Gen X Side Note: STAR TREK IS A GEN XER
Sixty Years of Going Boldly, Getting Weird, and Refusing to Disappear
Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966. Pew Research Center's widely used definition places Generation X between 1965 and 1980.
Which means there is really only one conclusion to draw.
Star Trek is a Gen Xer.
Image: Star Trek Cast. Source: Click Americana
Not the oldest. Some of the GenXers got here first, mind you.
1965. Founding members.
Respect your elders, Enterprise.
But Star Trek and Generation X have been traveling through essentially the same stretch of history for sixty years. And the more I thought about that, the more appropriate it seemed.
Because Star Trek didn't simply age.
It grew up.
It changed. It stumbled. It disappeared for a while. It was underestimated. It found its people. It came back. It experimented. It reinvented itself. It lost people it loved. It welcomed new people aboard. Sometimes it got things spectacularly right. Sometimes it didn't.
And somehow, through every incarnation, every new Enterprise, every new captain and every new generation that climbed aboard, it remained unmistakably Star Trek.
Kind of sounds like us, doesn't it?
It Started With Tribbles
Image: Captain Kirk, Trouble With Tribbles. Source: IMDb
The first time I ever saw Star Trek, I was sitting in a classroom.
I was very young. I don't remember the grade. I don't remember why we were watching television. Maybe the teacher had nothing planned. Maybe we had finished something early.
I just remember being happy that apparently we weren't having a test.
Then this crazy show came on.
And which episode did little Angel encounter?
“The Trouble with Tribbles.”
Of course.
Little furry creatures multiplying all over a spaceship. Falling out of compartments. Covering Captain Kirk. Spock being Spock.
What the heck was this?
I was fascinated.
Remember, there was no Dr. Google waiting at home. I couldn't look up the episode, read about the actors, find the history of the show or immediately watch another one.
I just knew I had seen something strange and wonderful.
Then I found it again.
Star Trek was playing in syndication, often in those wonderful afternoon hours when television became part babysitter, part companion and part portal to someplace else.
And I became obsessed.
The funny thing is that Star Trek had already been cancelled. The original series lasted only three seasons, ending in 1969. But syndication did something extraordinary: it gave the show another life. The reruns found audiences that hadn't necessarily been there during its original network run and helped transform a cancelled television series into a cultural phenomenon.
To me, however, none of that mattered.
I didn't know I was watching a cancelled television show.
Kirk was on today.
That was good enough for me.
The Television We Inherited
This was something Gen X became particularly good at.
We inherited television.
We watched shows our parents had watched. Old sitcoms lived beside new ones. Black-and-white television lived beside color. Programs that had been cancelled years earlier could become essential parts of our childhood simply because some local station needed something to put on at 4:00 in the afternoon.
We didn't necessarily know what was old.
We knew what was on.
And somewhere in that strange ecosystem of syndicated television, Gen X claimed Star Trek.
We weren't alone.
The fans who came before us had already started fighting for it. A famous letter-writing campaign helped secure the original show's third season, and within a few years of cancellation, thousands of fans were gathering at conventions. Smithsonian describes an early 1972 fan convention drawing about 3,000 people.
My oldest sister became one of those serious Star Trek people.
And when I say serious, I mean serious.
She collected. She debated. She followed the franchise wherever it went. She went to conventions.
I remember hearing about one of those early gatherings at an airport Marriott. Tables of people selling interesting things. Fans gathering to celebrate this show that had been off the air for years. Actors who had appeared in the series coming to meet them.
It seemed wonderfully strange.
Years later, her standing rule whenever a new Star Trek project appeared was simple:
You had to watch it.
Didn't like it?
Watch it.
Thought the movie wasn't very good?
Buy the ticket.
Why?
Because if we didn't support it, they might stop making Star Trek.
There would be no freeloaders in my sister's fandom.
Barbie, Meet Spock
Meanwhile, my own fandom was developing in slightly different ways.
I was a Barbie girl.
Oh yes.
Barbie everything.
That's another article.
One Christmas, I got a new Barbie. I couldn't tell you exactly which one now, but I remember that she had an articulated waist that allowed me to move her around like a belly dancer.
More importantly, she came ready to get married.
Wedding dress. Accessories. All the goodies.
There was just one problem.
No groom.
I suppose this was the point at which a normal little girl would have thought:
I need Ken.
Blech.
Forget that guy.
I had more presents to open.
A couple of packages later...
SPOCK.
OMG.
They gave me a Spock!
