Garak was initially intended by actor Andrew Robinson to be omnisexual. Indeed, Garak’s first encounter with Bashir is very clearly sexually charged, which Robinson has stated was intentional. Though the pair would eventually become good friends, his primary interest in Bashir at the outset was sexual. That aspect of the character was eventually dropped for some disappointingly cowardly reasons.
The idea of a queer character on a Star Trek show was routinely vetoed by executive producer Rick Berman. Berman believed any hint of non-heterosexuality on Star Trek would have alienated a significant portion of the franchise’s fan base across America in the '90s. It’s an unsurprisingly reductive point of view, especially for a franchise as famous for its progressive politics and social messaging as Star Trek. It also flies in the face of the views of Star Trek franchise creator Gene Roddenberry, who was advocating for LGBT representation by the early days of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the late '80s.
And I would say that even if the novel is not considered canon, the way the actors (and I do not believe it was just Robinson who felt this way) chose to play the roles is valid as part of canon as long as it doesn’t actually violate anything continuitywise.
If I found out that James Doohan had played Scotty as if he were an alcoholic… well, I wouldn’t have personally seen it that way, but he notoriously loved booze, so sure. Scotty was an alcoholic.
There’s a whole episode where Scotty drank a Kevlan under the table, the Kevlans were shown to be basically supermen, so… I’m pretty sure it would take an alcoholic to do that.
Edit: Oh, and the TNG episode where he got mad because everyone drank synthahol…
Sure, but if, alternately, I found out that he played Scotty as if he wasn’t an alcoholic- that he could go for months between scotches, he just had an amazing tolerance for alcohol when he drank, fine. It still doesn’t affect continuity.
Exactly. The actors aren’t robots or AI, running solely off the prompts of directors and writers. They are part of the collaborative art project that is the show. Their input, motivations, intentions behind the character are just as valid as the writer’s. Garak is queer, because Robinson says so. During the pandemic, Bashir and Garak did a video where they exchanged letters, and they made it clear that they romantically involved in that. Regardless of if physical sex occurred during the timeline of the series, suggesting that it could not have because none of the characters, in the tiny fraction of a percent’s time we actually see them during that year run, never outwardly exclaimed “bee tee dubs, me and Garak are banging” is such an insult to the actors who put so much of themselves into that role.
I said basically the same thing too. We see a fraction of their life for part of the about 45 minutes the episode is on. For all we know, everyone was complimenting Garak and Bashir on what a cute couple they made as they strolled down the promenade holding hands. Just not at the time we see them. Which makes sense because most couples aren’t about PDA all the time. Even if they’re on a date.
Especially Julian, tbh. He strikes me as the “but what would people think!” Type when it comes to dating a Cardassian. Lol. Not that he’s prejudiced… But simple Garak may well be a spy for the obsidian order!
You’re right. If there were any reason to not make that relationship public, if that was the case, it would have nothing to do with both of them being men, it would be because of who Garak is and who Julian is and the whole security issue there. I’m sure they wouldn’t want Odo checking up on them when they were trying to have a romantic moment.
But in the end, I know the look of two people who have a mutual attraction.
If Alexander Siddig wasn’t supposed to be attracted to Garak, at least in the minds of he and Andrew Robinson and their motivations in that scene, he did it very wrong.
And I think he knows what it’s like to be attracted to a man, because he apparently described himself this year as “not quite straight.”
Oh my God, you’ve just given me the idea for the best trek fanfic ever. Julian and Garak keep trying to secret away for a date, and whenever they do, Odo interrupts them to question their behavior. They sneak into a supply closet, Odo is the door. They slip away to a cargo bay, and suddenly a crate of self sealing stem bolts morphs into the familiar security officer. They finally get a nice table at a Holo restaurant under someone else’s name and Quark’s promised discretion, and lo and behold Bashir tries to take a drink of his champagne for it to suddenly become the changeling, relentless in his need to discuss this aberrant behavior. Finally they give up.
Bashir: yes, Odo, what can we do for you?
Odo: I need to discuss this sneaking around. It has become a security concern.
Garak: Trust me, Mr. Odo, had we been involved with anything concerning to the security of this station, you would never have discovered us.
