Gay Trekkers undoubtedly uttered an even greater sigh of disappointment following the airing of a 1992 "Next Generation" episode, "The Outcast." In the story, Commander Riker becomes romantically involved with Soren, a member of an androgynous (though outwardly female) race called the J'naii, whose leaders ruthlessly suppress any manifestation of sexual identity. "I am taking a terrible risk," Soren tells Riker. "Some [J'naii] have strong inclinations for maleness. Some have urges to be female. I am one of the latter ... In our world, these feelings are forbidden. [We] lead secret and guarded lives. We seek each other out, always hiding, always terrified of being discovered."

When Soren is outed, she is put on trial by the J'naii council. "What we do is not different from what you do," she pleads. "What makes you think you can dictate how people love each other?"

Her arguments fail, and she is brainwashed into androgyny. According to one "Next Generation" supervising producer, "The Outcast" was supposed to have been "the gay episode." But many gay viewers wondered why Berman felt the need to slink around in allegory.

Jonathan Frakes, who played Riker, complained later that the episode wasn't "gutsy" enough and that "Soren should have been more evidently male." On e-mail chat groups, some gay Trekkers saw the episode as worse than timid. "The depiction of Soren's society seemed to be something taken right from Rush Limbaugh's show or Pat Buchanan's campaign literature," complained an anonymous message poster. "If you listen to those people, you'll hear them talking about how the feminist and homosexual political agendas want to destroy the traditional family and make society into a sexless, genderless collection of politically correct clones ... Soren's society was a depiction of those people's worse nightmares."

A 1999 "Deep Space Nine" episode that touched on lesbian motifs, "The Emperor's New Cloak," provoked similar reactions. Viewers saw Lieutenant Ezri Dax, the station counselor, exchange a kiss with one woman and express interest in another. Unfortunately, it was not the genuine Ezri Dax they were watching but, rather, her menacing counterpart from an alternate, more evil universe. The "real" Ezri remained solidly heterosexual in her normal, heterosexual world.

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So what? Who cares? To the average non-Trekker, all of this attention to what kisses who in which universe seems absurd -- the comic obsessions of "Star Trek" fans encouraged and compounded by the gloomy obsessions of identity politics. There are now about two dozen shows on television that feature gay characters. Would it matter much if we added one more?

The answer, many gay Trekkers agree, is yes. To those reading the mass media's political tea leaves, "Star Trek" is unique not because it's set in space or in the future, or because it's the most successful franchise in the history of television, but because it represents a Utopia.

True, there is violence and strife, but always thanks to outsiders: the Klingons, the Romulans, the Cardassians, the Borg, the giant lizard-man Kirk fights in "Arena." Within the quadrants controlled by Starfleet, all is blissful tolerance and everyone gets to wear the same tight uniforms.

So it's one thing to exclude a group of people from a world as imperfect as our own, but what does it say when you've been kicked out of Utopia?

"They don't need money in 'Star Trek' and they don't need religion," says Cecilia Tan, founder and editor of Circlet Press, a Cambridge, Mass., publisher of gay-themed science fiction. "There are no Christians in 'Star Trek.' Everyone's a sort of secular humanist. Everyone is accepted and happily employed. So everyone wants to see themselves in that world. It's like, if everyone's all happy and well-adjusted, where are the happy, well-adjusted gay people?"

It was precisely because the original "Star Trek" series was shot through with Utopian themes that it seemed natural for it to boldly go where no television show had gone before. In an era when such casting decisions were risqué, Roddenberry put an African-American actress (Nichelle Nichols, playing Lieutenant Uhura) and an Asian-American actor (George Takei, playing Lieutenant Sulu) on the Enterprise's bridge.

The stupidity of prejudice was a recurring theme on the show. In a famous third-season episode, "Plato's Stepchildren," Kirk and Uhura engage in the first white-black kiss American television viewers had ever seen. This was 1968, just one year after the Supreme Court struck down 16 states' laws prohibiting interracial marriage.

How important was a competent, black woman on television at the time? "You cannot [leave]," Nichols claims Martin Luther King Jr. told her when she considered leaving the show after its first season. "Don't you realize how important your presence, your character is? Don't you realize this gift [Roddenberry] has given the world? Men and women of all races going forth in peaceful exploration, living as equals ... This is not a black role, and this is not a female role. You have the first nonstereotypical role on television, male or female. You have broken ground."

King persuaded Nichols. She stayed with the show and became an important part of its iconography. Uhura developed so much brand-name recognition that, in 1977, NASA asked her to help recruit female and minority astronauts.

Yet some point out that King was exaggerating when he said Nichols had a nonstereotypical role. "The three recurrent female characters in [the original 'Star Trek'] all performed tasks that were accepted 'women's work' in the mid-1960s," notes Rex Brynen, a political science professor who teaches at McGill University, in his 2000 essay "Mirror, Mirror? The Politics of Television Science Fiction." Uhura "was essentially a futuristic telephone operator ... Christine Chapel and Janice Rand were a space-traveling nurse and secretary, respectively. All were young, attractive and dressed in very short skirts, as were most of the other women to appear in the show ... Even the show's slogan -- 'to boldly go where no man has gone before' -- signaled its reflection of, rather than challenge to, established gender stereotypes."

"There are an endless number of episodes that deal with the issue of ethnic and cultural tolerance," Brynen added when I spoke with him. "Though the show's producers aggressively cultivated 'Star Trek's' image as a trailblazer, they were far more progressive on race than they were on gender and sexual orientation."

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