I was thrilled. My brother immediately started supplying Spock with a voice as I looked him over.
And then it hit me.
I had a bride.
I had a groom.
Barbie was going to marry Spock.
There in our living room, the day after Christmas, I staged the grand wedding of Barbie and Mr. Spock.
My brother continued breathing life into the groom, who was considerably less enthusiastic about the arrangement than the bride.
Apparently marrying an illogical woman with a strangely articulated waist was not how Spock had planned to spend his shore leave.
I didn't care.
The wedding proceeded.
Barbie had found herself a Vulcan.
Ken never stood a chance.
Then I Looked Up
Somewhere along the way, though, Star Trek began doing something much more important to me.
It changed the way I looked at the stars.
Space wasn't simply darkness anymore.
It was possibility.
Astronomy. Physics. Planets. Stars. Galaxies. Questions.
I wanted to know.
More importantly, I wanted to go.
I wanted to stand on the bridge of the Enterprise and watch the stars streak past me.
Since Starfleet apparently wasn't recruiting little girls from California, I began considering the next best thing.
I was going to be an astronaut.
Enter Angel, the space nerd.
I read. I studied. I watched.
Then came Carl Sagan and Cosmos.
Image: Carl Sagan. Source: IMDb
I was done.
They had me.
When Cosmos first aired, it became an event in our house. My mother understood what all of this meant to me. She watched with me. My family watched.
My mother subscribed to all the nerdy science magazines she could find for me.
I devoured them.
That's something I understand differently now.
My mother noticed.
She noticed Star Trek enough for Spock to appear beneath the Christmas tree.
She noticed science.
She noticed space.
She didn't tell her weird little daughter to stop being weird.
She fed it.
Then My World Got Smaller
There was someone else who saw me.
His name was Ricardo, but he liked to be called Rico.
He was my everything.
My ally. My fan. My big brother in every way that mattered.
Rico was a singer and an artist. He understood me. He seemed to recognize that there was something inside this strange, creative kid that wasn't being given enough room to blossom.
And he had a plan.
He was in the military and preparing for an assignment in Germany.
He was going to take me with him.
Germany.
I was preparing for it.
I was going to study.
Learn.
Explore.
Thrive.
My world was getting bigger.
Then we got the news.
Rico was dead.
He was twenty-four years old.
He had taken his own life.
I was never quite the same little girl after that.
I became depressed. I turned inward. Something in me that had been reaching enthusiastically toward the world began retreating from it.
The world noticed.
Eventually, the bullies came.
I don't want to tell you that Star Trek saved me from that.
It didn't.
But it was still there.
The Enterprise still came on.
Space was still enormous.
There were still questions to ask.
There were still worlds beyond the one I was struggling to live inside.
And somewhere in that imagined future, humanity had survived long enough to become something more.
I think that mattered.
So I Started Writing
Yes.
We're going to say the word.
Fan fiction.
I wrote Star Trek stories.
I didn't show them to anybody. I was far too shy for that. I knew there was a serious world around Star Trek writing and fandom, and I had no illusions that some kid could scribble something down, stamp Star Trek across the top and declare herself part of the official universe.
I didn't care.
I was writing them for me.
And most of them involved Spock.
That makes sense when I look back.
When I was very young, we had a school assignment to write a letter to someone we admired.
I had read Leonard Nimoy's I Am Not Spock.
Image: Leonard Nimoy. Source: Variety
So I wrote to Leonard Nimoy.
I had questions.
And here's the incredible part.
He wrote me back.
I carried that letter with me for years.
I remember asking him whether he liked being Spock. My memory of his answer is that yes, he did, and he was happy people liked him in the role.
That mattered to me.
Because later, during those darker years, one of the Star Trek stories I wrote asked a question of its own.
What if Spock really didn't want to be Spock?
What if he hated being himself?
What if he tried to become something else?
And what if, after all of that, he discovered that there was nothing wrong with being Spock in the first place?
He had to go back to being himself.
Hmm.
I was a lonely kid. I had lost someone I loved. I was being bullied. I was different and increasingly aware that being different could come with consequences.
And apparently I sat down and wrote a story about someone who tried to stop being himself, only to discover that being himself was exactly what he needed to do.
I'm going to let you make of that what you will.
Years later, Leonard Nimoy published another autobiography.
The title?
I Am Spock.
Of course I read that one too.
Nerd alert.
Then Star Trek Grew Up
And then something happened.
Star Trek came back.
Not reruns.
