Live Long And Prosper...Spock Comes Out

Having been following the "It Gets Better" campaign by The Trevor Project ( http://www.thetrevorproject.org/ ) for the last year or so, set up to combat the hostility and ignorance leading to gay teen suicide in the USA, I had been heartened to see so many famous faces posting YouTube videos in support. Some were the usual suspects,; Margaret Cho, Ellen DeGeneres, Darren Hayes, Max Adler and Portia DeRossi, but as welcome as these familiar voices were, I also found it very encouraging to hear from the sci-fi/fantasy community too, particularly Daniel Radcliffe, Aleksander Skarsgard and especially the wonderful Zachary Quinto, who this week chose to publicly come out as gay on his website.

Radcliffe and Skarsgard are well known to many people for there charitable and equal rights stances, but much less Quinto, who is much more of an unknown quantity, being a rather private individual despite such starmaking roles as Sylar in "Heroes" and of course as Spock in the rebooted "Star Trek" series. Quinto may be still in the first flushes of his career as a mainstream actor, but his coming out reasonably early bodes well for other actors and performers in the public eye, as he has shown an immense range with what should be, by any right, two very emotionally limited characters, but to his credit has made both a psychopath with major abandonment issues and a neurotic half-human, half-Vulcan the emotional centrepieces for two of the most significant sci-fi pieces in recent years. 

For many gay viewers and readers, sci-fi has long been a place of solace in literature in film, with the genre by its very nature offering an "alternative" reality where anything is possible, but since the trail-blazing like of Gabrielle and Xena's none-too-subtle subtext to the outright blossoming of Willow Rosenberg, things have started to break down, leading to currently one of the most popular sci-fi characters around, Captain Jack Harkness, being an "omnisexual" human(oid) from the 51st century played by an openly gay Scottish-American, John Barrowman, the character in turn having been created by the best television writer of his generation, Russell T. Davies, and openly gay Welshman.

With this announcement from Zachary, it should hopefully encourage more actors to feel able to assert themselves professionally as gay performers without feeling they have to be pigeon-holed into stereotypical characters, as proved in style by the amazingly versatile Neil Patrick Harris, but should also serve as a great example to other actors that gay roles can also be edgy and real, as shown by Alyson Hannigan's triumphant Willow. Too long have the gay community, in particular gay youth, been under-represented in a genre in which they have much stake and a fair amount of influence, but as long as we are still getting characters like Gareth David-Lloyds' Ianto Jones and of course Quinto's redoubtable Spock, then sci-fi will indeed "live long and prosper" in the 21st century and beyond, and give hope and visibility to those who may feel excluded by mainstream media, and hopefully, even in some very small way, turn the tide on the current sad state of events. As for Zachary himself, from reading the comments on his website ( http://www.zacharyquinto.com/ ), he may already be gaining himself a whole new set of admirers and fans, and I wish him all the luck in the world.