Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Part III
Published to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Delaney.
“The Utopian futures of Star Trek have remained determinedly heteronormative, with occasional hand-waving to mollify the fans – there are gays, but we’ve not seen them (where’s Will?); there were gays, but a plague killed them (triffic); or there were gays, but it got cured (thanks). The best we are left with is a game of Spot the Queer – a tactic borrowed from the McCarthyites – where those of us in the know decode a look, a phrase, a liking for show-tunes, into the sense that so-and-so in that program or film is secretly gay. The streets find their own uses for things, and we slash away.”
– Butler, 2009, p. 388
Speculative fiction has always promised us the future — just not to all of us. From the beginning, the genre learned how to dream big while keeping its doors firmly shut. Lucian’s lunar satire, Shelley’s stitched‑together Creature… desire was there, but only so it could be mocked, punished, or corrected. Queer longing was never the problem. The problem was the genre that insisted on disciplining it.
Lucian gave us men marrying men on the Moon, but only as a joke — a bit of cultural inversion played for laughs, not liberation. Shelley’s Creature wanted love and was punished for daring to ask. These early works didn’t open pathways; they taught speculative fiction how to bolt them shut. Queerness became something to point at, not something to inhabit.
By the time the pulp magazines arrived, the exclusions had calcified. Amazing Stories, Astounding, all those glossy futures full of straight white men conquering planets and seducing decorative women — that was the template. Queer writers hid behind initials. Women were told to use male names. Black and Indigenous futures weren’t just absent; they were unimaginable. Even as the genre evolved — Golden Age optimism, New Wave experimentation, cyberpunk rebellion — it carried its old scaffolding with it.
And it wasn’t just about who appeared on the page. Genre taught readers how they were supposed to feel. Love was straight. Bodies were binary. Intimacy was allowed only if it served the plot. Any attempt to write queer desire was dismissed as “not real science fiction,” “too political,” or “just fan fiction.” The genre became a kind of closet, and queer readers learned to survive by reading between the lines.
But silence never held completely. Queer fans slashed the canon open. Women built zines and archives. Disabled readers demanded access. Marginalized creators wrote futures that refused to be corrected. Speculative fiction became a battleground — not over what could be imagined, but over who was allowed to imagine it.
Even the Moon Wasn’t Safe
Lucian’s A True History (2nd century CE) is often called the first piece of science fiction, and it already tells us something about the genre’s instincts. It imagines men marrying men on the Moon — not as solidarity, not as possibility, but as satire. Queerness is a punchline, an inversion of Greek norms meant to amuse the reader. The Moon men aren’t subjects; they’re spectacles.
So from the very beginning, speculative fiction didn’t reach for liberation. It reached for parody. Lucian’s queerness is alien, exotic, and ridiculous — a pattern the genre would repeat for centuries. Even in its earliest form, science fiction learned to treat queer bodies as curiosities, not companions.
From lunar satire to coded survival, the genre’s relationship with queer desire began with a joke… and queer readers have been rewriting the punchline ever since.
Genre Was the Closet
Speculative fiction didn’t just forget queer desire — it trained itself to suppress it. The rules were simple: love was straight, bodies were binary, and anything outside that frame had to be alien, tragic, or villainous. If queerness showed up at all, it was only so the story could punish it.
Across the 20th century, the biggest franchises — Star Wars, Doctor Who, Babylon 5, The Twilight Zone — offered no openly queer characters. Not one. Before the 1990s, queerness was either invisible or punished for daring to be visible. Even Sulu, retroactively declared gay in Star Trek Beyond, spent decades as a character whose queerness existed only in the negative space. The genre didn’t overlook queer people. It taught itself to erase them.
As James Satter put it:
“Forty years after his first appearance, Hikaru Sulu is heterosexual only through inference; he remains discernibly queer.”
When queerness did appear, it was coded and punished. The flamboyant villain…. the seductive alien… the emotionally unstable outsider. Queer-coded characters were never the heroes; they were the threat.
