Grace Lee: She Taught Me To See

Last updated on: May 11, 2015 at 7:02 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Grace Lee: She Taught Me To See 2015-05-11T19:02:46-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Grace Lee Whitney, actor and Star Trek star, is dead. She was eighty-five . . . older than my Mom and older than my Dad.

A Person

I did not know her, but I hear she had a hard life. The ugly side of the industry that breaks the laws of God in order to commoditize sex and turn women into objects harmed her deeply. She made some bad choices too . . . and then made some good ones. I don’t know the state of her soul, but I do know that (along with Maureen O’Hara) she taught me a lesson and I am thankful for it.

May her soul rest in peace.

Star Trek in reruns was my favorite show and Yeoman Rand, the character Whitney played, was all that a young teenage boy could imagine only in primary colors on our primitive television. She had blonde hair, startling eyes, and spirit. She was near Kirk always, but she was not used by Kirk. She had boundaries with the Captain. And that red dress. . .

I crushed on Yeoman Rand almost as hard as I fell for Maureen O’Hara in Quiet Man. And then my blessed Mother made a crushing point about both Rand and O’Hara: they were a good bit older than she was. I reacted like a suburban Oedipus told by Tiresias that he had married his mother. I wished to gouge out my eyes. Yeoman Rand was old. How could reruns lie to me?

There must be some kid somewhere with a nerdy grandfather watching reruns of Star Trek only to discover the hardest truth of all: Yeoman Rand was played by a human being, Grace Lee Whitney, and she is gone. She lived a long life, eighty-five years, but she is gone.

Mom was making a point: the characters on the screen were played by people. The people wore a great deal of make up and Mom said, she really said, wore wigs. Yeoman Rand did not have an infinite pile of blonde hair that was her own. This was almost too much. (I shall leave to the side the bad news she delivered on William Shatner. She cannot be sure.)

Mom kept making her point until I realized that Grace Lee Whitney was a person and not an object for my amusement . . . not at all. She played a part and that part had been written in a rather demeaning way. She was too often her legs, hair, or bust. She was too infrequently a human, but Grace Lee was a human. I could not turn Rand into a possession without demeaning her and making her (and her character) less than God had made her. Then I learned, a bit older, that she was a hurting person. Men had harmed, hurt, and harassed her.

I was sorry. I am sorry now.

Mom taught me, at least a little bit, to begin to look at characters, all characters, on television as people. They did not exist for me, but for themselves . . . even in the story. Her reminder of Whitney’s age emphasized that much of what seemed real was not. Reruns meant Rand was forever young while Whitney grew old. Rand was not real, Whitney was. Would I demand as I grew older that my wife be forever young? Or would I learn that her beauty did not exist for me but for God? Would I stop trying to have and just accept a good thing as good?

I cannot say that I got all of this at fourteen or even at twenty-four, but the lesson stuck with me. Grace Lee Whitney was real and she was hurting. Sometimes after I knew this truth, I thought I could see it in her performances. Maybe. Maybe not. But at least I had stopped turning her into a doll and seeing both the character and the actor as a human being created in God’s image. Womankind was necessary for the entire Image of God to be visible.

There was nothing wrong with a young teen admiring beauty. That was good and natural. There was something wrong with the subtle step from “wow” to “that is for me.” It is the difference between the admiration of a peer and the desire of a slave master. Both the peer and the slaver might say: “Wow!” but the outcomes are different. One is imitating God and the other devils. Mom helped open my eyes to something so obvious that I am ashamed that it had to be taught: women are human. Women do not exist for me or my gaze, but to stand before the loving gaze of God: free and dependent only on His grace.

Just like me.

I once was blind, but now I see. . . a bit. I hope you see perfectly now Grace Lee Whitney.

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