Star Trek’s Hikaru Sulu is gay—and not just George Takei, the actor who originated the role. In the upcoming movie Star Trek Beyond, the character is shown to be a gay dad.
Actor John Cho, who plays the character in the rebooted series, will be “the loving father of a daughter with a same sex partner,” he told Australia’s Herald Sun. That sentence is ambiguous—it could be the daughter who has the same-sex partner—but the rest of the article makes it clear that Sulu is the gay one. (Not that the daughter couldn’t be, too, but there’s no indication of that so far.)
Cho told the paper: “I liked the approach, which was not to make a big thing out it.”
Seems like a good approach to me, too—although now I’m full of questions. Are his daughter and partner on the Enterprise with him? If not, how do they deal with his long deployments? How do they handle the pressure of his high-risk job? Did they dress their daughter in little yellow crew onesies when she was small? We’ll have to wait until July 22, when the film is released, to find out. I can’t wait.
Of course, I still think a Klingon lesbian collective has a lot of theatrical possibilities….