Queer Science

Abstract

In space there is no closet— or is a spaceship a closet with hyperdrive? J. G. Ballard pointed out long ago that the first sex act in space— involving terrestrials— would be homosexual. No doubt it has already happened. Two human bodies in close quarters prognosticates sexual contact: the zero–grav ballet, slow–peeling space suits, solitude as deep as space itself. This sexual destiny haunts Sttzr Trek (“To boldly go where no man has gone before”), particularly in its Next Generation phase, where the attractively aging and bald Captain Picard finds himself frequently bedeviled by a campy character called “Q.” The possibility that Picard is queer (why is he so compulsively single anyway?) suggests that homosexuality serves cybernetic society as a cultural vanguard, even in so austere a culture as that of Western technoscience. But the whole trope of the closet is peculiarly domestic. To have a closet requires a house, an assumption that attaches queer life to the heterosexual dyad of mommy and daddy. What if homosexuality wants nothing to do with the single–family home? What if the spaces it aspires to are as open as the night sky? And what if science and not domesticity provides the highest boost into those heavens?

You make Gemini with nice astronaut?

William Burroughs, The Wild Boys