The Forever War turned homosexuality into a state mandate, framed as dystopian. Stranger in a Strange Land dismissed queerness as cultural decay. The Mule in Foundation was sexually ambiguous and emotionally deviant, his queerness folded into his psychic instability. Lost in Space gave us Dr. Smith, coded as camp to signal danger (and to hint at nastier implications about boys and predators). Doctor Who offered the Master (seductive, theatrical, unhinged) and Davros, whose obsessive fixation on the Doctor echoed the genre’s fear of queer intimacy. Star Wars gave us Palpatine’s decadent menace and Hux’s repressed fury, both queer-coded. Blake’s 7 gave us Servalan, glamorous and predatory, and Travis, whose scarred obsession with Blake read like repressed desire turned violent.
Even stories that weren’t “about” sexuality still rehearsed the same logic. In Gattaca, Vincent must masquerade as genetically “normal” to access a future denied to him. In R.U.R., robots are punished for wanting love. In Clone Wars, clones who assert individuality or intimacy are labelled defective or unstable. These weren’t accidents. They were choices. Queerness was allowed only as threat, never as truth.
And Star Trek, the franchise that promised a better future, wasn’t immune. Q’s fixation on Picard, Trelane’s camp omnipotence, the (originally) all‑male Borg collective, Kivas Fajo’s obsessive desire to possess Data… queerness was spectacle, jealousy, danger. Even HAL 9000, in 2001, is framed as a being too refined and too sensitive… a queer-coded threat in a world of men.
Genre didn’t just exclude queer people. It built a closet and called it world‑building.
The Queer of Gothos
The Enterprise enters a “star desert” (so-described, with references to dunes, mirages, and oases) and waiting in the middle of it all is Trelane, the Squire of Gothos. He lives in an opulent oasis, kidnaps crew members, collects Earth memorabilia, and performs his own private drag show of history. He plays soldier, fashion designer, judge, spoiled aristocrat. He throws tantrums when denied applause. His fixation on Kirk is unmistakably queer-coded. Later canon calls him a juvenile Q, but honestly, he didn’t need the retcon. He was already camp.
James Doohan once wrote about Roddenberry’s wartime encounter with an effeminate sheikh: a desert rescue, romantic overtures, and the delicate dance of not offending a powerful host in an otherwise hostile environment. The parallels are hard to ignore. The Squire of Gothos reads like a stylised retelling: queerness framed as spectacle, hospitality edged with threat, desire punished for wanting too much.
Trelane doesn’t just bend reality; he plays with it. He’s a child in costume, demanding admiration, desperate for connection, and punished the moment he reaches for it. And once again, the straight-coded hero escapes, while the queer-coded host is scolded, corrected, and sent to his room.
From villains to lovers, the path remains tainted: Riker’s intersex lover Soren, in The Outcast, is forcibly “corrected” and returned to him as a shell of herself. Willow and Tara’s kiss in Buffy is followed by Tara’s death – ditto for Talia Winters following her blink-and-you’ll-miss-it fling with Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5. Captain Jack Harkness flirts across timelines, but his queerness is played for spectacle, not sincerity, and his lover dies tragically. Even Dumbledore’s love is retroactive, revealed only after the story safely ends, and never allowed to live on the page or the stage.
These weren’t accidents. They were genre norms. Queer desire was framed as unnatural, disgusting, or deviant; comprising a topic avoided in polite conversation, and within franchises seeking not to alienate conservative consumers; and erased from canon.
They Let Us Love, Then Made Us Pay
Somewhere between Wyoming and the Delta Quadrant, there was always a Brokeback Asteroid waiting for us.
The pattern is old, and it’s everywhere. A queer‑coded character reaches for love, intimacy, or selfhood — and the story punishes them for it. The straight‑coded character survives, grieves, and moves on. The queer one is erased.
You already know the classics — Soren, Lenara, Tara, Ianto, Lexa — but science fiction has been rehearsing this choreography for decades.
Star Trek kept returning to the same script
- Petri & Elaan (TOS): Queerness coded as primness and ineffectuality.
- Charlie X (TOS): Charlie’s needy fixation on Kirk is punished with exile.
- Trelane (TOS): Camp omnipotence framed as threat.
- The Lorelai Signal (TAS): Heterosexuality as biological inevitability.
- Data & Fajo (TNG): Queer‑coded villain punished; Data walks away untouched.
- Riker & Soren (TNG): Soren is “corrected”; Riker grieves.
