Gaaays in Spaaace – the future of LGBTQ

Imagine showing up at CBS offices with 70,000 mini muffins with one goal – keep Star Trek alive on the small screen. Of course, you would expect this fanaticism from a Trekkie, especially a gay one; we can go from zero to Warp 10 in two snaps and a twirl. It was this type of Star Trek fandom that launched an unprecedented letter-writing campaign, effectively petitioning the network to keep the original series on the air.

This year, Star Trek turns 55 years old with a multitude of spin-offs, and even animation, on the big and small screen with billions made in revenue. Star Trek has enjoyed a major resurgence on television with a full slate of programming eager to please newfound fans as well as the original Trekkie. And while Star Trek’s creator Gene Roddenberry pushed the envelope by including racial, gender roles, current politics, and war themes, the LGBTQ community has only had a recent on-screen presence. Themes such as equality and friends becoming your family have always attracted LGBTQ fans who often felt alien in their own, unaccepting environment. CBS’ Star Trek Discovery, now ramping up for Season 4, was the first Star Trek franchise to showcase a trans and non-binary character, to add to the first depiction of a gay couple on a television franchise.

That Trekkie showing up to CBS Studios with all of those min muffins was veteran producer and entertainment journalist Dan Deevy who, after almost twenty years in the business, decided it was time for a change and has made bringing the Star Trek LGBTQ community together his mission. In 2016, he organized a small group to attend Creation Entertainment’s Annual Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas, one of the most popular conventions of its kind. The response to Dan’s gathering was so well received with both fans and Trek celebrities clamoring for more. What started as a one-off event has now blossomed into Gaaays in Spaaace (GIS), an official nonprofit organization specializing in activism and advocacy for the continued inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters inclusion in entertainment, particularly the macho-dominated field of science fiction. GIS has held over a hundred events around the nation and during COVID was instrumental in keeping the family together with a series of digital events featuring the biggest names from the franchise.

GED Magazine is excited to take part in this year’s GIS The Wrath of Vegas 2021, starting on August 10^th with an entire week of fabulous, geektastic events to coincide with Creation Entertainment’s 20th Anniversary Star Trek convention. The lineup includes time at the convention, brunches, VIP cocktails parties, game nights, meet and greets, and an infamous grand party finale at Piranha Las Vegas…with Star Trek celebrities from the LGBTQ world and beyond in attendance.

Do you remember the first-time seeing Star Trek?

Believe it or not, I have a very vivid memory of the first time I saw Star Trek. When I was a kid, the best nights were the nights that I got to sleep over at my grandmother’s house, (Nana and I were tight). We had a tradition that at 11:30 pm every night we’d watch The Honeymooners and we absolutely loved it. Immediately after that, the station promo would come on for what was on next… “Coming up next on WPIX 11, Star Trek!”

Any memorable stories from your time as a celebrity interviewer?

Every summer plan I would plan a trip out to Los Angeles and I would schedule as many celebrity interviews as I could in the span of a week or two. So obviously during those trips, I focused a lot of attention on trying to interview the Star Trek actors. Because when you can pretty much ask anyone to sit down with you and have a conversation, you’re going to start with your heroes. I was very, very fortunate and very happy that so many of them said yes and I got to interview them. On two of the trips, I actually did the interviews on the set while they were filming the shows. So, I was on the set for Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise doing these interviews. And for me, particularly being on the DS9 sets, being able to walk around on the Promenade, being able to peek my head in and see what Ops looked like was just the most surreal, incredible experience of my life! The sets were so realistic that I felt like I really WAS on a space station! And then later that same day, I went over to Voyager and was on the Voyager Bridge. Also, side note, that was the first time I had ever been so intimidated by someone that I was unable to go over and say hello. I mean, at this point, I had done a lot of interviews with a lot of big-name actors and they were always super kind and gracious, so I never felt intimidated about initiating contact before. But that day on the set of Voyager, I glanced over, and standing at the craft service table was Jerri Ryan as Seven of Nine. And I remember looking at her and being so awestruck by how incredibly gorgeous she was in that impossibly tight, formfitting uniform, and to top it off, she was very daintily eating some Doritos, which I thought, oh my God, not only is she this phenomenally gorgeous, but she’s also a down to earth, real person who eats chips? How can I possibly go over and just introduce myself? So that’s the one and only time that that happened to me.

What is it about Star Trek that speaks to our community?