After I posted this, I tried to find it and I can’t. Either I’m using the wrong search terms, or I dreamt it. Lmao.
Iirc, it was a reading of a portion of a stitch in time. I mainly remember it because it was the first time I’d seen someone other than me think that Garak was queer. I wasn’t big into online trek communities at the time, and my brother didn’t twig to it.
Fuck Rick Berman for a lot of reasons, but I think some people who weren’t alive then don’t realize how deeply unpopular homosexuality was around that time. Still room to grow, but the fact even that homophobia just isn’t the accepted norm now… It’s amazing how much progress we’ve made in my lifetime. Sad and still a coward, but back then Rick was probably 100% correct.
I don’t agree. Firstly because Roddenberry himself wanted queer representation on TNG in the 80s, but also because there was a lot of precedent with queer characters becoming more normalized on TV going all the way back to the 70s when Billy Crystal played a decent, caring gay man on Soap with toned-down stereotypical mannerisms.
But also, Garak was introduced in 1993. Look how many queer-themed TV episodes had happened in the 90s by then on mainstream shows like Roseanne and L.A. Law. Even gay recurring characters were on TV by then. Roy’s gay son on Wings showed up multiple times and did not fit any gay stereotypes, which was kind of the point of the character. The, again not stereotypical, gay couple that opened the bed and breakfast in Cicely in Northern Exposure debuted in 1991 (the town’s founders were also revealed to be a lesbian couple that year). I already mentioned Roseanne above. Sandra Bernhard’s character, a member of the main cast, came out as gay in 1992.
No disagreements on Rick Berman being a bigot, he was pretty shitty for a lot of other additional reasons too, don’t have to limit to being a homophobe, but… LGBT themes doesn’t mean openly LGBT characters. We did definitely have some, but a lot of those characters lived in the realm of plausible deniability to let them have mass appeal. Publicly, they could just be ‘two roommates’. If you were a rare character who got to be openly gay, you tended to fall victim to the ‘bury your gays’ trope and probably were not long for this world.
Ellen came out in 97, on her show and then in real life, and they responded by slapping a parental advisory warning on her very family friendly show and then cancelling it as soon as they could. It may have made Will & Grace more acceptable though in 98… I feel like that was one of the first shows where they were okay having gay men regularly on US TV, but even then only as long as it was for comedy.
I know we like to put that black and white filter on it and pretend it was a long time ago, but it was a rough time, and a lot more recent than any of us like. Gay sex was technically illegal in over a dozen states until 2003 and a few of the less progressive states hadn’t even had those laws that long. A full 28 states went out of their way to explicitly ban gay marriage, most of them did so in the early 2000s. DS9 had it’s last episode in 1999.
The DS9 writers and actors also had workarounds for Berman. They would write a scene and then a close but Berman friendly version. He would ok it and then the actors would “improvise” the original script.
Dukat was another case of the writers and actor colluding. Berman wanted him to be straight up evil. The writers and actor wanted to give him respectable motivations for his evil acts.
So he is not a good guy but you can respect the love for family and state that drives his terrible crimes.
Aight, give me an openly gay man on TV before deep space nine that had a role where they had even half as many appearances as Bashir or Garak because I didn’t see one there.
I checked, Roy’s son was apparently in 2 episodes, the answer is there aren’t any who come close. We’ve made truly gigantic strides in LGBT representation, it was a dark time.
Ooh, you know I meant US TV, but technically correct potentially and that’s my failure for not specifying, so I can’t call you on that piece too much.
However, Queer as Folk and This Life both started well after DS9 and I did explicitly specify before Deep Space Nine. You’re coming up on the time when we started to get over ourselves and things started to get better. The AIDs epidemic wasn’t exactly… good… but people were starting to make an effort to understand it more and were at least less terrified.
Except ds9 literally rolled during the Queer renaissance, when we got back all the ground we lost due to AIDS. Ffs, Beverley Hills 90210 had more LGBTQ chars than trek.
The Garak -> Bashir -> O’Brien -> Keiko -> Worf -> Jadzia -> Kira -> Odo -> Changeling Orgy love polygon (polyline? graph?). Truly a classic. Everybody is doing it and nobody is happy.
