Patrick Stewart on Slash and Gender Issues

[auronlu]

Now I remember why I like this guy.

Excerpts from a 1995 interview in an issue The Advocate. You can read the rest here, where he also has a few pointed comments about the homophobia of the producers of Star Trek.

"Have you ever seen homoerotic fiction about Next Generation characters?" Patrick Stewart wants to know. It's a question that William Shatner, who played Stewart's Star Trek predecessor, Capt. James T. Kirk, would never have put to a journalist.


Q: Do you have any discomfort over the realization that some people believe you yourself are gay?
A: Well, so far as I'm aware, I'm conventionally a heterosexual male. And yet I find something quite flattering in these suggestions of others that I'm something else.

Q: You've told an interviewer you felt "much discomfort" about The Next Generation's treatment of women.
A: I felt that the writers and producers could not escape from their own essential rigidity in their attitudes to women. They were continually featured as sexual objects, as softer, weaker, and therefore— it always seemed to me— second-class individuals. And because I believed and still do that the show represents what our underlying philosophies are, it doubly irritated me that in that area I thought we were failing.
There is a kind of boys' club about Star Trek, do you understand? It's in the air all around the show, in the producers, in the front office, in the writers' building. Our actresses were not finding sympathetic ears for the things they had to say, and I think at times they simply got exhausted by the battle.

[Regarding Kirk/Spock slash] Oh, yes, I have heard of this. I don't have much of an opinion, but from the little that I know about those two characters, it would seem like there might be an intense attraction of opposites in that relationship. I have seen several homoerotic drawings of some characters in The Next Generation. I've seen the good captain with [Cdr. William] Riker and Data...

So, trekqueen, Patrick Stewart really may hear of you sooner or later!

I have a few icons for you and your readers who are getting a kick out of your panning in Cracked (please credit auronlu if you find 'em worth taking):

        

EDIT: Ack, I keep thinking of MORE of them!     

For those who don't follow her adventures, trekqueen's Picard/Elrond crossover story, Sons of the Stars, was featured in a widely-Dugg list of "The Five Most Baffling Sex Scenes in the History of Fanfiction." The reviewer was especially baffled by the word "slacks." [Insert Freudian analysis here]

 

Comments

[trekqueen.livejournal.com]

*snort**snarfle**Squee!* I am so stealing these, and I have room for adding icons too!! Dal's on the phone so he didn't hear me making weird noises in the living room trying not to laugh too loud.

SLACKS!

ok... hehehehehehe.

So, trekqueen, Patrick Stewart really may hear of you sooner or later!
I was thinking it might happen. mrs_picard said or mentioned something about how Sir Ian McKellen shares tidbits he's found on the internet before... there was some other interview about LOTR or XMen slash I think when he brought it up and said he had discussed it with Stewart (being their characters of course of Xavier and Magneto). Considering how far this is spreading now, I really wouldn't be surprised.

I had a nightmare (dream? I dunno) about someone asking one of the actors at a convention and my friend Ed (who always goes with me) yells out the author is there and I'm hiding under my chair going OHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT

You're too kind and I love you to bits!!!! *hugs*

oh and edited to add: For a while last night before I disappeared, I was bored checking out some google searches on the article and I found a gay fitness website with some guys discussing it and someone saying that Elrond deserves a flute playing Picard (*supersnort*) and another saying Celeborn is way hotter.

[auronlu.livejournal.com]

You really are (in)famous now. :)

[trekqueen.livejournal.com]

I'm scared now. :D Really, WTF??? ^_^ And it just HAD TO BE that the trilogy of LOTR was on TNT tonight. O.O