Well, I think from the very beginning, Star Trek has always been about breaking down barriers. It’s been all about inclusion and respect for people who are different from you in one way or another or in many ways. Star Trek is the show where the world saw the first interracial kiss on American television. And it was a show where there was a trusted Russian, an Asian character who was driving the ship, and a black communications officer who was also a woman. We were finally being shown a picture of humanity that was much more complete than anything we’d seen before. And I think the gay community, well, I can speak for myself, I always looked at that as the world that I wanted to live in because I felt that even though there are no gay characters on screen, I can imagine that we’re there, we’re just not being shown yet. Star Trek gives the impression that in the future, everyone who today is considered a minority group, everyone who is struggling, everyone whose life is not easy, we do make it. We do survive into the future and are finally embraced by the rest of humanity and respected for what we have to contribute. A lot of times being gay, it seemed less and less likely that we would make it to that future.

How has Star Trek changed your life?

So, I grew up without very many role models in my family, particularly male role models. There were very, very few people that I could really look up to and respect and aspire to be like. But in watching Star Trek, I was able to find those people that I wanted to be like, I was able to look to them and they taught me what it meant to be a good person, what it meant to become a man. And those are lessons that I was not learning at home. But every time I would watch Star Trek, all of these characters who were so different from one another, I would see each and every one of them being the best version of themselves, regardless of how difficult it might have made things – they always did the right thing. And without that influence, I have no idea who I would be today, what my life would be like today. So how has Star Trek changed my life? Well, it kind of gave me my life. It gave me the life that I’m living now that I absolutely love and am immensely grateful for.

Ok, let’s talk about those mini muffins. It was part of your #WEWANTWORF campaign to convince CBS to create a series around the character of Worf, played by Michael Dorn. Are you insane?

This started because of an interview that I did with Michael Dorn during the Vegas convention. He had written a pilot for a series centering on Worf’s character set in the Klingon Empire and was pitching it to Paramount and CBS. At this time, the big question was when is Star Trek finally coming back to television? And so, we talked about it and it seemed to me like such a great idea, such a groundbreaking Roddenberry style TV show, that it would be an amazing way to bring Trek back to television. And as we were talking during the interview, he talked about how the studio kind of went back and forth. The night before the interview, I was in the hotel and there was an episode of Friends on TV and the episode was where they say that the best way to get people to do stuff for you is to send the mini muffins. It kind of hit me that this might be just ridiculous and crazy enough of an idea to work. We started a social media push, a social media campaign, and we asked people to order baskets of mini muffins to send to the CBS offices with a little note saying, “We Want Worf.” The other part of the campaign was that we knew that CBS was not going to keep all of these mini muffins so the plan was that the people would order these mini muffins from a single bakery in L.A. and then we would take them and they would be donated to a local food bank.  It was just kind of that perfect combination that made the campaign itself very Roddenberry that it had a charitable aspect to it. we packed all the mini muffins into a white and pink mini muffin van driven by a Klingon in full, complete cosplay next to a Vulcan, also in full cosplay.

What can we expect from this year’s Las Vegas event?

OK, so this year in Las Vegas, Gaaays in Spaaace is going to be doing more events than we ever have before, and we will once again have a table in the vendor’s room, the biggest space you can have. We’ll be giving away prizes, will be doing some photo, ops, all sorts of fun stuff will happen throughout the convention. We also are partnering with an organization called MMAARS, a company that is training people to live on Mars. They are coming to Vegas with us and are setting up an experience on Mars, a virtual reality experience where you go into the habitats with some experiments. At the end you come out, you get to put on the actual spacesuit and take a photo in front of a very cool Mars backdrop landscape. Then we’re doing another science-based panel that will highlight our new partnerships with actual space agencies. We are working now directly with the companies who are building space stations. They are making a concerted effort to include underrepresented communities so that when the opportunities are there, members of underrepresented communities can be a part of it. So that’s why they love what GIS does and what we’ve been doing. We also will be doing a live episode of Trek Feud. That’ll be a lot of fun. And this year we are renting the penthouse suite at the RIO Tuesday night through Friday night for VIP reception events in the evenings. Also in the penthouse suite, we have three brunch events planned with one of the brunches called The Differently Abled Trek Fans Unite, specifically planned for them. And then finally, the big event is our annual The Wrath of Vegas party. This year, we are once again at Piranha Nightclub and will also have various celebrity guests and live musical performances. It’s going to be pretty fantastic.

Would you ever date someone not into Star Trek?

Well, I actually was engaged to someone who was not a Star Trek fan and the wedding did not happen. And I am so relieved that it did not happen because the man that I am currently with, my partner, the first gentleman of Gaaays in Spaaace, Richard Hart, is just as much a Star Trek fan as I am. And I cannot imagine life what life would be like if he were not. So, I have in the past, but would never again.

To find out more about Gaaays in Spaaace and to get your tickets for The Wrath of Vegas 2021, visit https://www.gaaaysinspaaace.org/