To many people the Japanese-American actor George Takei, will always be fondly known for his role as Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu the helmsman of the USS Enterprise in the celebrated television series and subsequent movies of ‘Star Trek’. When he wasn’t acting he was passionately working away to promote the work of The Japanese American National Museum. Then just 10 years ago at the age of 68 years Takei was so enraged when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed a Bill to allow Same Sex Marriage in California and almost overnight he turned from a fiercely private person into one of the most highly visible and powerful gay activists the community has ever seen.
Since then Takei has added to his Awards and honors from the Japanese Government ‘ Order Of The Rising Son', and the Japanese American Museum’s Distinguished Medal of Honor for Lifetime Achievement and Public Service with American Humanist Association’s LGBT Humanist Award, and GLAAD’s prestigious Vito Russo Award.
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Credit: Adam Bouska
On a personal level in 2010 he got to marry Brad his partner of over 20 years, and in 2011 he joined Facebook and become a Social Media phenomena with over 8500000 hits, and then in 2014 his life story was profiled in an excellent new documentary ‘To Be Takei’. This year however George finally gets to fulfill a long cherished dream about bringing the story of his childhood in a Japanese American Internment Camp to the stage in the shape of a brand new musical called ‘Allegiance’.
This utterly charming and very voluble Star took time out of rehearsing in Broadway’s Longacre Theater to sit down with queerguru to share how exciting life has been since he became an out and proud gay man.
QG: What Brits may be surprised to know is that you are a dedicated Anglophile, or Britainophile as you call it.
GT:I learned to say that because I did a play in Edinburgh some years ago and after the performance we all went to the local pub. We were drinking what they insisted were just ‘wee drams’ but I kept sipping them to the point that they were no longer ‘wee’ and I very soon started to carry on about my passion for Edinburgh. I said’ I love the architecture, i love the history, I love the people, I love the accents etc and I am a confirmed Anglophile.’ Well I learned that night in Scotland that I am certainly not an Anglophile (laughs loudly). I thought by their reactions I was going to be tarred and feathered and banished South of the border. From that day on I have very carefully kept my focus on being a Britainophile
QG: Am I right in thinking that your father was an anglophile, and that he actually named you after King George VI?
GT: Absolutely correct. I was born in 1936 the year of his Coronation, and then when my younger brother was born he was round and fat and roly-poly and so he was named after Henry VIII (laughs). So we are Japanese Americans named after English Royalty.
QG:You've appeared on British TV several times, including 'I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here' with Martina Navratilova and also you and Brad did ‘All-Star Mr. and Mrs.’ but I read somewhere that long before all that you actually studied Shakespeare in Stratford Upon Avon.
GT: It was actually my graduation present. I wanted to go to the Actors Studio in NY and my father said although that's a respected acting school they won't give you a diploma there that says you are legitimately educated. However here in Los Angeles’s UCLA we have a great theater department and if you go there and graduate, they will give you that vital piece of parchment, and as a sweetener he said he would subsidise me. However he added if I insisted on going to NY he wanted to remind me that NY is a crowded competitive and very expensive place, and I would need to be prepared to do it all on my own. I was a very practical kid so I followed my father’s choice and plumped for UCLA. When I finished he blew me away with his generous gift to me of a summer session at The Shakespeare Institute. So for the first time I was going to Europe and to study Shakespeare at his Birthplace. It was the best graduation present that anyone could ever dream off.
QG: In very early days of your professional career you worked with some major British stars such as Richard Burton and Sir Alex Guinness.
GT: Richard Burton was the star of the very first film that I did and I got the part because I had heeded my father's advice and gone to UCLA. Whilst I was there a Warner Brothers Studio Casting Director called Hoyt Bowers who essentially became my guru saw me in a student production. He opened the door for me for a lot of other productions I did later on.
This first film was ‘Ice Palace’ based on a novel by Edna Ferber about Alaska and I played a Chinese immigrant working in a fish cannery alongside Richard Burton. I was in 7th heaven even though we were filming in a really smelly fish factory. I was a stage struck theater student and here was this great Shakespearean actor from England and I peppered him with questions, as Richard just loved talking about himself. So we were the perfect pair
QG: Before we get on to the 'serious' stuff about you, would your husband mind if I asked you what you thought about English men?
GT: (laughs) Oh well I think they are very informed, and very literate and cultured, but I don’ t think that they are as athletic as American men, especially those from Southern California where I come from. English men are very slim and lean and very very white. (laughs)
QG: So let's then now start with your beginning. In 1942 in WW2 you and your family were forced to live in an Internment Camp. This is something that we are not familiar with in the UK, so can you please explain what that was all about to us?
