Mr. Pinup

In the arid landscape of late-1960s television, largely devoted to quasi-realistic forms like the family sitcom or the police procedural, “Star Trek” was new and startling in several different ways: a science-fiction series that was literary and imaginative and heavily allegorical, that ladled out historical and political messages by the quart and that delivered a distinctive undertone of adult sexuality.

OK, yes, it might be better described as a swaggering, Hefneresque and profoundly sexist version of semi-adult, semi-repressed sexuality. Preening Kirk, arguably the most sexualized male character in TV history, tomcats from one interstellar honey to the next. In Season 1, beehive-haired Yeoman Rand (Grace Lee Whitney) seems to serve as his personal concubine, but for that matter there’s something haremlike about the female personnel aboard the Enterprise in toto. They all apparently departed on a five-year space mission directly from their other jobs as go-go dancers behind Smokey Robinson and the Miracles.

Nurse Chapel (Majel Barrett, later Roddenberry’s wife) moons pathetically for the chaste and logical Spock, who is himself locked in a sub-rosa competition with the bitchy and sexually ambiguous “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) for Kirk’s attention. Spock pretends not to notice Chapel, but behaves like an outrageous tease; in “Amok Time,” he strokes her tear-stained cheek and murmurs, “It would be illogical for us to protest against our natures.”

But hey, this stew of delightful and appalling ingredients produced the first black-white kiss in the history of American narrative television, the aliens-made-them-do-it snog between Kirk and Lt. Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) in the 1968 episode “Plato’s Stepchildren.” (Contrary to legend, that smokin’-hot moment did not produce widespread outrage in the American South. Widespread arousal, certainly.) In the same scene, Chapel finally gets to kiss Spock, while protesting the whole time that she really, really didn’t want it to happen like this.

via Why the original “Star Trek” still matters – Beyond the Multiplex – Salon.com.

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