My name is Brian, and Im a Star Trek fan.

Whew, there I said it.

Just one simple sentence, right? Well yeah, but lets be honest, there are many stigmas associated with being a Star Trek fan, stigmas which I have attempted to disassociate myself by staying in the proverbial Star Trek closet.

Sure, in the wonderful anonymity of the World Wide Web and among family and close friends, I was unashamed of at what one point in my life bordered on an unhealthy obsession. But for the most part, it was my little secret. In my much younger days I wore my being a fan on my sleeve. I distinctly recall focusing on the then upcoming Star Trek: First Contact film for a sixth-grade class project. That brought about a few peculiar looks and I eventually realized that being a Star Trek fan was not considered cool.

Shortly after I closeted myself I discovered the wonders of the Internet, and it was there that I discovered the plethora of Star Trek content available to a fanboy like me. Those fans among us who remember the days of AOL 3.0 probably had the pleasure of experiencing Keyword: "Star Trek" with the popular chat room aptly titled The Bridge. Then there were the simulations where fans pretended to be officers on some Federation starship off in some distance galaxy, traversing the stars. And of course, in 1998, I founded the Star Trek Galactic Newsletter, which at one point in time boasted a subscriber base of several thousand.

And yet, during all this time, most of the people around me did not know this side of me. Eventually I gave up the chat rooms and the simulations, and real life got in the way of the newsletter and several attempts at its resuscitation, but I religiously still watched the new episodes of whatever the current series was. Come the past three or four years now, however, Ive hardly paid any attention to the franchise -- not that there has been a whole lot going on -- and what once gave me great pleasure took a back seat to other things, the thousands of dollars of memorabilia slowly collecting dust in storage.

It wasnt that I still didnt love Star Trek -- I always will -- it was just time for a break. But it wasnt until my good friend Michael Hinman here at Airlock Alpha -- who I first got to know through this site and my newsletter -- approached me to do a Star Trek column that I really began to think about why I loved this franchise so much. Why was I willing for all those years to devote so much of my time to what many people just consider a simple television program? What was it that made Star Trek so enticing to not just me, but to millions around the world?

So the more I thought about those questions the more I realized just how much Star Trek shaped my life. One seemingly simple TV show changed my life forever. Im not talking about how it changed my life because I spent so much time watching it, but how the message and morals behind that one-hour chunk of time helped to mold my very being. I looked at what I believe in, what I feel in the very depths of my soul, and I saw connections to Star Trek.

The utopian-like version of the world that Star Trek portrays is one I believe we should all strive toward. The beliefs of equality, acceptance and understanding that countless episodes discuss -- both directly and indirectly -- have made their way into my very psyche. It is for those reasons that Star Trek is ever so much more than a simple television program for so many of us and why I am writing this very column. Granted there are quite a few bad apples in the franchise -- last nights rerun of "Star Trek: Enterprises" Regeneration comes to mind -- but there are so many gems in the hundreds of hours of episodes, ones which tout those franchise values that I would like to think many of us hold.

As members of a fanbase that is extremely stereotyped, people often assume we like the show for the cool ships, "lasers," out-of-this-world technology, or any other number of "geeky" rationale. But at least for me, that isnt the case. I love Star Trek because it is all about humanity, it gets to the very core of the human race in a way I think few other things have done. Sure, the aliens and the trek across the stars are cool and all, but I like to think that it is the trek within that matters.

Brian Meskimen is a columnist for Airlock Alpha writing out of Minnesota. He can be reached at bmeskimen@airlockalpha.com.

The Trek Within is a feature of Airlock Alpha, but also will soon be available on Roddenberry.com, the official Web site for the Roddenberry family maintained by Eugene W. Roddenberry Jr. Visit Roddenberry.com to read The Trek Within as well as a bonus feature from Airlock Alpha site coordinator Michael Hinman every other week.