“I did a lot of the heavy lifting for the first six months of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I wrote the bible for the show. I brought in writers to do scripts and things and then they started bringing in other people,” he said. “Gene [Roddenberry]’s lawyer came aboard and started taking apart everything that we had created. And it was a very unhappy experience. But the straw that broke my back was Gene had promised we were going to do gay characters in the crew. We were going to have a gay crew member. And he had promised it in front of an audience of 3,000 fans. And then he had said it again in a staff meeting. So I knew he was serious.”
He continued, “[Producer] Rick Berman wrote a three page memo listing all the different issue stories we could tell. And the third one on his list was AIDS. I’ve been big on blood donations because of my friendship with Robert A. Heinlein, and so I said I wanted to do a story about how the fear of AIDS has cut back blood donations. So the story was about a disease, some of the crew members were infected, and the only way to save their lives, was to donate blood because they had run out of artificial blood. The show could put a card at the end of the episode saying ‘You can be a hero, too. Go and donate blood.’ I thought that if we did that then the next day, the next week, blood donor-ship would go up 100% because all of the Trekkies would run out [to donate blood]. And Star Trek would get credit for it. It would have been good publicity for the show, but it would also save human lives. I thought it was perfect. That’s Gene Roddenberry’s universe.
So by the time I got to the script, they approved the outline and I said ‘Oh, you know what? These two characters, they’re boyfriends! Or married! Or whatever!’ And so there’s four lines of dialogue in the script. — ‘How long have you two been together?’ ‘Since the academy.’ — That’s it! Now, if you’re under 12 — ‘Oh, they’re good friends!’” And if you’re older than that, you realize, ‘Oh my gosh, they just put gay crew members on this.’ So you might say ‘hooray!’ but it created an uproar of biblical proportions. As you would say, in Ghostbusters — ‘dogs living with cats’.”
Gerrold went on to tell me about a follow up memo that he had received, saying that he had to take the gay characters out of the show due to the threats and angry letters from mothers that they were bound to receive, to which Gerrold responded in the best way: ”Let them write letters then! The Streisand Effect is free publicity!”
“We went through two or three different rewrites and the script didn’t get any better. [Producer] Bob Justman finally realized that we needed to go back to my original draft, but by then it was too late,” he remembered. “That made me realize that if we didn’t do that script then not only is Gene a hypocrite, but I’m also a hypocrite for staying aboard this show when we’ve broken a promise and I let them straight-wash my script. If I do that, then I’m not doing what Star Trek is supposed to do.”
(via tinsnip)