- Riker & Brenna (TNG – “Up the Long Ladder”):
Brenna asks Riker if he likes girls. “Of course,” he says, because the script can imagine no other answer. A tiny moment that reveals everything: heterosexuality is compulsory, unquestioned, and absolute. - Crusher & Odan (TNG): Beverly recoils from queerness; the future snaps back to straight.
- Jadzia & Lenara (DS9): A kiss across lifetimes, then silence.
- Seven of Nine (Voyager): Deep intimacy with women reframed as “mentorship”; only straight romance made canon.
- Trip & the Cogenitor (Enterprise): A third‑gender being dies; Trip is told off for trying to help.
- Garak & Bashir (DS9): Queer‑coded longing suppressed by producers.
Doctor Who and its universe weren’t immune
- The Master: Decades of queer‑coded obsession with the Doctor, always punished.
- Nyssa & Tegan: Intimacy coded but never allowed to breathe.
- Ace: Queer‑coded, punished for desire; queerness confirmed only in novels.
- Jack & Ianto (Torchwood): Love allowed, then killed.
- Clara & Me (Ashildr): Romantic‑coded bond teased, never textual.
Star Wars repeated the pattern
- Asajj Ventress: Queer‑coded intensity punished with betrayal and death.
- General Hux: Repressed, brittle, humiliated, discarded.
- Lando (Solo): Pansexuality played as a joke; nothing allowed to be real.
Battlestar Galactica (2004)
- Felix Gaeta: Queer, idealistic, executed by firing squad.
- Cylon fluidity: Non‑binary‑coded bodies framed as seductive or dangerous.
The Expanse
- Camina Drummer: Queer in the books; the show softens and sidelines her relationships.
- Julie Mao: Desire punished; she becomes a corpse‑bride for an alien intelligence.
Fringe
- Alt‑Astrid & Astrid: Queer‑coded tenderness never allowed to be textual.
Orphan Black
- Cosima & Delphine: Canonical love, but Delphine is shot, resurrected, traumatised.
- Tony: Introduced as a trans clone, then erased.
Sense8
- Nomi & Amanita: Groundbreaking, but the show is cancelled before their story can fully unfold.
Literature’s long shadow
- Baron Harkonnen (Dune): One of the most infamous queer‑coded villains in SF.
- Ender’s Game: Intense boy/boy intimacy punished with isolation and violence.
- Hyperion: Queer‑coded longing framed as tragic or morally compromised.
- Altered Carbon: Fluid bodies treated as grotesque or disposable.
Video games, too
- Mass Effect: Queer characters often killed, traumatised, or sidelined.
- The Last of Us: Bill & Frank’s love framed through loss (game version).
The straight‑coded character survives.
The queer‑coded character is punished, erased, or killed.
Grief becomes a privilege reserved for heterosexuals.
These weren’t isolated incidents. They were patterns. They were genre norms. Queer desire wasn’t just punished, it was erased. And queer fans learned to mourn quietly, between the lines.
A Whole New World
Not everyone followed the script.
While mainstream science fiction kept rehearsing the same old punishments, a handful of writers cracked the genre open from the inside. They didn’t ask permission. They didn’t wait for the future to arrive. They built it themselves.
Theodore Sturgeon was one of the first to refuse the closet.
In 1953, The World Well Lost gave us two alien lovers fleeing persecution — a thinly veiled allegory for same‑sex love, written with tenderness instead of fear. Venus Plus X imagined a post‑binary society where gender dissolves into possibility. And in “Amok Time,” he slipped in an ambiguous final moment that launched decades of Kirk/Spock slash. Sturgeon didn’t code queerness as threat. He coded it as love.
James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon) broke the genre’s gender rules by disguising herself as a man.
Her stories — Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, The Women Men Don’t See — didn’t just critique gender; they weaponised it. Tiptree’s queerness lived in the layers: the pseudonym, the bisexual desire, the ambivalence about embodiment. She cracked the boys’ club open by walking in through the front door wearing a mask.
Ursula K. Le Guin imagined ambisexual beings in The Left Hand of Darkness, but filtered them through the discomfort of a cisgender male envoy.
Years later, she admitted the limits of that lens — and revised her own worldbuilding in Four Ways to Forgiveness and beyond. Le Guin didn’t just build worlds; she returned to them, corrected them, and made them more honest.
Samuel R. Delany tore the scaffolding down entirely.
