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George Takei’s voice is so smooth, so rich, so buttery good that my body dysmorphia tricks me into thinking I should go on a hard-core, low-carb diet the moment our conversation is over.
I’m speaking to the legendary portrayer of Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu — who comes to Northeast Ohio to narrate a space-themed Cleveland Orchestra show at Blossom Music Center on Sunday — just weeks ahead of his one-year wedding anniversary to 22-year partner (now husband) Brad Altman.
So it’s the perfect opportunity to chat about Star Trek; gay Hollywood; his relatively recent adventures as an out, queer activist; and just what drew him to his husband all of those years ago.
* * *
George Takei was gathered around the copier one morning decades ago, chatting with Walter Koenig (he of the thick, sorta-Eastern European-accented Mr. Chekov), when Koenig started making head gestures, urging him to turn around. Puzzled, he followed his co-star’s lead, pivoting around to discover the production’s extras, fully costumed and standing around before the next take.
“And one was stunningly gorgeous, in a tight Star Trek shirt that clung to his pectorals,” Takei says. “… And that’s when I knew Walter ‘knew’ and was helping me out.”
Supportive co-stars have marked Takei’s career (Koenig and good friend Nichelle Nichols — Uhura — stood up for him at his wedding), but in the late-‘50s and ‘60s, being out wasn’t an option.
“When I was starting out as a professional actor, you’d go to an interview and there were a dozen other people who physically qualified for the part: They’re all Asian,” the 72-year-old actor says. “But when you have everything equal … they find reasons to reject you. Too tall, too short, too fat, too skinny, too young, too old. And you want to get the part, and you don’t want to have another ‘too this’ or ‘too that.’ So you hid that you’re gay. You essentially live a double life.”
He took female friends to parties and premieres. But with a regular gig on a TV series — Star Trek — he found himself working daily with the same people, whom he was getting to know and become comfortable around.
“You bring your boyfriend, but you just introduce him as your friend,” Takei explains. “But the week after, you bring him again. And Hollywood people are sophisticated, so they get it. [They say:] ‘Oh George! I get it!’”
He cracked the closet door farther open by joining Frontrunners, the LGBT running club. “When I went on my first run and there was a buzz: ‘Sulu, Sulu,’” Takei says. “So I knew they were talking about it.”
His sexual orientation became common knowledge in those circles, he says, and he was comfortable with that. But when the AIDS pandemic exploded in the ‘80s, being out in Hollywood became more complicated. So while Takei wasn’t in, he wasn’t fully out yet, either.
* * *
 For young George Takei, barbed wire and guard towers became part of the landscape when his family was sent to an internment camp during World War II — despite being American citizens.
“I was very young at the time that we were incarcerated,” he says. “A child adjusts to the most abnormal situations.”
When war hysteria subsided, and they were released and allowed to return to Los Angeles, his family was unable to find housing and forced to live on skid row, an experience Takei calls “harrowing. The smell of urine, people staggering around right in front of you.”
It was at that time he began to understand racism, especially when a school teacher referred to him as “that little Jap boy.”
“I knew that she hated me, and I hated her,” he continues. “At that time I also realized that my parents were deeply wounded from the time in internment,” so he didn’t tell them.
But his father was teaching him a lesson about the positive aspects of American government.
“Our democracy is as great as the people can be, but it’s also as fallible as people are,” Takei says. “My father believed that the good people had to be engaged in democracy.”
So his father became involved in the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign — and volunteered his young son. That experience started him on a lifetime of political activism — from the civil rights movement, where he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., right through the battle for marriage equality in California in recent years.
It was that latter battle that pushed Takei completely out of the closet. In 2005, the California legislature passed a law allowing same-sex marriage, sending the bill to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger — who promptly vetoed the bill.
“[Schwarzenegger] made all these enlightened sounds. ’I’m from Hollywood. I’ve worked with gays and lesbians,’” Takei says.
The veto was a surprise. “When he went against his campaign rhetoric and vetoed it, it boiled my blood,” Takei continues. “And that’s when I decided, ‘All right. I’m going to become vocal.’ And to do that, my voice had to be authentic, and I came out publicly to the press.”
* * *
Despite the internment camps, despite widespread hysterical racism brought about by the attack on Pearl Harbor, despite being treated like criminals — thousands of Japanese Americans signed up to fight against the Axis powers, Takei tells me. As part of segregated military units, they were among the most decorated soldiers of the war — and suffered the highest casualty rate.
“Democracy is not cheap,” he continues. “In fact, it is very costly, and so I am deeply mindful of the price that needs to be paid for our Americanism.”
And so he draws a parallel between the fight against fascism and the battle for queer equality.
“Gay men and lesbians are in the military, fighting and sacrificing, and yet there is this discriminatory law: Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,” he explains. “At a time of urgent national security, when we need good security and intelligence, we have Arabic-speaking intelligence officers who are found to be gay and fired. It is the most dangerous thing to national security, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. So I draw all of these parallels.”
It’s a line he can draw from his experience in the internment camps to the civil rights movement to the fight for marriage equality.
“I draw the parallel between the barbed-wire fences that confined us to the legalistic barbed-wire fences that confine us now.”
Click here for Part Two of our interview with George Takei.
The Details
George Takei narrates the Cleveland Orchestra’s Sci-Fi Spectacular
August 16
7 p.m.
Blossom Music Center
Tickets are $21-$47. More information and tickets are available at www.clevelandorchestra.com.
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