GT: It is a rather shameful chapter of American history. When Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese and plunged the US into the Second World War, overnight all American citizens of Japanese heritage were looked on with suspicion and fear and outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people who did the bombing. The United States was swept up in war hysteria, which even reached the President Franklin D Roosevelt who signed Executive Order 9066, which ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast to be summarily rounded up without any charges being levied at us. It was the most unconstitutional thing that ‘due process’ the central pillar of our justice system simply disappeared, and we were forced into barbed wire Prison Camps for the duration of the war.
We were Americans, my mother was born in Sacramento and my father was a San Franciscan and they had met and married in Los Angeles where I was born. Yet we became the enemy simply because of the way we looked. There was no trial because there were no charges.
First we were taken from our home to the horse stables of the nearby racetrack, where each family was assigned a smelly horse stall. So for about three months while the Camps were being built, this cramped small stall was home for our family of five. When the construction was completed we were all crammed onto trains with armed guards at both ends, and transported two-thirds cross-country to a camp in the swamps of Arkansas.
The swamps were lush and green and full pools of water and it was a fun place for a 5-year-old child to explore. I began school there in the barracks and the irony is that every morning we would begin with the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ to the Flag. I could see the barbed wire and the sentry towers with the machine guns pointed at us right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words 'With Liberty and Justice For All’. I was just an innocent child just mouthing the words at the teacher had taught.
We were there for about eighteen months before we were transferred to another camp in Northern California that was almost the polar opposite of Arkansas. There was a dry lakebed that was completely devoid of vegetation in this desert-like landscape, which was very windy with all these tumbleweeds flying through the air. My siblings and I soon adapted to how we lived those years behind barbed wire fences and it became our regular routine lining up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy Mess Hall, and going with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Then the war ended and they simply opened up the gates and we left the Camp to try to pick up with our old lives.
The Government had taken my father's business, our home, our freedom but we were free to go wherever in the US we wanted, so my parents decided to go back to Los Angeles, but it was far from easy. We had done nothing wrong but we were still the focus of everyone’s hatred over Pearl Harbor and so we couldn't get housing or a decent job, and so my father's first job was as a dishwasher in the Chinatown Restaurant as only other Asians would hire us. Our first home was on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles and was that was completely terrorizing to us. There was this stench of human urine everywhere: in the hallways in the streets, it is sometime that I will never ever forget.
Even with their sheer determination, my parents really struggled to get back on their feet. My father first got a dry-cleaning shop in an all Mexican-American neighborhood and then he bought a grocery store in an all African-American neighborhood. Then some years later when Japanese-American families were finally getting back on their feet, he switched to Real Estate and he became very successful at that and then we eventually had a nice 3-bedroom home again in the Wilshire district of Los Angeles.
However this shameful history chapter of American history that my people were innocent victims off has in fact become something of life mission for me. Ever since then I've gone on speaking tours throughout the country about this internment of Japanese Americans, as I want to keep that story alive. My parent’s generations are the ones that really experienced it because I was only a young child at the time and adjusted to the situation back then as all kids do. However here I am now in my senior hood and I do not want the story to die away, so I helped start the Japanese American National Museum, of which I served as the chairman of the board for two terms. The Museum will help preserve the story of our past and as well as continue to work for the diversity of our future.
QG: You have talked about getting your big break playing Sulu in Star Trek many times, but what is one of your proudest moments about being a part of this iconic series, and secondly do you think there is a specific reason why it spawned a whole regime of gay trekkies?
GT: (laughs) I am proud of my association with Star Trek in its entirety because it was one of the most innovative cutting edge shows when we first premiered back in 1966. Just think, in one more year it is going to celebrating its Golden Anniversary.
I’m proud of it because of what Gene Roddenberry the creator and producer of Star Trek envisioned for the human future. So much of science fiction is about a dystopian society that fails to build a relationship with the human beings scrambling around in the ruins of a once great civilization, or one that has been taken over by apes or robots. Gene Roddenberry however believed that if we are confident of our problem-solving capabilities and our inventive nature, and both our innovative and entrepreneurial spirit, then we could work in concert with the diversity of our climate. He said the Starship Enterprise was a metaphor for Earth, and if the strength of the starship was playing in its diversity and coming together and working in concert with everyone, then we will be able to meet all the challenges of our times.
We used science fiction as a metaphor for the issues back in the 1960s. E.G. we had the civil rights movement going on where blacks and whites couldn't get along, and then later on the Vietnam War, and we dealt with that issue too. Gene Rodenberry looked at our society and told stories in the science fiction context, making commentaries about our society boldly going over where no one had gone before.
