Anthony Rapp

Despite what Weird Bigots On The Internet will tell you, Star Trek has always been political. It doesn’t take much effort to find episodes of the original series that have political messages. You don’t have to get that far into the series to find overtly political episodes, and even the ones that don’t have overt politics have an underlying progressivism that is easy to miss in hindsight. Remember that Uhura was a black woman in a position of authority and responsibility and that Chekhov was a Russian in the middle of the Cold War.

To that pantheon we must add Anthony Rapp. Now, I’m not planning a deep dive into the later Star Trek shows the way we’ve now done the ones through Voyager. Part of that is that the only person who’s really had a major career from Enterprise is Scott Bakula, and I’ve already covered him. But there are a few people who will come up in the future, and Rapp will be the first. The next will be in four weeks, where we’ll get his TV husband. In other words, the first openly gay main characters on Star Trek.

Oh, there’s speculation about Bashir’s being bi. But that’s speculation and so is anything to do with Garak whatsoever, from what I can tell. Lt. Commander Paul Stamets and his husband, Hugh Culber, are established as a couple pretty much right away. This being Star Trek, they’re not just a couple, they’re an interracial couple. I haven’t watched a ton of Discovery yet, but the show is upfront about the relationship and treats it as seriously as any other marriage.

Granted, there’s more to his career than Star Trek. I can hear the screams of the Theatre Kids younger than I am demanding that I tell them about Rent. But you know about Rent. And I’m not a huge fan of it. But it’s true that we should talk theatre, because he’s played everyone from Seymour Krelbourn to Henry V, from Charlie Brown to Hedwig Robinson. He’s a heck of a singer, a heck of a performer. He would have had a long-running career even without Stamets.

It’s strange to think of someone being declared in 2012 to be one of the first openly gay men on Broadway. There are lots of straight men in the theatre, and no few bi ones, I’m sure. But I thought everyone knew that there are gay men working in the theatre. I guess that “openly” is doing a lot of lifting—even though Rapp himself uses “queer,” not “gay,” inasmuch as he feels it defines him better. That’s fine. Everyone has a right to define themselves the way they want to.