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this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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Star Trek
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Robinson 110% played Garak as being sexually interested in Bashir in his first appearance. And in the (non-canon but very very good) novel A Stitch in Time that Robinson himself authored, he establishes Garak as having had relationships with men and women.
As the show developed the producers/writers/studio backed away from that idea (which, to be fair, I think is a spin that the actor himself put on the script, rather than being there on the page itself), hence giving Garak a girlfriend.
Personally I never read into any of their scenes together that Bashir was interested in Garak as anything more than a friend, but if the show had been more progressive in that respect I suppose it might have evolved into an explicitly romantic relationship. Early 1990s vs early 2020s I suppose.
DS9 was pretty progressive in that the idea of "being in the closet" wrt ones sexual orientation was never a consideration. In "Rejoined" for instance, nobody has an issue with Dax loving another woman - the taboo was about reassociation. And "Rules of Acquisition" people didn't judge Pel (who people thought was a man at the time) for falling in love with Quark - the taboo was about Ferengi females wearing clothes etc. (Not sure if that Matt Baume video mentions this - it's been a while since I saw it.)
I mean, they could be bisexual.
As mentioned, I think there's some evidence of Garak being queer, but not a lot of Bashir. That's where fan theorising comes in. But even in fanon I don't think people thought they were "in the closet", ie hiding their sexuality. It was more a case of "what we see on-screen is not the whole story, the fun stuff happens when the cameras are off them".
This is similar to how a lot of fans saw Seven as queer (even though I personally don't think there was a lot, if any, evidence of it on screen). But there was sufficient momentum for this fan theory that the writers made Seven canonically queer in Picard.
Bashir and chief O'Brien have also a deep friendship and no one has ever claimed they were in a romantic relationship. Or Picard and Riker. Or Geordi and Data. They have close and meaningful friendships and no one else sees more than that. Sure, there are fanfics, but it's not something really accepted as fact by many in the fandom, as opposed to Bashir and Garak. The dynamics between Bashir and Garak really feel like flirting, specially in the first one or two seasons. And nothing really makes me think Andy Robinson is lying when he says he really intended to portray Garak like that.
There are also pretty decent writings explaining why the relationship between Frodo and Sam reads as homosexual, like this one. I mean, even when I read the book around a decade before the movies were released, I remember talking about it on IRC and people who had read it earlier were making constant jokes about how gay frodo and sam are. Even people who refuse to have queer content in their fiction saw them as queer.
Can't talk about Captain America and Bucky because I know very little of the source material and didn't enjoy these movies enough to care about any character and considered they made little sense, even heterosexual romance is pretty badly done in the MCU in my opinion.
Btw, the same thing you are complaining about could be said about male-female relationships, whenever there is a close friendship between a male and a female characters, a relationship is expected, and sometimes even forced between characters who had none in the source material when adapting it (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or the Hobbit for example). And we have tons of examples of forced heterosexual romances with far less chemistry than Bashir and Garak that harm their respective movies and shows (don't get me started on Rey/Kylo Ren, Padme/Anakin, or Spock/Uhura in the Abrams movies, or the dumpster fire that is Passengers).
Complaining about a bunch of people just being happy with the few crumbles of non harmful queer subtext we could have in the 90s feels a bit petty.
I never really saw the Frodo and Sam read as homosexual but that article was convincing. I always thought of them as being part of a loving friendship the kind that only exists when two friends go to war. The kind of friendship that can could only be forged when two people who lived in the same place had to go to hell and back together. However, I can see the romantic and sexual elements of a friendship within that context. What I never enjoyed was the dismissing of that kind of friendship as "gay" in the derogatory and dismissive manner. But that is the great part about art is that it is open to interpretation based on people life events and their context.
You do make a good point that any two close male heterosexual friendships being labeled gay is a problem. Its important to show that as well. I feel like some pairings have friendship vibes than others but that's the fun of the debate.
But what I think this video shows is how important representation is. Since there was no queer characters in Star Trek people made their own in their fan fictions. These become wildly popular and influential at fan conventions, zines and the internet. The whole genre is still referred to as Slash Fiction for the most popular pairing Kirk/Spook fiction. These types of fan fictions influences future writers, actors and showrunner who made it a reality. That is what I think is interesting about this video
I never took it as them being "in the closet", just that they never overtly showed that side of their sexualities outside of flirting.
It is a gay relationship, even if it is just flirting, but no one is denying that both characters also had meaningful straight romantic relationships.
Garak definitely flirted. I think Bashir played it as liking the attention.
Bashir was noticeably nervous in "Past Prologue", their first meeting. It's interesting that fans ignore that, or chalk it up to him being nervous because Garak might be a spy, as opposed to accusing the actors and writers of extracting humour out of the "gay panic" trope. I guess it's because now people know theirs turned into a real friendship (or even more. ;-) ) Although I suspect if "Past Prologue" had aired today, there'd be a lot more outrage.