I’m watching a lot of the conversation between my gay friends on social media. A few seem to have the same feeling you do about how different things were in the past. Others feel like that’s making excuses.

On the one hand, yes, there is something to be said for the fact that 40 years ago, gay people didn’t have any sex education at all let alone open discussions of consent and boundaries. And it’s possible that Takei’s actions felt normal to him because he himself had been come onto in a similar way by older men. I am…

“I was drunk as fuck, I thought he consented. I actually did not think he was passed out. I’m still not sure. I took off his pants, he raised his head. He said ‘no’. I persisted and THERE is my fuck-up. I’m sorry, I made him say ‘no’ twice. I thought this was something we had both put in our past, but obviously not…

The upside (and I’m not sure it’s really an upside) is that the people who had maybe a single instance of bad judgement are probably not going to get punished for this as harshly as the serial predators, and there do seem to be a lot of serial predators. I’m not saying the “single instance of bad judgement” types…

This whole thing is such a slippery slope. Every celebrity and politician is now having their entire lives reviewed for faults. It’s good to get these things into the open, but when you think about where it could lead...wow.

I get not giving Takei the benefit of the doubt (I remember listening to this segment—which happened a month ago, by the way, this “unearthed” nonsense has to stop—thinking it’s only a matter of time) but why can’t it also be true that the Russian bots are playing up the story to make sure it goes as wide as possible?…

yeah I mean if he drugged someone then that is totally fucked. If all he did was cop a feel 40 years ago and he has proven to live a good life since then...then Idk if this is really a story.

I get the impression Shatner is just an asshole in general, like Alec Baldwin, moreso than a groper/harasser/assaulter kind of asshole.

An alternate PR strategy:

If you jinx this, there’s a good chance you might be dismembered by someone. Figuratively, of course... maybe?

[huddles under desk]

I’d be more disturbed by this if Takai wasn’t in his 80s and if this didn’t happen nearly 40 years ago. Arguably, all gay sex was criminal and deviant in the 1980s. Society repressed and shamed gays, forcing them underground, which means their outlets for sexual activity weren’t always healthy. And it was, even more…