As to the second part of your questions about gay trekkies, well I said because we dealt with diversity I talked to Gene Roddenberry about the sexual orientation diversity but he said that we could not address that issue on the show. Mainly because we had one episode in which Capt. Kirk kissed Uhura an African-American woman, and that show was blacked out in the American South. All the Stations in the Region refused to carry it and so our ratings plummeted. So although back then we didn't deal with the diversity of the sexual orientation, I think LGBT people were able to see themselves as part of our overall diversity coming together and working as a team, and that society was stronger and better for that.
QG: Have politics always been a passion for you?
GT: Because of my childhood incarceration, as a teenager I could never relate to what I read in our Civic Books about the high shining ideals of American democracy. There was nothing about what my family had experienced in my history books here so I engaged my father in after dinner conversations, and I learned about American democracy from a man who suffered the most during the Second World War from the imprisonment. He said our democracy is a people’s democracy, and it can be as great as the people can be but it is also as fallible as people are too. He said that our democracy is vitally dependent on people who cherish its ideals to becoming actively engaged in the process, so he took me to the downtown campaign headquarters of the Governor of California Adlai Stevenson who was running to be President of the United States. There I learned about how it takes the kind of passionate and dedicated people that were there at that headquarters, and I was very impressed with Stevenson himself as he was an eminently successful governor and an eloquent person and inspiring orator.
QG: You 'came out' publicly as gay 10 years ago after being in a relationship with Brad for 18 years. What propelled you to decide then was the right time?
GT: I’ve been active in social justice issues all my life but at same time I was silent on the one issue that was organic to me and the one thing that was an integral part of me that I am gay, because I desperately wanted my career. I passionately loved acting and if it were known that I was gay at that time then my career would have been taken away from me. So I kept that part of my life hidden, and I led a double life.
Then in 1969 two major things happened which would eventually re-shape my life forever. Firstly the Star Trek TV series got canceled and I was again unemployed which happens to actors. Then later the same year the Stonewall revolt happened in New York City. The drag queens and the gay men in the Bar had finally enough of the police bullying and they resisted and for the very first time they fought back and started throwing beer bottles, or glasses or whatever they could lay their hands on. The Stonewall Riot marked the birth of the gay liberation movement in the United States and it grew and grew to the point where society was starting to really finally change for our community.
In 2003 the Supreme Court of the State of Massachusetts ruled that marriage equality was constitutional and then in 2005, again another landmark event, but this time from the legislative route, the people's Representatives of the State Legislature of California and the Senate passed the marriage equality Bill. That Bill needed just one more signature for it to become the Law of the State and it was that of our Governor, who at that time happened to be the movie star Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was a right wing conservative, however when he ran for election to be governor he said to the LGBT community ‘I'm from Hollywood where I work with gays and lesbians, some of my best friends are gays and lesbians’ and persuaded by that kind of rhetoric, some of my gay friends did vote for him.
However once he got to the Governors Office and the Bill reached his desk, he vetoed it, thus killing it stone dead. My blood was boiling and I was simply raging. I was so very angry as this was such an important issue for me and I knew then that I needed to speak out even if it meant taking some risks, and that I would need to be prepared for what could happen to my career. So I spoke to the Press for the first time as a gay man and I blasted Arnold Schwarzenegger's veto, and I've been an active advocate for equality from that time on.
QG: What people admire about you is that you didn’t just ‘come out’ quietly, you came out, for the want of a better ‘screaming’. You went from a private gay person to a powerful and very public advocate for gay rights. Why?
GT: One of most important issues for Brad and me is marriage equality but there are also some very nasty problems caused by reactionary politicians in this country, particularly in the South which really concerned me. For example, there was one politician in Tennessee, called Stacy Campfield who wanted to criminalize the use of the word ‘gay’ by teachers. His insidious Bill was targeting the very people who are working with our youth who are making discoveries about themselves and who need to be able to be given the passionate guidance, and leadership from their teachers. To criminalize the use of the word gay was outrageous, and apparently under this law they could be jailed for one week and fined $250.
I thought the best way to fight back that kind of thing is show that how stupid it really is, and I decided we would make a mockery of it. I did a Youtube video where I said that as my surname ‘Takei’ rhymes with ‘gay’, you could just substitute Takei for gay when you want to say the word, and you can march in a Takei Pride Parade. Thankfully that Bill died. It was mocked to death. However Campfield came up with another Bill where he wanted to require teachers who suspected any student to be gay or lesbian to have to report back to their parents or otherwise they would be jailed for a week and fined $200. This man is crazy and single minded. I thought he would be kicked out of office in the last election I understand he squeaked through again, so he is still in office. There are people like that perpetuate the political universe here in the United States, and they are petty people that need to be mocked.
QG: Were you and Brad the first gay couple to get married in West Hollywood?
