Pegg won’t really give us the in-universe reason for new-Sulu to be gay when Prime Sulu isn’t. Any behavior comes down to three options — nature, nurture or choice. We’re pretty sure it’s not a choice, and it’d be weird for it to be nature. Did his upbringing change significantly? Are they pushing the theory that homosexuality is caused by lens flair? Photo courtesy Paramount Pictures.
Representation of minorities and women have always been important, and they’ve become increasingly important to the public over the past few years. For political reasons both flimsy and painfully real — the Black Lives Matter movement and all the death that started and sustains it plays into this — demands for proportional onscreen representation have become louder, and they’ve been heard. Studios are finally beginning to realize that people who aren’t straight white males also see movies and the straight white male crowd is mostly mature enough to handle seeing movies about other kinds of people anyway. The Academy is forcefully diversifying. This is by-and-large a good thing — black actors are getting more work and black children have more characters and action figures who look like them to look up to and grow up playing with.
But with LGBTs, it gets a little more complicated because of the closet. There are far, far more actors in Hollywood who are gay or bisexual than we publicly know about, as confirmed by common sense, anyone who’s ever stepped foot in a drama class and Matt Damon. Additionally, sexuality is a character trait that isn’t always spelled out expressly, so there’s nothing saying Mad Max isn’t gay or James Bond isn’t bisexual. You can’t usually hide an actor or character’s skin color, so black actors need black characters for work and any black character will obviously be black, but none of that applies for LGBT actors and characters.
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