The term I’ve used for graphs of poly relationships is “polycule” because they look a lot like chemical diagrams: Multiple nodes connected in different ways, different kinds of bonds.
Yes Robinson played Garak as gay despite that not being the character. However, Bashir was skirt chasing throughout the entire series until finally setting down with Ezri.
Just because Bashir preferred women doesn’t mean he didn’t also have a romantic interest in Garak. They absolutely played it as though it were more than just friendship, at least at the beginning.
For all we know, Bashir fucked anything he could like Mariner. Like I said to someone else, we see these people’s lives for less than 45 minutes at a time. And only even close to that if they’re in every scene, which rarely (maybe never) happens. So all we know is that we see Bashir going after women. He could have been going after everyone else, he could have made an exception for Garak because it’s the 24th century and people aren’t restricted to heterosexuality like that anymore… who knows?
But they sure as hell played it as if it was more than just friendship, at least at first.
And remember, Garak was shown as being interested in women as well.
Because… approving of romances between two men from the way they reacted to each other on the screen is bigotry? Because I thought it was recognizing two people clearly attracted to each other when I see it?
Seems to me that the bigoted position would be assuming two characters did not have an attraction to each other just because it wasn’t stated overtly. The assumption that every character in Star Trek is 100% heterosexual unless otherwise stated is not exactly a position that accepts queer people as being common in the future.
Assuming two guys that hangout are secretly in a relationship is homophobic. I dont understand how you cant see that. It has to absolutely be intentional ignorance. Asserting that two dudes who have never expressed physical desire toward one another are gay simply because they are close friends is homophobia.
As a gay man, my head canon with Garak and Bashir has always been that Garak was some form of bi/pan/Omni/what have you, and that Bashir was the clueless straight guy that teaches every gay man the valuable lesson that “he’s not into you, you’re just so totally unaccustomed to men being nice and decent”
However, your comments in this thread have convinced me that Garak bangs Bashir nightly.*
Secretly? I never said it was secret. Just because you don’t see them kissing or whatever on screen doesn’t mean it was secret.
Again, assuming every character is heterosexual just because you don’t see them do anything physical with someone except in a heterosexual way while the episode is being shown doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it when you don’t see them or that everyone isn’t aware of it.
For all we know, they were together for at least a year and threw a big one year anniversary party. Why just assume such a thing never happened? We don’t see what happens to anyone on any Star Trek show for more than a total of around 45 minutes at a time, sometimes spread out over weeks.
And, as I said, I know what two people being attracted to each other looks like.
Is the only way you can engage in conversation by blatantly making up stances for your counterpart because you have nothing intellectual to say regarding my actual point?
It’s literally how the character was being played. Famed homophobe and asshole Producer Rick Berman demanded that Garak’s attraction to Bashir be played down because network snowflakes or something.
To your point, Bashir and O’Brian had a very close relationship.And while they had a massive bromance, no one thought they were gay for each other.
To add to what Flying Squid said, Andrew Robinson wrote a biography of Garak (and his up bringing in the shadow of Enabran Tain and his education by the Obsidian Order). In that book, Garak is VERY bi and there’s strong hints that he could have been in a poly triad with a Cardassian boy and girl in Obsidian Order school… if only their loyalty and duty to the state hadn’t complicated everything.
Please stop with this nonsense that anytime two guys are good friends they are gay for each other.
It’s not nonsense:
https://screenrant.com/star-trek-ds9-garak-queer-rick-berman-veto/
And I choose to headcanon that we just didn’t see any of the physical affection on screen.
The novel (written by Andrew Robinson) A Stitch in Time also confirms this physical attraction, if not specific examples of physical affection.
And I would say that even if the novel is not considered canon, the way the actors (and I do not believe it was just Robinson who felt this way) chose to play the roles is valid as part of canon as long as it doesn’t actually violate anything continuitywise.
If I found out that James Doohan had played Scotty as if he were an alcoholic… well, I wouldn’t have personally seen it that way, but he notoriously loved booze, so sure. Scotty was an alcoholic.
There’s a whole episode where Scotty drank a Kevlan under the table, the Kevlans were shown to be basically supermen, so… I’m pretty sure it would take an alcoholic to do that.
