Star Trek Beyond: The Sulu Controversy (minor spoilers)

Cafe Society
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I thought I knew you better than that, too, but what you’ve written here is tremendously insulting. I mean, look at what you’ve written here:

You start with “Why make the Asian guy gay,” then immediately segue into, “Asians don’t get a lot of roles in Hollywood.” Which is an odd complaint to bring up in this context, as the actor currently playing Sulu, John Cho, is Asian. Then you bring in Cumberbatch as Khan, as an example of Hollywood erasing an Asian character. What, exactly, is the connection between the trend of erasing Asian characters in Hollywood, and making this character Asian? The only connection I can see is that being gay and being Asian are somehow mutually incompatible - that by making Sulu gay, they are somehow taking away his ethnicity. I’d really love it if you meant something else by that - but if you did, I cannot divine it from what you’ve written here.

I’m aware of the ongoing issue with Asian in Hollywood never being cast as the protagonist, or as a serious romantic lead, and I agree that it’s an important issue. And I think that issue does exist with the new ST movie, but the way you’ve stated it in this thread is terrible. By giving Sulu a family (and making the family largely incidental to the actual plot) they’re effectively taking Sulu off the table for potential romantic subplots.* But that’s an issue that exists regardless of his sexuality. If he had a wife and daughter, it’d be exactly the same problem. But you didn’t address this issue: you said, “Asian guys never get the girl,” and making Sulu gay guarantees that. But he does get (or has gotten) the guy, which is every bit as much a victory for representations of Asians in romantic relationships as it would be if he had a wife. By presenting Sulu being gay as a continuation of the trope of effectively sexless Asians, you’re implying that “getting the guy” is a less desirable outcome than “getting the girl.”

And that’s not even touching the comparison between revealing that Sulu is gay, and killing off an Asian character, which just… holy shit! What were you even thinking with that?

*This cuts against the movie in more than one way, actually, because by making the gay character married and a parent, they also preclude themselves from having to write a gay romance subplot somewhere down the line.

And this is the coup de grace. You’re explicitly saying that making an Asian character gay makes him less Asian. I mean, I don’t even with this. How can you look at that post, and think that this is in any way an okay thing to say? Sorry, straight lady. If Hollywood is wrong for ignoring Asians, then you are every bit as wrong (if significantly less culpable) for ignoring gay Asians. You don’t get to argue about Asian representation as much as you do, and then turn around and complain that they’re not showing the right kind of Asian.

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That scene has one of my favorite Trek quotes. Sulu: “I’ll protect you, fair maiden.” Uhura: *“Sorry, neither.” *

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I’m willing to give Anaamika the benefit of the doubt, but I also disagree strongly with the idea that choosing the Asian character to be gay and “getting a two-fer” is somehow a mis-step or “disenfranchises Asians.” If anything, I think the opposite - having one of the white male characters become gay - furthers the notion that “gay” is just another ‘minority checkbox’ to mark, when sexuality is a different issue than race. Without getting too much into it here, there’s actually a rather interesting and complex intersection of minority race and minority sexuality issues.

As far as the issue of turning an established character gay versus making a new gay character, I can certainly see problems on both sides, damned if you do, damned if you don’t. A new character who’s gay feels token and runs the risk of being identified by their sexuality first. But changing a character feels like changing the original vision (which is what bothered Takei about it), not to mention you can flip it around and say “oh, so a character can only be determined by non-sexual things if they start out assumed as straight, and then later revealed to be gay?” It’s a thin line to balance on. A lot of the same issues came up when Iceman was recently revealed/ret-conned as gay over in the X-Men comics.

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Takei’s objections still don’t make sense, as he admitted that Roddenberry wanted to make Sulu gay. So how is it attacking canon? Sulu was ambiguous with his sexuality on TV. That alone shouts “gay” to anyone who knows the time period. You can’t show him actually being gay, but you don’t really make him definitively straight, either. That isn’t making him closeted, since it doesn’t come up.

As for “The Naked Now,” all he does is say he wants to defend “fair maiden” Uhura (while intoxicated). Yes, you could see that as him wanting to be a “white knight” and have sex with her. Or you could see it having a fairy tale fantasy. Again, ambiguous. Same as when he was appreciative of a very muscular (movie) Klingon woman. And that’s all that came up when we discussed possible straight Sulu moments on Reddit.

