Kate Mulgrew Fought For Inclusivity On Star Trek: Voyager, But Got Rejected

“Star Trek,” which a very progressive franchise in many respects, has always had something of a fraught relationship with queerness. Gay or lesbian characters weren’t wholly visible on the series, and dating couples tended to fall into the heteronormative. Near the end of his life in the early 1990s, “Star Trek” creator Gene Roddenberry once idly mused that he’d like to depict two background male characters holding hands in a romantic way, but that’s hardly a great spearhead for a progressive ideal. 

There were occasional attempts to include queer stories in “Star Trek” throughout the 1990s, but they were few and far between. The “Next Generation” episode “The Outcast” was controversial even at the time (and one can read all about “The Outcast” in the pages of /Film), and the “Deep Space Nine” episode “Rejoined” did allow Jadzia Dax (Terry Farrell) to have a romantic relationship with a woman, but she never had any other relationships with any other women after. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be until “Star Trek: Discovery” in 2017 that the franchise would include an openly queer character as part of its regular cast. “Discovery” certainly made up for lost time, featuring multiple queer relationships and even more queer actors. 

When “Star Trek: Voyager” debuted in 1995, however, some felt that it was already high time to include a gay character on the show. Lead actress Kate Mulgrew, who played the stalwart and commanding Captain Janeway, felt that “Star Trek” could be even more progressive than it already was, and she even appealed to the show’s executives that a gay character be written into the show. Mulgrew talked about her request in a recent interview with Collider, and how she was, quite unfortunately, shot down. 

Mulgrew recalls talking to “Star Trek” head honcho (and credited “Voyager” co-creator) Rick Berman about possible gay representation on her new series. Even before it debuted, “Voyager” received a lot of press for hiring a woman to play the show’s central captain character, as all the previous “Star Trek” shows featured men in the captain’s chair. According to Mulgrew, Berman felt that a female captain was enough in terms of positive representation, and queerness was elbowed out. Mulgrew said: 

“I wanted a gay character on that bridge with me! But they couldn’t be pushed. ‘Good enough to get a woman in the seat,’ you know? […] I went to Rick Berman and I said ‘It’s a good cast. It’s a very good cast. But we need a gay character. I want this known, that this is my preference and my choice.’ But there wasn’t any room, they felt at that time. Things changed quickly.”

“Voyager,” to its credit, featured a First Nation character as its first officer, a Latina/Klingon as its engineer, an Asian ensign, and a Black Vulcan. It wasn’t hurting for diversity. Berman was, however, still weirdly reluctant to feature a gay character on the show. It was 1995. It was well past the time when such a thing should have been acceptable in a mainstream sci-fi series. 

In retrospect, though, it seems there was a queer character on “Voyager” after all. Jeri Ryan joined the show in its fourth season to play a former Borg named Seven of Nine. The character was immensely popular … but also seemingly heterosexual; at the end of the series, Seven of Nine instigated an affair with Chakotay (Robert Beltran). But then, in the 2020 series “Star Trek: Picard,” Seven returned, and began having an affair with a new character named Raffi (Michelle Hurd). It seems that Seven was bisexual all along.

Thanks to this new wrinkle, Mulgrew got her request, ex post facto.