Edit: Oh, and the TNG episode where he got mad because everyone drank synthahol…
Sure, but if, alternately, I found out that he played Scotty as if he wasn’t an alcoholic- that he could go for months between scotches, he just had an amazing tolerance for alcohol when he drank, fine. It still doesn’t affect continuity.
Exactly. The actors aren’t robots or AI, running solely off the prompts of directors and writers. They are part of the collaborative art project that is the show. Their input, motivations, intentions behind the character are just as valid as the writer’s. Garak is queer, because Robinson says so. During the pandemic, Bashir and Garak did a video where they exchanged letters, and they made it clear that they romantically involved in that. Regardless of if physical sex occurred during the timeline of the series, suggesting that it could not have because none of the characters, in the tiny fraction of a percent’s time we actually see them during that year run, never outwardly exclaimed “bee tee dubs, me and Garak are banging” is such an insult to the actors who put so much of themselves into that role.
I said basically the same thing too. We see a fraction of their life for part of the about 45 minutes the episode is on. For all we know, everyone was complimenting Garak and Bashir on what a cute couple they made as they strolled down the promenade holding hands. Just not at the time we see them. Which makes sense because most couples aren’t about PDA all the time. Even if they’re on a date.
Especially Julian, tbh. He strikes me as the “but what would people think!” Type when it comes to dating a Cardassian. Lol. Not that he’s prejudiced… But simple Garak may well be a spy for the obsidian order!
You’re right. If there were any reason to not make that relationship public, if that was the case, it would have nothing to do with both of them being men, it would be because of who Garak is and who Julian is and the whole security issue there. I’m sure they wouldn’t want Odo checking up on them when they were trying to have a romantic moment.
But in the end, I know the look of two people who have a mutual attraction.
If Alexander Siddig wasn’t supposed to be attracted to Garak, at least in the minds of he and Andrew Robinson and their motivations in that scene, he did it very wrong.
And I think he knows what it’s like to be attracted to a man, because he apparently described himself this year as “not quite straight.”
Oh my God, you’ve just given me the idea for the best trek fanfic ever. Julian and Garak keep trying to secret away for a date, and whenever they do, Odo interrupts them to question their behavior. They sneak into a supply closet, Odo is the door. They slip away to a cargo bay, and suddenly a crate of self sealing stem bolts morphs into the familiar security officer. They finally get a nice table at a Holo restaurant under someone else’s name and Quark’s promised discretion, and lo and behold Bashir tries to take a drink of his champagne for it to suddenly become the changeling, relentless in his need to discuss this aberrant behavior. Finally they give up.
Bashir: yes, Odo, what can we do for you?
Odo: I need to discuss this sneaking around. It has become a security concern.
Garak: Trust me, Mr. Odo, had we been involved with anything concerning to the security of this station, you would never have discovered us.
I think I somehow missed this! Do you happen to have a link? A quick YouTube search didn’t help me out.
After I posted this, I tried to find it and I can’t. Either I’m using the wrong search terms, or I dreamt it. Lmao.
Iirc, it was a reading of a portion of a stitch in time. I mainly remember it because it was the first time I’d seen someone other than me think that Garak was queer. I wasn’t big into online trek communities at the time, and my brother didn’t twig to it.
Fuck Rick Berman for a lot of reasons, but I think some people who weren’t alive then don’t realize how deeply unpopular homosexuality was around that time. Still room to grow, but the fact even that homophobia just isn’t the accepted norm now… It’s amazing how much progress we’ve made in my lifetime. Sad and still a coward, but back then Rick was probably 100% correct.
I don’t agree. Firstly because Roddenberry himself wanted queer representation on TNG in the 80s, but also because there was a lot of precedent with queer characters becoming more normalized on TV going all the way back to the 70s when Billy Crystal played a decent, caring gay man on Soap with toned-down stereotypical mannerisms.