I honestly think that Takei is upset for another reason that he isn’t quite saying, for fear of backlash. That it is about him playing the character as straight, and objecting to having the one character played by that gay man become gay. That the ambiguity above is a challenge to his ability to play Sulu as straight. And that that is what really insults him.

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Honestly, I’d be insulted as well. Takei is considered a gay icon, and he’s taken to that role well, but it can’t feel nice to have everything he’s done in showbiz be interpreted through one aspect of his personality.

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Actor John Barrowman, who is gay, has said that he has auditioned for gay roles and been told that he’s “not gay enough”.

I know people who have apparently become so accustomed to seeing high school students played by actors who are in their late 20s (and even over 30) that, when they see an actual 18-year-old they think he/she is an underage middle school student.

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Which is pretty silly if you’ve ever met him.
Some of his costumes at the SDCC that just ended

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Yes. John Cho says a scene was filmed of Jung and him kissing, but it didn’t make the final cut of the film.

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I think, to some extent, we are so used to seeing various human types played by the “wrong” types that we don’t always know what we’re looking at. I have heard one or two people complaining about Chloe Bennet playing a half-Caucasian, half-Chinese (or Asian) character when she’s “obviously” white - but she isn’t, she herself is half-Caucasian and half-Chinese. In reality, there’s a wide variability in what mixed race people look like but all too often in Hollywood they look wholly one ethnicity or the other.

The thing is, if non-white people were getting a fair share of the roles in Hollywood - that is, a proportion of roles that don’t have to be a particular ethnicity similar to their ethnicity’s percentage in a population, either of actors or the country as a whole, the occasional ethnicity-jumping actor wouldn’t matter so much but in reality white-washing does occur. Just having an ethnic name can be a liability (Chloe Bennet was born Chloe Wang but she discovered she got more jobs in Hollywood with a “white” last name, then there’s the Estevez family where Martin and Charlie took the last name “Sheen” and Martin’s brother Emilio stayed with “Estevez”. Also Carlos Estevez did get credit for at least one film I’ve seen.)

Idris Elba being cast as Heimdall in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is one of the few cases of an altered ethnicity being from white to something else, and it worked well. Well enough I doubt anyone else is going to play that role for Marvel as long as Elba wants to keep it. Well, that and Nick Fury being white in in the comics up to a certain point, after which he strongly resembles Samuel L. Jackson (which was not coincidence - Marvel sought permission before using his likeness) and SLJ got the movie role, too.

I’d be less concerned with white people playing ethnic roles if there were more non-white people getting roles either traditionally considered white or where there’s no specified ethnicity more of them get that role.

The actor currently playing Spock is gay. I suppose that would have worked, if they hadn’t already established Uhuru as his girlfriend in a prior movie.

In reality, there’s a long history of gay men playing straight men. I strongly suspect most straight actors can play gay characters. Isn’t it in the nature of acting to portray someone you’re not, even if you bring bits of yourself to the role sometimes?

He sort of flirted with Uhuru, but outside of that one episode we don’t see anything about his interests in that area.

My understanding (which I freely admit may contain some error, as I’m not an expert) is the character played by a bald white woman was, in the original, a male Tibetan and China had some issues with that, and possibly some other people had issues with China’s issues. I guess Marvel decided that if that was going to be a problem they’d just re-cast the character. A white woman willing to shave her head got the role. I suppose it could have gone to a black woman willing to shave her head, but… well, darn, it does seem white people are more likely to get the role of a re-cast character like that, aren’t they?

Well, in the novel the protagonist was a guy… so keeping the character male would have been consistent with that. Strictly speaking, though, the main character in The Martian the book is never described. Wait, I think there’s something about calling himself “Blondebeard the Space Pirate” at one point, but really, that’s it. In the whole book. “Blackbeard”, “Redbeard”, “Brownbeard”, “Graybeard” all could have been swapped out without altering the narrative more than one word.

No, they beam the waste away. Transporter technology has some surprising applications.

