Simple answer: no.
Longer answer: it’s not worth a longer answer. Think about it for more than 2 seconds and you might realize why those aren’t analogous.
Thanks for that detailed and insightful response.
Sort of missing the point, here, bill.
There’s been a longstanding stereotype in western media of Asians as either the sinister foreigner, or the impotent nerd. Sulu is important to a lot of Asians because he’s a heroic, dynamic character that avoids either of those traps.
There has also, for a long time, been a similar problem with the portrayals of gays in western media, where we’re either ineffectual comic relief, or some sort of sexual predator. We’re another group who seldom gets portrayed as heroic, dynamic characters. So getting open representation on Star Trek is also a pretty big deal, and it’s been a lot longer in getting here.
The fight in this thread is over the perception, by some of the posters, that by making Sulu the gay character, you’re taking away from his portrayal as a heroic Asian character. Which is a tacit endorsement of the common stereotypes against gay people - that we’re not adventuresome or heroic. They’re arguing that making Sulu gay is taking something away from the character, making him less than he would be if he were straight. But if gay Sulu is somehow “less” than straight Sulu, then implicitly, being gay in general is “less” than being straight, in general.
Sulu is a great Asian-American icon. Whether he’s gay or straight does not take away from that one way or the other, and the people who are saying that it does, are taking a homophobic position.
Some people are making that argument. And some people like yourself can interpret it that way (which is nice because you can then throw nasty labels around).
It doesn’t have to be “less”. All it has to be is “different”.
If a gay man needs Sulu to be gay to identify with him, then him being gay surely can make it harder for a straight man to identify with him.
The fact that apparently Sulu in this movie is so low level gay that it almost doesn’t matter being beside the larger arguement here.
Asians, non-straight people and other minorities are not looking for representation just so they can have someone to look up to. They’re looking for representations of people like them in popular culture because they have been systematically excluded. Straight people don’t have that problem. A straight Asian kid can see himself in a straight person of any race and in an Asian person of any sexual preference. Now obviously it’s great to have enough Asians in the cast so that the can be straight ones or gay ones. But making an Asian character gay is not robbing straight Asians of anything.
“People like myself?” I’m very curious to know what cohort you’re including me in, there.
A commendably enlightened attitude! And one I recommend to Isamu and Anaamika, who seem to have not quite got that message - because they’ve been pretty explicit in presenting this as “less,” and not “different.”
No one ever said that gay people needed Sulu to be gay before we could identify with him. He’s been a favorite character of mine since long before I learned that he (or myself!) was gay. What we like to see is acknowledgement that gay people exist in this universe, and that they’re just as accepted by society as anyone else. We like to see that there’s a place in the Star Trek utopia for people who are like us. We don’t, generally speaking, need to see people who are exactly like us in every respect. I’m a gay white dude. I don’t a gay character to be specifically white and male to feel represented by them. And I’m not just talking for myself, here, or just on gay issues: The OP of this thread is an Indian woman, but she still felt a Japanese character played by a Korean man represented her as an Asian.
Until they made him gay, and now he’s no longer good enough.
The underlying - and rather ugly - implication of this line of thought is that, if Sulu is now a gay character, then he doesn’t count as an Asian character, anymore.
Funny how that works. Baby steps…