You were born in 2037?

Hopefully, people in 60 years will be saying the same about the top picture.

why is it bad?

Representation, does not matter. Your skin colour, your sex, your gender, who you love, dont matter. Only your character matters. Who you are as a person. If you need to see yourself in tv and movies, thats what we call in the business "Narcissism". But seeing the qualities that you share, well, now thats something people want to see.

But you are right. The one thing that Disco did right, was in making these characters just characters. They werent special, they werent given special attention. They were just members of the crew like everyone else. THIS is how star trek is supposed to do it. By making it "normal" or everyday or regular. However you wanna say it. But then later on when they introduce the non binary character, they make a song and dance about it. Like this kid in year 3000 is going to have to "be brave" about correcting someone on their pronouns. Like Star Trek hasnt met thousands of other species of all walks and variations and no one in it would bat an eye. Having a lingering shot of Stamets beaming with pride is not Star Trek. To do that in a star trek way, Stamets should have just said "sorry" and they move on instantly.

Back in the day, they didnt make a big song and dance about Uhura on the bridge. She was just there. It was "normal". This is how Star Trek should be doing stuff like this. Because thats what star trek is, or was. Star Trek is supposed to be about showing us who we could be, not showing us who we are.

had a constant melodramatic after-school special vibe in which characters were constantly stopping in the middle of an emergency to talk about their feelings and kumbaya-cry it out

Nail on the head.

I dont give a shit. Im Scottish, Im almost never represented in Tv and movies by my nationality. But so what? What I look like and who are love, have fuck all to do with representing me. I dont want to see "ME". The only representation that matters is character. Who a person is, not what they are. What they are means nothing. You can black, and be any number of things. Being black means... nothing. Just like being white means nothing. Being black or white doing make you good or bad, or smart or dumb, or interesting or boring.

I mean, it's very obviously not that, some people just like to pretend it is.

Like, no one is going to complain that Brokeback Mountain is too gay (well, some people will, but those are bona fide bigots). But when you shove two men kissing in every other scene for no reason at all, it gets on my nerves.

And I'm not talking about scenes that make sense and where perhaps having two gay dudes is cool, but the shows people complain about are not that.

As an example the Netflix Sandman - an otherwise brilliant adaptation which for some reason puts gay scenes everywhere, especially where they don't make sense. What's the show trying to convey? That all day dudes are whores who have sex with each other just because they're gay?

And this shit is everywhere - there's a story or whatever and suddenly a forced gay scene happens and the story wouldn't change a single bit if it was skipped.

So, chances are that your "otherwise normal people" friends are just tired of bullshit being shoved down their throats and breaking immersion.

Make a romcom if you want gay dudes constantly being horny, for fuck's sake.

Because women kissing women is sexy to straight men.

Men kissing men is not sexy to those same men.

It's misogyny.

I recall there being angry letters sent about how it was inappropriate for a kid, and who ever responded basically said [heavily paraphrasing] 'there's guns, violence and death and you draw the line at two women kissing? Fuck off'

one theory is that ds9 was fucking great and discovery waa poo poo.

which had fuck all to do with gay people. I mean, I guess it may have in a sense now thst I think abojt it, but only in the narrowest of ways and as an overt symptom of 2 dimensional character writing. Paul Stamets' partner's whole character was basically "I'm a gay doctor", which combined with "my whole character is that I have anxiety" Tilly and Michale "I have problems with authority" Burnham really show how weak the writing was.

which, if you stop and think about it, has anout as much do with being gay as flowers do with the plot of The Room.

They did, but not as many of them. And most kept it to themselves because they liked it.

I watched this episode and I've never been more embarrassed to be gay.

I also watched a couple other episodes (out of order), and I'm confident that I didn't miss much because each episode is 10% plot and 90% "let's talk about what you missed while you were watching tiktok".

I think the latter is the bigger offense.

I strongly dislike Discovery.

And those two were some of the ONLY redeeming features along with Jet (Tig Notaro).

It’s the only Trek I wasn’t able to finish.

I’m sure I will one of these days.

Depends on what you mean by interracial. Lucy and Desi (I love Lucy) were pretty controversial at the time, and that was before Kirk and Uhura.

While the first interracial kiss on TV is still debated, Kirk/Uhura most definitely wasn't it. This was '68 or '69, on Dutch TV we already had the first interracial kiss in 1959 and there are other American examples before '68. The actress from that Dutch scene passed away this year at 95 by the way. Unfortunately I only have a Dutch source, but here you go: https://nos.nl/artikel/2574061

It might not look like much these days, but in '59 it made the headlines in international news.