer-Chapman’s boss explained he needed to play the role of the “sassy” judge on the panel. Bowyer-Chapman said, “Being told that from a white person, ever, as a Black person, it’s like a dog whistle. It’s like what is said of Black women and of Black queer men meaning you’re the hot-headed, opinionated one who’s going to tell it like it is and not give a shit about what anybody has to say. And that’s not who I am.” He also attributes that environment, at least in part, to a lack of Black talent behind the camera. “There really was no Black talent,” he said. “We’re walking onto a set of CDR day one, and the showrunner is telling me how diverse the crew was as he’s giving me a tour. And I didn’t see one Black person.”

In a departure from the US version of the show, the Canadian version outfitted judges with earpieces to get suggested snarky comments from producers. Judges also got a list of suggested negative criticisms from producers ahead of time, and were required to record them so editors could drop them into a show at will. The policy made Bowyer-Chapman uncomfortable as it forced both him and the other judges to constantly deliver negative criticism. “Even if we didn’t have anything negative to say, you had to come up with something negative.”  He said he realized the producers were portraying him as aggressively negative after the first episode. Tensions hit a new level several episodes into the season when Bowyer-Chapman had a terse exchange with the contestant, Jimbo. The moment, in which Bowyer-Chapman told Jimbo to “use time better, maybe,” became an instant meme, and prompted fans to create a Change.org petition to have Bowyer-Chapman fired from the show. The petition didn’t garner anywhere near its signature goal, but the moment started a campaign of online bullying that would follow Bowyer-Chapman the rest of the season. 

“My inbox was flooded with people telling me I was too mean. I didn’t know what I was talking about. Just a lot of blatant racism. Their public profiles read ‘Black Lives Matter,’ but their DMs were all about how my Black life didn’t matter. All of us were locked in our homes, riddled with anxiety … and then to be experiencing this hate and verbal violence and emotional assaults, this just blatant racism at the same time from my own community? It was really hard.” Bowyer-Chapman’s co-judges felt some of the backlash, too — but whereas judge, Brooke Lynn Hytes (who said of one contestant’s piñata-like outfit, “I should … beat you with a stick”) already had competed in a season of RPDR, and earned the right to critique, Bowyer-Chapman was viewed as an interloper with no expertise in the field. There also was the matter of race. “There was a lot I experienced that Brooke Lynn just couldn’t have, because Brooke Lynn is a white man.”  

Amid the harassment, RuPaul himself reached out to comfort Bowyer-Chapman. He also advised the then-judge to leave Twitter over the ongoing harassment. “We had conversations about his experience in this world and this industry as a Black, queer man. As a drag queen,” Bowyer-Chapman recalled. “All the hate and trolling and vitriol he’s experienced his entire life. And it’s really heartbreaking, but he’s experienced it for so many years and he’s so clear-headed about it. He has learned to not take it personally.” Still, when Season 2 of CDR rolled around, Bowyer-Chapman opted to leave to accept a role on another series though not before he “called a lot of attention to the bullshit that occurred behind the scenes and the stuff that happened online and their inaction.”

Crave, the network that airs CDR, released a statement regarding Bowyer-Chapman’s departure and the campaign of online bullying. “In light of the social media attacks and bullying that Jeffrey experienced during season one, we put measures in place to mitigate this for future seasons. This includes a dedicated social media consultant to work with Crave to continue monitoring conversations in real-time.” RuPaul declined to comment, but his relationship with Bowyer-Chapman remains good, and he already has taped an appearance on an upcoming season of RPDR. For Bowyer-Chapman, though, the lesson is clear: “That’s what happens when it’s only white, cisgender people behind the scenes making the decisions. That’s what happens.”

Wilson Cruz, who plays the gay doctor Hugh Culber on Star Trek: Discovery and is openly gay himself, took to Twitter to bring attention to an incident that occurred during his appearance for Star Trek Day on September 8. Cruz voiced his frustration with a homophobic Star Trek fan that harassed him during a recent appearance.

In the tweet, Cruz wrote, “I wonder if this was the moment on stage when I heard a ‘fan’ on Star Trek Day refer to me with a homophobic slur,” Cruz wrote, captioning an image of himself smiling on stage. “Still smiling, though. You’ll never kill my joy.”

There are more Trekkies who are homophobic than you would think would be the case. They were outraged when on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine there was a kiss between two women (which was not a gay kiss—it’s complicated), and they have voiced their disdain over the LGBTQ+ characters on Star Trek: Discovery and the possibility of LGBTQ+ characters on Star Trek: Picard. During the early years of Enterprise there were constant rumors that one of the characters would come out as gay, but with the backlash from this homophobic group of fans, it never materialized. Only recently has the Star Trek universe begun to embrace LGBTQ+ characters, and it’s about time. 

The majority of fans are not homophobic, but the ones who are seem to be quite vocal. Cruz’s tweet sent Trek fans rushing to defend Cruz and slam event organizers for not doing more to curb the hate. Cruz then returned to Twitter to defend the event and calm his fans.

“Listen, y’all… I really don’t blame the event. I only heard it,” Cruz wrote.” Couldn’t point them out, so chose to ignore it. I DON’T blame the EVENT at all! That day wasn’t about them and it wasn’t about me. It was about Star Trek, it’s legacy, it’s ideals, it’s visionary creator…”

“I REALLY didn’t mean for this to blow up,” he continued. “It just means we have work to do. Let’s do it and move beyond this trivial moment. They’ve received enough attention, as it is. I’m grateful for ALL of your care. I forget sometimes how much this fandom can go to bat when it wants!”

Star Trek: Discovery has won wide praise for including the first explicit LGBTQ+ characters in the history of the long-running franchise. Alongside Cruz, actor Anthony Rapp plays Hugh Culber’s husband Paul Stamets, while actor Blu Del Barrio portrays the couple’s adoptive trans/nonbinary teen, Adria. Trans actor Ian Alexander also has a recurring role as Adria’s former love, Gray Tal. Also, openly gay comedian Tig Notaro plays Engineer Denise “Jett” Reno who in an early episode discussed the death of her wife.These homophobic Trekkies don’t understand the basic philosophy of Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, built Star Trek around the idea of differences and coming together despite them. When you compare the diversity of Star Trek: Discovery to Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek has come a long way, and I believe Roddenberry would be happy with the diversity presented in the franchise. On the bridge of the original USS Enterprise, there was a black woman, an Asian man, and a Russian during the height of the Cold War. Star Trek has come so far, yet there is still much work to be done. Progress has and is being made. No matter what century the show takes place in, we are seeing a true normalization of diversity.