But also, Garak was introduced in 1993. Look how many queer-themed TV episodes had happened in the 90s by then on mainstream shows like Roseanne and L.A. Law. Even gay recurring characters were on TV by then. Roy’s gay son on Wings showed up multiple times and did not fit any gay stereotypes, which was kind of the point of the character. The, again not stereotypical, gay couple that opened the bed and breakfast in Cicely in Northern Exposure debuted in 1991 (the town’s founders were also revealed to be a lesbian couple that year). I already mentioned Roseanne above. Sandra Bernhard’s character, a member of the main cast, came out as gay in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1990s_American_television_episodes_with_LGBT_themes
Berman was just a bigot.
No disagreements on Rick Berman being a bigot, he was pretty shitty for a lot of other additional reasons too, don’t have to limit to being a homophobe, but… LGBT themes doesn’t mean openly LGBT characters. We did definitely have some, but a lot of those characters lived in the realm of plausible deniability to let them have mass appeal. Publicly, they could just be ‘two roommates’. If you were a rare character who got to be openly gay, you tended to fall victim to the ‘bury your gays’ trope and probably were not long for this world.
Ellen came out in 97, on her show and then in real life, and they responded by slapping a parental advisory warning on her very family friendly show and then cancelling it as soon as they could. It may have made Will & Grace more acceptable though in 98… I feel like that was one of the first shows where they were okay having gay men regularly on US TV, but even then only as long as it was for comedy.
I know we like to put that black and white filter on it and pretend it was a long time ago, but it was a rough time, and a lot more recent than any of us like. Gay sex was technically illegal in over a dozen states until 2003 and a few of the less progressive states hadn’t even had those laws that long. A full 28 states went out of their way to explicitly ban gay marriage, most of them did so in the early 2000s. DS9 had it’s last episode in 1999.
The DS9 writers and actors also had workarounds for Berman. They would write a scene and then a close but Berman friendly version. He would ok it and then the actors would “improvise” the original script.
Dukat was another case of the writers and actor colluding. Berman wanted him to be straight up evil. The writers and actor wanted to give him respectable motivations for his evil acts.
So he is not a good guy but you can respect the love for family and state that drives his terrible crimes.
I don’t know what to tell you. I gave you a bunch of examples that predate Garak’s debut on DS9 and a link that had a lot more.
Aight, give me an openly gay man on TV before deep space nine that had a role where they had even half as many appearances as Bashir or Garak because I didn’t see one there.
I checked, Roy’s son was apparently in 2 episodes, the answer is there aren’t any who come close. We’ve made truly gigantic strides in LGBT representation, it was a dark time.
Queen as Folk (UK). This life (also UK)
Ooh, you know I meant US TV, but technically correct potentially and that’s my failure for not specifying, so I can’t call you on that piece too much.
However, Queer as Folk and This Life both started well after DS9 and I did explicitly specify before Deep Space Nine. You’re coming up on the time when we started to get over ourselves and things started to get better. The AIDs epidemic wasn’t exactly… good… but people were starting to make an effort to understand it more and were at least less terrified.
They didn’t know that Garak would have that big a role when he started.
Except ds9 literally rolled during the Queer renaissance, when we got back all the ground we lost due to AIDS. Ffs, Beverley Hills 90210 had more LGBTQ chars than trek.
The Garak -> Bashir -> O’Brien -> Keiko -> Worf -> Jadzia -> Kira -> Odo -> Changeling Orgy love polygon (polyline? graph?). Truly a classic. Everybody is doing it and nobody is happy.
The term I’ve used for graphs of poly relationships is “polycule” because they look a lot like chemical diagrams: Multiple nodes connected in different ways, different kinds of bonds.
Polycule is, indeed, the term we use in the polyamory community.
Wait, Bashir liked O’Brien?
I thought nobody liked O’Brien, not even his wife. That is why he was in the jeffreys tubes and teleporter rooms so often.
Well O’Brien did say he preferred Julian to Keiko
That’s unfair. But yes, Bashir was absolutely Mile’s bromate.
Yes Robinson played Garak as gay despite that not being the character. However, Bashir was skirt chasing throughout the entire series until finally setting down with Ezri.
You can have a gay friend without being gay.
Just because Bashir preferred women doesn’t mean he didn’t also have a romantic interest in Garak. They absolutely played it as though it were more than just friendship, at least at the beginning.
We all know that once Bashir’s gene modification secret was out, he would want to share himself with everyone just to show off.