Not the original crew returning for another movie.
A new Enterprise.
A new captain.
A new crew.
Star Trek: The Next Generation arrived in 1987, and a generation that had helped discover the original through reruns suddenly had a Star Trek unfolding in real time.
I had feelings.
I mean...
A Klingon on the bridge?!
Excuse me?
But they won me over.
Picard. Riker. Data. Geordi. Worf. Crusher. Troi.
I understand completely why so many Gen Xers consider TNG our Trek.
I'm not mad at it.
But my heart?
My heart still belongs to the OG.
Kirk. Spock. Bones. Uhura. Scotty. Sulu. Chekov.
They found me first.
I Finally Joined the Tribe
Eventually, I went to my first Star Trek convention with my best friend.
And yes.
I wore a Starfleet uniform.
TNG.
Command.
Of course command.
Counselor Deanna Troi was the special guest.
I got Marina Sirtis's autograph.
And thus began the Angel Star Trek collection.
My sister's strange convention world had become mine too.
But years later, something happened that I couldn't have imagined when I attended that first convention.
I went back wearing different credentials.
The Fan Became the Writer
For a short time, I wrote for the San Francisco Examiner.
One of my early assignments took me to a convention in Sacramento.
I was nervous.
I had credentials hanging around my neck, but I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to do with them.
I felt a little like a fan who had somehow managed to sneak past security disguised as a journalist.
My daughter was with me, and there was a voice actor she adored: Crispin Freeman.
Crispin Freeman
Before the convention, I had contacted him and asked for an interview.
No response.
At the convention, I listened to him speak. He was intelligent, entertaining and genuinely charming.
Afterward, I introduced myself.
And he said something along the lines of:
Didn't you ask me for an interview?
Yes.
We sat down.
And talked.
For nearly an hour.
My daughter sat there starry-eyed while her mother interviewed someone she adored.
And somewhere during that conversation, something changed in me.
I realized I could do this.
In that moment, I wasn't pretending to be press.
I was a writer.
I had authority to ask questions.
So I kept going.
I met Margot Kidder.
She was wonderful.
She spoke candidly about Superman, what it had been when she played Lois Lane, what she thought it was becoming and how she felt about it.
I was honored that she trusted me with her opinions.
Then I asked whether I could take a picture with her.
Almost immediately, I apologized and backed off because people were paying for photographs.
Her response was essentially:
F* that. You're press. Get over here and take the picture.**
Well.
Yes, ma'am.
And then I reached the end of the line.
There was Marina Sirtis.
Again.
When Timelines Collide
This time I wasn't wearing my Starfleet uniform.
Marina Sirtis
I was wearing my press badge.
There was the woman who had been the special guest at my first Star Trek convention. The woman whose autograph had helped begin my collection.
And now I was standing beside her as a writer.
We talked.
And she was so easy to talk to.
She didn't make me feel like a fan who had somehow infiltrated the inner sanctum.
She talked to me like a person.
Like someone who belonged in the conversation.
We took a picture together.
At the time, it was simply a wonderful moment.
Looking at that photograph now, I see something else.
I see two timelines crossing.
The girl who had gone to her first convention dressed in a TNG command uniform had grown into the woman attending another convention professionally.
The fan had become the writer.
And Counselor Troi was standing there at both ends of the journey.
Sometimes you have to live long enough to look at an old photograph and realize:
Oh. Look where I got to.
The Convention Changed Too
Those experiences helped me understand something my sister had discovered years earlier.
Conventions changed the relationship between fans and the people who made the things we loved.
When I was little, celebrities lived somewhere else.
They existed inside the television.
You might read about them in a magazine. Catch an interview. Buy a poster.
But conventions allowed the audience to enter the room.
Fans could gather with other fans.
Actors could discover what their work had meant to people.
People could ask questions.
Collectors could find one another.
Writers could write.
Artists could make art.
Fans weren't merely consuming a universe anymore.
They were participating in it.
The early Star Trek fandom helped demonstrate the power of that participation. Fans organized, wrote letters, gathered and kept caring long after conventional television wisdom said the show was finished.
Today we take enormous fandoms, conventions and direct access to performers almost for granted.
I remember when it felt revolutionary.
My Sister Never Left the Enterprise
My sister's fandom became epic.
She collected everything.
She debated everything.
She followed Star Trek through its incarnations.
Eventually she lived in Las Vegas, home to one of the enormous Trek conventions. Somehow she managed to work her way into staff status.
She went for years.
