Star Trek: Discovery Will Have An Openly Gay Character & A Female Lead

For the first 50 years of its existence, Star Trek pushed to boundaries on things such as race, but it never had an on-screen gay character. That’s certainly changing, with John Cho’s Sulu revealed to have a husband in Star Trek Beyond, and now it’s been revealed there will be a gay character in the new TV series, Star Trek: Discovery.

The show, which will air on CBS: All Access in the US and Netflix in the rest of the world, has been outing promoting itself at with a Television Critics Association panel, where showrunner Bryan Fuller (Pushing Daisies, Hannibal) was asked about the possibility of a homosexual character. He replied, “absolutely we’re having a gay character.”

It was one thing Fuller was apparently adamant about, as he worked on Star Trek: Voyager, and still has a folder of the hate mail they got when it was rumoured Jeri Ryan’s character, Seven Of Nine, was going to be a lesbian. Talking about the progress made since then thanks to the likes of Will & Grace, he added, “I think we’ve come a long way since then; gay rights have come a lot further in that time than racial issues and women’s issues.”

Women’s issues are also something the new show may put centre stage, as it was also revealed that the lead character on the show would be a woman, although unlike earlier Star Trek series, the main character won’t be the captain of the ship. Instead it will be a subordinate, likely to be a Lt. Commander. The show will take place 10 years before the original series, and will be set in the same timeline as the earlier television series, rather than the Kelvin timeline of the recent movies. Discovery – Season 1 is due to be released next year.