GT: We were the first to get our licenses in West Hollywood but Brad is a planner of things, and of our lives, and he felt that he needed more time to get the wedding planned properly. So we got our license in June but we had our rather grand sumptuous wedding in September at The Japanese American National Museum. It a three building complex and because we were staged symposia and lectures and debates we built a building called The Democracy Forum, and we loved the idea of getting married there because democracy was what had made our marriage possible. We had our wedding banquet in the Great Hall of the Museum and as Brad has a little Scottish blood in him, we hired a Piper to pipe us in across the plaza.
I am a Buddhist and Brad has embraced Buddhism as well so we got a Buddhist Minister, who just happened to be Mexican American, to be our Officiant and we had Walter Koenig a Jewish-American who played Chekov in Star Trek as my Best Man and Leah Michelle Nichols an African-American who played Uhura to be our Best Lady. We wanted to have as much diversity as possible in our wedding ceremony
QG: I wrote in the Queertiques review of your documentary ‘To Be Takei’ that Brad was the ying to your yang. Quiet, shy, reserved with an obsession for detail, he is the one who insures that Takei, no longer on the Enterprise, is in fact a whole enterprise himself. You also once called him a Saint. Is that true?
GT: He really is a very special guy. My mother got Alzheimer’s late in her life and as she could no longer take care of herself, I asked Brad if we could move her in with us. He didn’t hesitate and was more than happy to agree and he helped me care for the horrible horrible four last years of her life. To watch your beloved mother fade in stages is painful and heartbreaking. There is that anger stage when they realise they cannot express themselves and they get so frustrated. They are angry at everything and lash out, and then when that is passed, it just goes all-blank for them and so she just sat out on the patio and gazed out. Taking care of a person like that requires enormous energy, time and most of all love. It took a lot from both of us, especially Brad, and he became another son to her, and that's why I call him my Saint.
QG: How did you become such a Social Media Phenomenon, with one of the world’s biggest Facebook followings ever?
GT: About eight years ago by sheer chance I met an amazing and gifted composer and lyricist Jay Kuo who had written three musicals that had been produced in San Francisco. We began working together on developing a musical based on the stories of the interned Japanese-Americans. We were soon investing a lot of our energy, time and talent and our own resources on a subject that was relatively unknown to the general pubic. We knew that we had to raise the awareness of that chapter of American history and to let the people know what we were developing, and I thought that social media would be the most efficient and cost effective way of doing that.
However my own base was made up of small group of fans primarily from my ‘Star Trek’ series and so obviously I had to grow that. By trial and error I discovered that humorous posts got the most likes and shares. Particularly those of ‘Grumpy Cats’ so I started doing a lot of that, and the audience just grew and grew. As it became larger and more substantial I started introducing the fact that we were developing this musical and we shared a little bit of the music too.
By the time the Show was finished and we opened in San Diego at what we called our World Premiere, the word had got out and we played to Sold Out houses every single night. People were being turned away performance after performance and although the old Globe Theatre where we played very rarely extends a run, they gave us another extension because so many people still wanted to see the show. We ended up breaking the seventy seven year old Box Office Record, and then to cap it all we wound up winning the Best Musical of the year Award from the San Diego Critics Circle.
Despite the fact we called this our ‘world premiere’, New Yorkers keep referring it too as our out-of-town tryout. So this Fall ‘Allegiance’ will be opening on Broadway and at aged 78, I will be finally making my Broadway Debut. Also I have played in theaters all over the UK too from Scotland all the way down to Brighton, and so after we have a good healthy run in New York, we will bring this Show to London’s West End too.
QG: You call ‘Allegiance’ your 'legacy project, is that correct?
GT: I have been able to bring my passion for the theater and combine it with my mission of bringing awareness of that hideous chapter of American history together in one beautiful glorious production. Yes, it is very much my legacy and I am so excited that it is finally happening. Lea Salonga is co-starring and re-creating the role she played in the San Diego production and we have already started rehearsals. We are going to be doing public previews from October 6th and then we have our Opening on November 8 at the Longacre Theater on 48h Street right here in the heart of Broadway.
QG: Looking at your Resume it seems like you never ever seem to stop working. Just this year alone I have reviewed two movies, which you are in: ‘Tab Hunter Confidential’ and ‘Do I Sound Gay?’ What else can we expect to see you in soon?
GT: I did a cameo on the movie version of the hit TV series 'Entourage' that has just been released.
QG: George, I always finish interviews asking the same question. If there were a movie made about your life, whom would you like to play you?
GT: Oh Goodness me, there is a very small handful of Asian/American Actors to chose from.
QG: Who said they had to be Asian? (laugh)
GT: Well I am (laughs). Perhaps one of the younger actors coming onto the scene now when they mature. I did a TV series called Super Ninjas and I really liked Brian Potter who played my grandson who I had to teach to become a Ninja. He was a really good actor and a very good-looking young man, so give him a few more years and a few gray hairs, he’ll be perfect.
