Julie Karasik

Incidentally, my best friend J happened across a copy of the famous novelization of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and gave it to me for Christmas last year. We have been doing dramatic readings of the chapters to each other, complete with air quotes and loudly emphasizing the many, many, many unnecessarily quoted or italicized words/phrases/paragraphs. Although it was fun in its own unhinged way, it was also kind of shocking to realize just how terrible Roddenberry's... like, everything was without being able to lean on good writing/editorial staff like Sturgeon and Fontana, figures like Gene L. Coon to temper his worst impulses, the visual brilliance of people like Jerry Finnerman and William Ware Theiss, and the warmth and charisma brought to even much of the weaker writing by superb theatrical actors like Nichols, Shatner, and Nimoy. For all the novelization's extreme sleaziness, it is one of the coldest and most inhuman-feeling published novels I've ever encountered.

The attempts to salvage the footnote are largely nonsense, IMO—like, yes, it does accidentally imply that Kirk is just a bisexual who rather prefers women rather than a totally super manly straight guy, and his description of Spock and their super special eternal psychic bond does sound incredibly gay, but this is clearly because Roddenberry was constitutionally incapable of writing about any relationships in a non-horny way and loathed women. He was definitely going for desperately recuperating Kirk as the hypermasculine hyper-heterosexual seasoned middle-aged commanding captain figure with a weakness for women but also distaste for them that he'd always envisioned for his ideal of "the captain" (it's all over his writing of April and then Pike), and his resentment of what TOS Kirk actually became in the show is extremely visible (his Kirk dismisses TOS Kirk as a twee fictionalized version he actually hates and TOS in general as terrible and fake, unlike the real story in the novelization, etc). Like, it's 100% an attempt at no-homo and gender essentialism, he's just very bad at no-homo and also at writing people.

But the thing is, the footnote (and the other material straining to find a heterosexual explanation for TOS) may be - and is - homophobic, but this is actually the least of the novelization's problems. It is even more misogynistic, racist, incredibly petty, and so incredibly awkward that I was starting to think "justice for the OG Mary Sue writers, they were far better than this and honestly seem to have understood Star Trek itself rather better," given the weird 70s dystopia aspects he's got going.

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To my 30s, that is! Today is my last day in this decade :D