Patrick Stewart 'treasured' LGBTQ+ people; they felt the same

This story originally appeared on Out.

In announcing his death at age 86, the official X account for legendary actor Sir Patrick Stewart rightly called him an activist for human rights. William Shatner, Stewart's costar in Star Trek: Generations, also praised Stewart for his "deep sense of humanity to everything he did."

And in two conversations I had with the man who played the heroic Captain Jean-Luc Picard, he shared with me his commitment to human rights extended to making sure LGBTQ+ people were included in the future of Star Trek.

“I will encourage it as much as I possibly can, because it is in what is a very troubled world,” Stewart told me in a video interview in 2022. “Currently, there are elements and this being one of them, where you see we are at long last beginning to grow up and become real adults who have an open view of the world and of life.”

Stewart had long been a champion of equality alongside his longtime friend and fellow thespian, Sir Ian McKellen, an out and proud gay man.

“My friendship with Ian is as important as anything that I have in my life, and my wife also is in love with him, which makes it quite an easy relationship. He married us,” Stewart recalled of his wedding to Sunny in 2013. “He got certified for performing an authentic marriage ceremony, and so we have him to thank for the fact that we are together.”

McKellen and Stewart will appear on screen one last time in December when Avengers: Doomsday premieres. Fans of the pair flooded social media with memories of their bromance.

In that 2022 video conversation for Forbes, I asked "Pat," as he asked me to call him, if his work on season 3 of Star Trek: Picard might in some way benefit the LGBTQ+ community — which, as it turns out, featured a fractured lesbian romance between Jeri Ryan's character, Seven of Nine, and Michelle Hurd's Raffi.

“You know, when I look into the future and the work I might do, what you have just said actually plays a part in it,” he said. “So we'll see.” And we did, as the final season of Picard ended with two queer women serving on the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise, a victory for queer representation that showrunner and executive producer Terry Matalas — now the honcho of VisionQuest on Disney+ — told me was always the plan.

"Our goal from the beginning, we knew very much from the beginning of the season, that was our North Star, that we wanted Raffi and Seven to be captain and first officer of the Enterprise," Matalas told me back in 2023.

On Thursday, Matalas shared a photo of Stewart from the finale of Picard on X, captioned: "Oh Captain, my Captain. This is how I will always remember you..."

Stewart also raised his powerful voice in support of the LGBTQ+ community in 2015 as The Advocate reported, when a U.K. bakery chain owned by a Christian couple refused to make a cake with a pro-marriage equality message.

Declaring that "both equality and freedom of speech are fundamental rights," Stewart posted on Facebook an eloquent defense and explanation of his stance in a controversy surrounding that antigay bakery in Northern Ireland.

"I have long championed the rights of the LGBT community," Stewart wrote, "because equality should not only be, as the people of Ireland powerfully showed the world, universally embraced, but treasured."

Stewart played several notable gay roles in his career, including the groundbreaking 1995 film romantic comedy Jeffrey and 2014's Match, in which he played a dance instructor.