There’s an odd link between Star Trek and the Eurovision Song Contest. If you’re a Trekker, you may already know where I’m going with this. If you’re not, let me tell you about Deep Space Nine.
It was a spin-off from Star Trek: The Next Generation. And while TNG all too often consisted of the Enterprise travelling to alien worlds so Captain Picard could lecture them about how they do things so much better on Earth, DS9 was far more morally ambiguous: it’s set on a space station circling a planet called Bajor. Bajor has just emerged from a decades-long occupation by a militaristic race called the Cardassians. During the occupation, the Bajorans ran a resistance campaign. Atrocities were committed by both sides. The Bajorans who were members of the resistance think of themselves as freedom fighters. The Cardassians think of them as terrorists.
Bajor has a strategic and economic importance, so Starfleet is in charge of the space station: to discourage the Cardassians from having any ideas about reinvading, but also to try to keep the lid on simmering tensions on the station itself. All sorts of races live on DS9, and many of them don’t like each other: culture clashes abound. There are episodes that deal with racism and religious differences and murky political intrigues. And unlike much else in the Star Trek canon, the problems aren’t neatly solved after 45 minutes.
Among all this is one of the most interesting characters Star Trek has ever produced: Jadzia Dax. Jadzia is a Star Fleet officer, and her species is Trill. The Trill are humanoid-looking, but a proportion of them are selected to carry a slug-like symbiont. When the Trill host dies, the symbiont is moved on to another host. Jadzia is the eighth host of the symbiont she carries, so while she is ostensibly a woman in her 20s, she regards herself as being 350 years old, because she carries all the memories and emotions and abilities of all the previous hosts. As far as she’s concerned, she’s the same person, but she’s switched bodies a few times.
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Which is where it gets really interesting, because those bodies have been both male and female. Jadzia routinely refers to women she was married to or all the children she had. And while the point is never laboured, it’s clear that Jadzia is not too pushed about gender or sexuality or species. This was in the 1990s: long before terms like gender fluid or pansexual came into common usage. Jadzia probably wouldn’t want to apply a term to it at all. She (and that was the pronoun the series used) liked who she liked. She loved who she loved. One of her best friends was a goblin-like Ferengi, a widely despised race. She ended up marrying a Klingon.
Without any master plan at work, the Eurovision has been subject to an international queer revolution, and seemingly a popular one too
The Eurovision, you may have noticed, is no longer a competition full of twee love songs or big-belter anthems. It’s still about pop music, but the way it looks has become equally important, and it looks like the promenade in Deep Space Nine – a dazzling, otherworldly place, where the terms humans use to describe personhood don’t really apply.
Without any master plan at work, it’s been subject to an international queer revolution, and seemingly a popular one too. Singers still represent a country, but all too often they are of mixed heritage, of uncertain gender or no gender at all, yet still attract votes from competing countries – including those countries we might, in other circumstances, think of as hostile to such displays of campness. Eurovision isn’t usually a synonym for subtle, yet in this respect it presents a surprisingly nuanced picture of our world.
When I saw Bambie Thug – who makes Lady Gaga look like a tradwife – I thought of Jadzia Dax. An intergalactic “witch”, as they have called themselves, is just the sort of person Jadzia would have liked to hang out with.