Speculation Should there be gay characters in the ST?

I'm pretty sure Palpatine was always gay.

 

I distinctly recall Han grabbing some boobage in RotJ. And Padme in the corset thing...nothing sexual about that? No way. Slave Leia choking Jabba, Slave Twilek in chains dancing against her will, Padme's throwing back of the "agressive negotiations" line.

I agree with what you are saying, joking and obvious undertones aside.

 

Brokeback mountain in SW Universe - interesting

 

Please leave Political Correctness out of Star Wars. Surely we can leave some pure, fun things away from this destructive menace.

 

I'm not against it, but as someone said, it's just a matter of percentages. That is, how many love relationships we have seen in Star Wars? 2, 3,..4? Not more.

If we have seen so few relationships, it is not probable that there is a gay one. In real world there is 1 out of 15, or 1 out of 20 gay relationships....

So, there should be at least 15 love relationships to be one that is gay in Star Wars.

That is of course if you want to make a proporcionate world. If you want to make it more fictional, you can change those proportions.

You can even think that in Alien species, that human-gay proportions are different. For example, in Ewoks, there could be 50% of gays.

Also, i'm not against a gay relationship, specially if it's well written, with elegance.

BTW, are we sure that this guy was not gay? :

 

No tokenism in Star Wars please.

 

Honestly, I think that romance should only really be included if it is integral to the plot, especially for films. What I mean is, we have a movie that is going to be about 2 hours and 20 minutes at most and do we really want to devote a substantial fraction of that time to developing something that is not going to matter, in the end? I have no problem with including an established gay couple (say, if our heroes stop by a restaurant that is owned by a gay couple), but unless the relationship (gay or straight) is necessary to the story, I personally don't see the point in including it.

I bring this up because, outside of a romance, I can't think of many ways to organically integrate someone's sexuality. In the example I mentioned above, for instance, it'd be difficult to conclusively demonstrate that the couple that owns the restaurant is gay (rather than, say, siblings) without shoehorning it in.

And I don't really see the need to describe the sexuality of every character anyway. Obi-Wan or Mace Windu might already be gay for all we know (EU excluded of course). Or maybe Sabé or Mon Mothma are. Or another character. But it doesn't fundamentally change the way we perceive them.

 

There will never, ever be a Disney Princess that has a liquor license.

 

Maybe we'll see Rotta the Hutt, all grown up and taking over the syndicate, following Ziro's curious sexual footsteps, who I believe was gay, lesbian, straight and had both genders.

 

I so wanted Ziro to have some male dancers in that film...

 

Speaking of terrible SW characters, it's hard to get any worse than Jar Jar, but I think Ziro may be the most annoying character in the SW universe.

 

There are homosexual characters in the Original Trilogy.
Moff Jerjerrod: "I need more men."^^

 

They didn't have horses in Star Wars...!!!

 

Tauntauns.

 

I disagree.

Princess Leia: Captain, being held by you isn't quite enough to get me excited.
Han Solo: Sorry sweetheart. I haven't got time for anything else

Padmé: "There'd been whispers, that you'd been killed"
Anakin: "I'm all right." [begins kissing her again, more intensely]
Padmé: "No, not here..."
Anakin: "Yes, here! I'm tired of this hiding, I don't care if people know we're married!" [notices something's wrong]

Leia's Bikini, Padme throughout episode 2, the sexuality is there.

 

In the German dub they have them on Tatooine.
Cliegg Lars: "Ich kann nichtmal mehr auf einem Pferd reiten. (I can't ride a horse anymore.)"

 

"Padme throughout episode 2"

Sorry if this makes it awkward in the conversation, just ignore me!

 

I don't recall us ever meeting a Mrs. Calrissian. And he did wear a cape for some reason.
Not that there's anything wrong with that.

 

No.-Darth Boba.

 

I wouldn't shoe horn a gay character in just to do it. And I certainly wouldn't want a gay character to be just a sterotype. But there is nothing wrong with including a gay character.

 

Bless you, Jedi Mountain.

Well, unfortunately, no; your opinion does matter every bit as much as any of ours, or you wouldn't have posted here (by the way, welcome to the forum!); and in a charged question such as this, your motive for asking it also ultimately does matter. If you yourself are not LGBT, for instance, but simply an interested observer in the issue, then the question is best answered one way; if you are, and the basic unspoken premise of your question is "I am a Star Wars fan who is also LGBT, and I feel it would be great for me, more inclusive-feeling and/or empowering for me, if a LGBT character of some kind, no matter how small, made an appearance in the Sequel Trilogy," then it should be answered in another way designed to specifically frame the argument for you in the best way possible. That kind of feedback, I believe, enriches the answer for the better. I might also point out that if it is indeed the latter premise (and I'm just assuming, but you did admit to being "actively" interested, so I felt I was on safe ground there), then no one should ever feel hesitant to just say as much to us, and proudly. We're a pretty inclusive group here.