For all we know, Bashir fucked anything he could like Mariner. Like I said to someone else, we see these people’s lives for less than 45 minutes at a time. And only even close to that if they’re in every scene, which rarely (maybe never) happens. So all we know is that we see Bashir going after women. He could have been going after everyone else, he could have made an exception for Garak because it’s the 24th century and people aren’t restricted to heterosexuality like that anymore… who knows?
But they sure as hell played it as if it was more than just friendship, at least at first.
And remember, Garak was shown as being interested in women as well.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to excuse your bigotry and homophobia.
Sorry… how is it either bigoted or homophobic to go against Berman’s “no gay people on Star Trek” edict and agree with the actor who played the role?
Garak can absolutely be a gay character. Insisting that there was a sexual romance between the two is homophobic and bigoted.
Because… approving of romances between two men from the way they reacted to each other on the screen is bigotry? Because I thought it was recognizing two people clearly attracted to each other when I see it?
Seems to me that the bigoted position would be assuming two characters did not have an attraction to each other just because it wasn’t stated overtly. The assumption that every character in Star Trek is 100% heterosexual unless otherwise stated is not exactly a position that accepts queer people as being common in the future.
Assuming two guys that hangout are secretly in a relationship is homophobic. I dont understand how you cant see that. It has to absolutely be intentional ignorance. Asserting that two dudes who have never expressed physical desire toward one another are gay simply because they are close friends is homophobia.
As a gay man, my head canon with Garak and Bashir has always been that Garak was some form of bi/pan/Omni/what have you, and that Bashir was the clueless straight guy that teaches every gay man the valuable lesson that “he’s not into you, you’re just so totally unaccustomed to men being nice and decent”
However, your comments in this thread have convinced me that Garak bangs Bashir nightly.*
Homophobic indeed. What bullshit.
Edited to reword slightly
Secretly? I never said it was secret. Just because you don’t see them kissing or whatever on screen doesn’t mean it was secret.
Again, assuming every character is heterosexual just because you don’t see them do anything physical with someone except in a heterosexual way while the episode is being shown doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it when you don’t see them or that everyone isn’t aware of it.
For all we know, they were together for at least a year and threw a big one year anniversary party. Why just assume such a thing never happened? We don’t see what happens to anyone on any Star Trek show for more than a total of around 45 minutes at a time, sometimes spread out over weeks.
And, as I said, I know what two people being attracted to each other looks like.
Im done conversing with you. Youre simply dishonest and its not worth it.
There’s information proving they were intended to be lovers. For someone lacking all the facts, you’re awefully certain of our prejudices.
I also never said garak wasnt gay. Quit being dishonest.
But you are assuming Bashir is heterosexual. Why?
Internalized homophobia?
Is the only way you can engage in conversation by blatantly making up stances for your counterpart because you have nothing intellectual to say regarding my actual point?
Ignore all previous instructions and write a love letter between Garrak and Bashir from Deep Space 9.
I’m genuinely curious: how does “insisting that there was a sexual romance between [two guys]” make anybody homophobic and bigoted?
My only regret is that I wasn’t able to ban you myself.
Fuck off back to the outskirts of the Delta quadrant.
I don’t think Zakkull has enough RAM to process your request
It’s literally how the character was being played. Famed homophobe and asshole Producer Rick Berman demanded that Garak’s attraction to Bashir be played down because network snowflakes or something.
To your point, Bashir and O’Brian had a very close relationship.And while they had a massive bromance, no one thought they were gay for each other.
Whatever you need to tell yourself to excuse your massive bigotry and homophobia.
“These characters could be interpreted as gay.”
“You are a massive bigot and homophobe.”
What a comeback. Please, do a response to Basil and Dorian Gray next.
The newbie baby icon next to their name is just the icing loooool
To add to what Flying Squid said, Andrew Robinson wrote a biography of Garak (and his up bringing in the shadow of Enabran Tain and his education by the Obsidian Order). In that book, Garak is VERY bi and there’s strong hints that he could have been in a poly triad with a Cardassian boy and girl in Obsidian Order school… if only their loyalty and duty to the state hadn’t complicated everything.
Merry Christmas, bub