queerness in disco season one

My parents and I are midway into season one of Star Trek: Discovery and so far, I think the story would mostly be stronger if it weren't a prequel to TOS, because making it a prequel creates all sorts of problems^[1] and I've yet to see anything that makes its prequel-ness truly necessary for the fundamental story it's trying to tell and the questions it's trying to ask.^[2]

However.

We just did the episode ("Choose Your Pain", DSC 1.05) that plays around with the reveal of Culber and Stamets' relationship. The scene in which the all-important contextual information is given to the audience in particular is done in a way that implies some level of institutional acceptance: they share quarters on a Starfleet ship, which would be difficult if not impossible to accomplish if Starfleet did not know and accept their relationship. It does something to me to have that established as fact in something that is meant to exist towards the beginning of the Star Trek universe.

I am put in mind of the Kirk/Spock fic This Deadly Innocence by Leslie Fish:

This fic is from 1979, ten years after the end of TOS, ten years after Stonewall, and five years after homosexuality was removed from the DSM. It gets me all in my feelings because, while it is wonderfully imaginative and clever and lovely, it does not (and maybe cannot) imagine a 23rd century in which two men being in love is commonplace. There is, arguably, a comparison implied between being openly queer and being a nudist.^[3]

That was then. Now, I'm queer and I'm sitting with my parents, watching an episode of Star Trek that came out less than half a century after that fic was written and there are two guys brushing their teeth together and chatting before bed. And, on the diegetic level, this is supposed to be ten years before TOS. It's rewriting the show's own past, and I have pretty mixed feelings on that, but I won't lie, rewriting this part really does something to my emotions.

(Also, I really need to get around to writing the paper I have in mind reading the Star Trek prequels with Alessandro Barchiesi's "Future Reflexive: Two Modes of Allusion and Ovid's Heroides".)

1. E.g. the sheer tonal weirdness of making the 2010s-does-2250s aesthetic come before the 1960s-does-2260s aesthetic. This is a point that I think Star Trek: Enterprise managed really well with the whole NASA copycat uniform/ship-held-together-with-duct-tape-and-a-dream vibes.^{^}
2. Another thing that I think Enterprise did really well. Enterprise was fundamentally a how do we get from here to there sort of show, and it could not have been anything but a prequel without changing its fundamental nature. Also, I think it did some really fun stuff with the weird temporality of prequels using the whole Daniels plot.^{^}
3. Not in a way that condemns either, to be clear. Maybe calling it a comparison is even a bit of a stretch. But, in my eyes, it's impossible to see the way that Kirk talks about Spock's (perceived) flirtation with nudism in this context and not think that it's saying something about their shared trajectory towards a queer relationship.^{^}