I'd also like to elaborate on last night's answer, much as you liked it as it was, and risk shoving the metaphorical foot into my mouth further. On principle, no, I would never have any objection to having an apparent LGBT background character; there's already some precedent for it in the EU (though how much EU is gonna survive this new trilogy is a matter of debate itself). Ideally, it should be only a background character, because I personally just don't think the films can carry the weight of both their own must-achieve goals AND that issue as a MAJOR issue. For the record, people who have wanted to see gay characters on Star Trek have asked, by and large, for pretty much just that: to have a pair of characters in the background in Ten-Forward, or in some Enterprise corridor walking by holding hands. That appears to be as much as they want or need to feel that they have a place in that universe; and that's a realistic goal, one Star Wars certainly can accomplish without short-changing its primary goals. To do more than that is to then risk what everyone who seems to be against it seems to fear, that it would obscure the larger purpose of the ST, whatever the writers determine that to be.

In the defense of people who ask that kind of thing, you have to understand the situation for fans in general here on this forum right now: it's been about a week or so, we get an announcement that there's gonna be a Sequel Trilogy... and suddenly this forum goes absolutely Hutt****-insane with every kind of possible speculation under the sun! And I don't mean with intelligent questions, such as "Can John Williams still do the music at his age, and if not, who can replace him?," or "What direction will the story go in?" I'm talking about flat-out goofy things like "To hell with John Williams, and to hell with romantic classical music; why can't we have AC/DC or Metallica music in these new films, because I like that kind of music?" Or "Porkins has to come back! I don't care that he was clearly burned into a fat charcoal briquette in ANH, I love him!" It's almost impossible to tell if these people are just joking with us (in which case they're either comedians or, worse, just trolls), or if they really believe that (in which case they may have serious problems, LOL). On the surface (no offense intended) the gay-character issue can risk being interpreted as one of those troll-questions or, worse, one of the serious-problems-questions, so again, I wanted to know why it was asked. Your motivations, as I'm interpreting them, I can understand; I doubt I could say the same for those of some of these others.

And in each and every case of these hypothetical questions, I have to put in, the answer is usually the same for me: such questions are irrelevant because we have no idea what the producers and writers intend to do, and even if we did, we have no say in it at all. None. The plans are in all likelihood already too far along for our input to be important. What we're doing with all this is to pass the time. That's all. And that makes all our questioning, regardless of the subject of said question, just so much sound and fury signifying nothing. Which means we're not so much passing time with all this as we are wasting it. Can we all just stop it already? We have a three-year wait and we're gonna fill it with this nonsense?

Which now leads to the question of if it is likely to happen. If, as you say, Arndt is himself gay, I'd have to assume that if anyone is going to make it happen, you'd think it'd be him; but he's never so much as mentioned it being important to his plans for this - all he's gone on about is achieving the proper emotional climax for the audience and how the ending of ANH demonstrates how that should be properly done. Which means his head is in the right place; it's not on something even he seems to think is a side-issue or even a non-issue.

That one wasn't for me, but it's applicable: differing opinions are at the heart of one aspect of human interaction, and so ultimately, the question itself is valid. I just don't think Star Wars is really about such issues. When they can't really touch on heterosexual intercourse without us just assuming it happened one time between Episodes II and III, then I have no expectations that they'd do anything to touch on any other kind of intercourse either. Again, background characters that are seen and then walk off camera are another matter, but to push it closer to the camera lens than that is to then turn the saga into something it was just not designed to be, and we have a hard enough time trying to keep the saga on an even keel as it is some days...

That said, I heart you too.

P.S.: With all this discussed, isn't it possible that we really have already gone there in a roundabout fashion? For those of you in this forum who aren't certain what I'm referring to, I ask you to consider the case of Ziro the Hutt - he's made to sound like famed writer Truman Capote; intelligent as a man of letters, and gayer than a three-dollar bill. He's PURPLE, for crying out loud! What more do we need or want?! And in terms of his acceptance, well, the audience did go "huh?" and/or "what?" at first, but we quickly got past that because we had gotten used to Lucas' penchant for inexplicably eccentric characters by then; it was enough for us that he wasn't as distracting and/or offensive as Jar Jar. We even liked it when he came back for further appearances, so I'd argue that there is a measure of acceptance based on context. (Of course, Ziro then was revealed to have had a relationship with Sy Snootles, but all that shows is that there's no accounting for taste. At all.)

PK EDIT: Language Edit.

 

No.

 

Yeah there are gay characters already.

 

I guess I don't think it's overdone. Twilight is something where the overtones and mood of the story seems more appropriate for a such as gay fantasy characters, I guess was my point in all the posts I made in this thread.

Either way, I don't care anymore. I really can't see it happening.