She met members of the original cast.
Do you understand what that means to a Trekkie?
That's like being a vampire and getting to meet the original vampire.
Royalty.
I wore green well.
Then came something none of us wanted.
My sister was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.
It was devastating.
And only a few months after her diagnosis, the convention was coming.
She wanted to go.
Badly.
We supported her.
She went.
She sent pictures and videos so we could experience pieces of it with her.
The organization treated her like a queen.
She was happy.
She had made it.
She got one more convention.
One more trip aboard the Enterprise.
We lost my sister three months later.
I think about that differently now.
When my sister and I first encountered Star Trek, it was essentially a television show another generation had already discarded.
But it wasn't finished.
The fans wouldn't let it be.
Syndication wouldn't let it be.
My sister certainly wasn't going to let it be.
She carried Star Trek through most of her life.
And near the end of that life, this strange little universe she had loved for decades was still there waiting for her.
That's what fandom can become.
Not simply something you watch.
Something that marks time.
Something that introduces you to people.
Something that gives you somewhere to go.
Something that survives different versions of you.
Something that can still bring you joy when joy has become particularly precious.
Star Trek Is a Gen Xer
And so here we are.
Sixty years after a strange little science-fiction program first appeared on American television.
It lasted three seasons.
It got cancelled.
It refused to disappear.
It survived in reruns.
It found its tribe.
Its tribe fought for it.
It came back.
It got bigger.
It got older.
It changed.
It gave us new captains and new ships, new characters and new ideas. It sometimes challenged its own assumptions. It invited new generations aboard.
And through all of it, it remained itself.
Star Trek.
Maybe that's why I love the ridiculous idea that Star Trek is a Gen Xer.
Because it didn't simply survive sixty years.
It evolved through them.
So did we.
I'm certainly not the little girl who sat in that classroom watching Tribbles fall all over Captain Kirk.
I'm not the girl who planned to become an astronaut.
I'm not the grieving child who disappeared into stories.
I'm not the shy young writer secretly writing adventures about Spock.
I'm not the woman nervously walking into a convention wondering whether her press credentials really meant she belonged there.
And yet...
I'm all of them.
Every version came aboard.
Every version traveled a little farther.
Every version became part of whoever came next.
Maybe Star Trek did the same thing.
The original didn't disappear when Picard sat in the captain's chair.
TNG wasn't diminished when another crew took over.
The universe simply became bigger.
And perhaps that's one of the quiet gifts of getting older.
We don't have to remain who we were to honor who we were.
We get to grow.
We lose people along the way.
We find new people.
We change our minds.
We discover things.
We revisit old worlds and discover we understand them differently.
Sometimes we even dig through old photographs and find ourselves standing beside Counselor Troi.
And occasionally we remember that once upon a time, Barbie married Spock in our living room.
He was not thrilled.
She was.
I still think they could have made it work.
Star Trek turns sixty this year.
For nearly six decades, we've been traveling through the same strange period of human history together.
We're both older.
We've both changed.
We've both lost people we loved.
We've both had to figure out how to become something new without surrendering what made us ourselves in the first place.
And somehow...
we're still here.
Still curious.
Still a little weird.
Still imagining something better.
Still wondering what might be waiting beyond the next star.
Still looking toward the future.
And, after all these years...
still boldly going.
🖖❤️
A Little More to Explore
For readers who want to wander farther into the history behind this story:
Star Trek: It All Began Today in 1966 — StarTrek.com — the franchise's official account of the September 8, 1966 debut.
An Oral History of Star Trek — Smithsonian Magazine — a wonderful deeper look at the original series, its cancellation, fan campaign and extraordinary second life.
The Mission to Restore the Original Starship Enterprise — Smithsonian Magazine — including the show's early fan culture, convention history and the original Enterprise model's remarkable journey.
Pew Research Center: Demographic Definitions — and yes, my fellow founding members, Gen X: 1965–1980. 🖖
**
Thanks for taking this trip back with me.
What do you remember? Were you there too, or did this story bring back a memory of your own? I’d love to hear it. Share your stories in the comments, and if this made you smile, laugh, cringe, or turn up an old favorite song, share it with someone who remembers too.
Follow and subscribe to Rock ’n’ Roll Angel for more music, memories, pop culture, and wonderfully strange adventures from growing up Gen X.
Come find me beyond the memories:
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Until next time...
Keep the memories alive. Keep the stories coming. And whatever you do... turn it up.
— Dr. AY Heath (Angel)
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