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Also, off the top of my head, there’s Kingpin in the Daredevil movie, Hogun, also from Thor, Johnny Storm in Fantastic Four, Ben Urich in the Daredevil TV show, and Quake, played by the aforementioned Chloe Bennet. And more that I’m forgetting, I’m sure. The Ancient One aside, in comic book movies there’s far, far more examples of turning a white character colored than the other way around. The problem is with the leads, who are invariably white guys. Mostly named Chris. It’s a step up from the comic these movies were based on, which were generally whiter than the Antarctic in winter, but it’s still pretty fucked up that we have to wait until 2017 for a major superhero movie starring a woman, and 2018 for a person of color.

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I’m going to quibble about that one - allegedly, Kingpin was originally envisioned as a black man, changed to white for the comic, but often depicted with a somewhat to quite ambiguous appearance where he could have easily been mixed race or a light-skinned black man.

Johnny Storm in the recent Fantastic Four was very recent, like last year, all prior treatments of that character were white. Which is OK, of course, except a lot of people would have liked the Storm siblings to be of the same race. It’s not required, of course, plenty of multi-racial families with siblings of different ethnicities, but it’s generally still typical of families to have that consistency and hey, why not cast Sue Storm as a black woman?

In the immediately prior FF film Alicia Masters was played by a black woman when in the comics she’s long been white. Not a hugely major character, but really there’s no reason she had to be either ethnicity.

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Jamie Foxx as Electro? (Granted, that wasn’t the MCU – but neither is DAREDEVIL or the FANTASTIC FOUR movie, right? So I figure it’s worth quick mention.)

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Some examples from various DC properties… Perry White in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman (understandable that those would be forgotten). [del]Jimmy[/del]James Olsen in the Supergirl TV series. The West family in The Flash.

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Will Smith as Deadshot.

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First I’ve ever heard of it. Here’s the cover to his second-ever appearance. (His first appearance being in the previous issue of Spider-Man.) He’s always been portrayed as not just white, but down right pale. Still, his most salient feature is his size, not his color, so Michael Clark Duncan was an inspired casting choice. Shame the rest of the movie didn’t live up to it.

Yeah, that felt very much like they made Johnny black because it couldn’t be the lead, and it couldn’t be the lead’s love interest, so it had to be either Johnny, or the special effect.

Arguably, Jessica Alba’s Sue Storm was Hispanic, too.

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While I agree with your general argument, the nitpicker in me feels that it should really be “the first ones for this cycle of films” since we had a female superhero lead in 2005 and a person of color lead in 1998 (or even 1997.)

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That last link there doesn’t go to STEEL, as well it shouldn’t.

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That was based on interviews with Stan Lee. As I said, he was white-washed for the comic. Lee has reasons for that that make some sense given the time period involved.

And that is the root of the problem - the notion that the black man can’t be the lead or the lead’s love interest. It’s toxic and pernicious and it makes life harder for a significant number of actors both male and female.

DC’s TV version of The Flash is surviving a “lead’s love interest is black” just fine, which shows the public isn’t going to flee in terror from the concept. It’s time Hollywood come to grips with that.

Right… in a blonde wig and/or bleached hair. Alba is Hispanic, but she was playing a white character. Hispanics have the advantage over other minorities in that they can do that, but it also shows how silly some of this BS is.

You could point to Jay Silverheels as “proof” that Hollywood was willing to cast Native Americans in the 1950’s, but he was an exception, not the rule. And not the lead, either. Ditto for Bruce Lee being “proof” Asians could get a job on American TV… but he went from the lead in his movies to the Green Hornet’s sidekick.

Yes, things are getting better but there is still quite a way to go.

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I believe he was specifically talking about being up for the lead in Will and Grace. I got the feeling he didn’t believe the explanation. It was felt that it was more palatable for the public to have the lead be straight playing a gay character.

Daredevil the movie wasn’t MCU. The TV show is. Kingpin stayed white (and dammit don’t think of changing that, Vincent D’onofrio is brilliant) but Ben Urich became black, then dead. Electra is played by a French/Cambodian instead of a pasty WASP(movie) or Greek(comic book).

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Bruce Lee was Kato first and then his big roles came after. He had to go to Hong Kong to make those movies but Green Hornet was first.