Some details of Gerrold's story are disputed (though not the bit about Maizlish, who is now dead; David Alexander, Roddenberry's authorized biographer, referred to the lawyer in his discussions with me as "Roddenberry's dark presence").

Many "Star Trek" insiders say Gerrold's "Blood and Fire" was simply a bad script. "David has made a career out of this sort of claim," says Ernie Over, a Wyoming journalist who worked as Roddenberry's personal assistant. "He had an agenda, which was to get gay people onto 'Star Trek.'"

"I knew Gerrold from 1972, and I'd read all his books up to that point. 'Blood and Fire' was not his best work," says Richard Arnold, Roddenberry's research consultant on "The Next Generation" and a columnist for the official "Star Trek" newsletter. "I was almost offended by the stereotypes. The scene I remember particularly was when the gay couple was having a sort of lover's dispute. The one we could call the wife was expressing concern to the other about getting into dangerous situations. He was saying stuff like 'You know how much I worry about you when you're away.' I mean, come on. This was absolutely ridiculous -- for Starfleet officers or for gay men."

But whatever the merits of the "Blood and Fire" script, Arnold, Over and other "Star Trek" insiders agree that Roddenberry's subordinates have deliberately kept the official "Star Trek" canon free of any explicit mention of homosexuality since the creator made his comments to the Gaylaxians 15 years ago.

One anecdote Arnold told me about the filming of a third-season "Next Generation" episode, "The Offspring," stands out. In that story, the android character Data decides to build an android daughter, whom he calls Lal. Data educates her as best he can, but Lal becomes confused when she sees two people kissing. In a typically "Star Trek-ky" "What is this 'love' you speak of?" scene that takes place in the Enterprise D's lounge, Whoopi Goldberg, playing Guinan, teaches Lal about the birds and the bees.

"According to the script, Guinan was supposed to start telling Lal, 'When a man and a woman are in love ...' and in the background, there would be men and women sitting at tables, holding hands," Arnold says. "But Whoopi refused to say that. She said, 'This show is beyond that. It should be "When two people are in love."' And so it was decided on set that one of the tables in the background should have two men holding hands -- or two women, or whatever. But someone ran to a phone and made a call to the production office and that was nixed. [Producer] David Livingston came down and made sure that didn't happen."

That was back in 1990. The next year, Roddenberry responded to a Gaylaxian-led letter-writing campaign by promising to bring gays into the "Star Trek" universe. "In the fifth season of 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,' viewers will see more of shipboard life in some episodes, which will, among other things, include gay crew members in day-to-day circumstances," Roddenberry wrote in a statement to the Advocate, a Los Angeles gay magazine.

A few months later Roddenberry suffered a fatal pulmonary embolism and heart attack. And many gay Trekkers took his statement to the Advocate as a promise that Rick Berman, Roddenberry's successor, was dutybound to honor. Berman, however, didn't see things that way.

Before he joined the "Next Generation" team in 1987, Berman had spent five years producing a children's show called "The Big Blue Marble." At Paramount, he oversaw production of shows like "Family Ties," "Webster" and "Cheers." Unlike the creator of "Star Trek," Berman had little abstract fascination with the destiny of human civilization. No one I spoke with accuses him of homophobia. But he certainly wasn't interested in putting "ensign tutti-frutti" on a show that, in some markets, was broadcast in the after-school time slot.

The last three seasons of "The Next Generation" came and went without gayness. Ditto for seven years of "Deep Space Nine" and "Voyager," both of which Berman helped create and produce. This fall, a fifth "Star Trek" franchise, "Enterprise," will air. Berman will be head honcho for that project, too.

"Gene talked to me about the issue of how gay people could be depicted," says Over. "And the consensus between us was that we should show people in background situations -- two people walking down a hallway holding hands, for example. You would do it without dialogue, without making a big deal about it. In the 23rd century, that would be accepted as normal.

Over the years, some gender-bending has been permitted -- but always with a sci-fi twist that makes it something more confusing than garden-variety homosexuality. For example, in "Rejoined," a 1995 "Deep Space Nine" episode, female science officer Jadzia Dax and a female guest character named Lenara Kahn exchanged a steamy smooch. Without the sound or context, it could have been confused for a lesbian kiss.

But in space, just because something looks gay doesn't mean it is. It turned out that Dax and Kahn were, to use a "Star Trek" term, "joined trills" -- compound entities whose biological form (the human-looking "trill" part) is inhabited by an ethereal creature called a "symbiote," which jumps from trill to trill as the hosts die. Although Kahn and Dax were strangers trill-wise, their symbiotes shared a straight relationship back when the Kahn symbiote had a male host.

"That kiss was not a 'lesbian' kiss because both women were actually heterosexuals," complains Rochus Boerner, a 27-year-old Arizona State University graduate student who maintains a Web site devoted to uncovering what he calls Paramount's "saga of deceit, lies and broken promises." "Their desire for each other was induced by their symbiotes, who were remembering a past heterosexual relationship ... [W]hen the episode ended, Jadzia was 'back to normal' again."

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