In Trouble on Triton and Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, he wrote queer protagonists who were messy, desiring, political, and gloriously uncorrected. Delany didn’t treat queerness as metaphor. He treated it as story structure.
Octavia Butler reimagined intimacy itself.
Her protagonists — often Black, female, fluid, and impossible to categorise — refused the genre’s binaries. In Imago and Fledgling, love isn’t punished. It’s transformed.
Joanna Russ didn’t ask for inclusion. She demanded rebellion.
The Female Man didn’t politely critique masculinist genre logic — it shredded it. Russ wrote with rage, wit, and queer defiance. Her protagonists weren’t palatable. They were revolutionary.
And then, in the early 1990s, television began to crack.
Quantum Leap played with gender fluidity through body‑hopping narratives, offering glimpses of queerness without naming it… except for one episode about a young gay man and “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” which terrified sponsors and delivered the show’s highest ratings.
Alien Nation used alien‑human dynamics to interrogate race, sexuality, and assimilation. Its queer‑coded subplots didn’t ask for permission; they challenged the genre’s comfort zones. Is it any wonder that this series was quickly cancelled?
They weren’t just stories. They were cracks in the wall. They showed the future didn’t have to inherit the old punishments. They suggested that queerness wasn’t a threat to the genre; it was the thing keeping it alive.
— Samuel R. Delany
They Rewired the Genre
They didn’t just imagine futures. They rewired the genre.
While speculative fiction punished queer visibility, fans rewired the genre from below. Slash fandom didn’t just interpret canon; it rebuilt it. Zines weren’t footnotes. They were blueprints. Queer fanfic didn’t ask permission. It bulldozed its way into public spaces.
Queer women, disabled fans, and trans archivists built participatory infrastructure: archives, fan campaigns, slash repositories, and mutual aid networks that refused correction. They didn’t wait for canon to catch up. They built futures in the margins.
Fanlore, AO3, and countless zines became sites of reclamation. These weren’t just fan responses. They were editorial acts of justice. They documented what genre erased. They remembered what canon punished. They built scaffolding where speculative fiction collapsed.
They didn’t escape the closet; they rewired it. Fandom rewrote the coordinates. We occupy the future.
References:
Andrew M Butler, in Rob Latham et. al., 2009. “SFS Symposium: Sexuality in Science Fiction”, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3, Science Fiction and Sexuality (November), pp. 385-403. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.
James Doohan & Peter David, 1996. Beam me up, Scotty: Star Trek’s “Scotty” – in his own words, Pocket Books, p. 162.
Michael Green, 2013. “Screenwriting Representation: Teaching Approaches to Writing Queer Characters”, Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 65, No. 1-2 (Spring/Summer), pp. 30-42. JSTOR, accessed 26 September 2025.
James Satter. 2006. “The Hidden Homosexual: Reexamining ‘Star Trek’’s Sulu.” Science Fiction Studies, Greencastle: SF-TH Inc, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 379–82. JSTOR, accessed 16 May 2023.
Unreal Worlds, Real Bodies: Speculative Fiction and the Colonial Imagination
A four-part journey through how speculative fiction echoed empire, rewrites resistance, and reclaims futurity.
Part One: Race and the Colonial Imagination
Published: 2 January 2026
Read Part One
From Lucian to Le Guin, speculative fiction’s imperial DNA is exposed: how imagined futures rehearsed conquest, racial hierarchy, and colonial logic.
Part Two: The Hero Must Be Rewritten
Published: 22 February 2026
Read Part Two
Gender and the myth of the universal hero. This chapter rewrites masculinist genre scaffolding, tracing how speculative fiction disciplines emotion, care, and female agency.
Part Three: Sexuality & Queer Futures
Published: 1 April 2026
Read Part Three
A queer reading of Star Trek and speculative canon. This chapter critiques heteronormative erasure, celebrates queer fandom’s legacy, and imagines futures beyond genre discipline.
Part Four: We Occupy the Future
Published: 5 April 2026
Read Part Four
Published on the anniversaries of the 504 Sit-In and Medibank Blockade, this chapter confronts techno-fix fantasies and reimagines futures where disabled bodies are not corrected or cured, but centred, celebrated, and architecturally included.
©2026 Geoff Allshorn, with editorial and layout assistance from Copilot AI. I show my respect for Elders past and present and acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the Land on which this blog was prepared.