- 2 days ago
One of America's most beloved actors and activists, George Takei recently released a new full-color graphic memoir, titled, It Rhymes with Takei . The beautifully illustrated autobiography reveals for the first time ever, the full story of his life in the closet, his decision to come out at the age of 68, and the way that moment transformed everything. The 88-year-old living legend stopped by our LifeMinute studios to tell us all about it. This is a LifeMinute with George Takei.
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00:00Hi, I'm George Takei, and you're watching Life Minute.
00:05One of America's most beloved actors and activists, George Takei,
00:09recently released a new full-color graphic memoir titled, It Rhymes with Takei.
00:14The beautifully illustrated autobiography reveals for the first time ever
00:19the full story of his life in the closet, his decision to come out at the age of 68,
00:24and the way that moment transformed everything.
00:27The 88-year-old living legend stopped by our Life Minute studios recently to tell us all about it.
00:34This is a Life Minute with George Takei.
00:37George Takei, thank you so much for being with us at Life Minute.
00:41Good to be here.
00:4287 years young.
00:45No, I'm even older than that.
00:47Are you 88?
00:48I'm 88 years old.
00:5088! Oh my goodness!
00:51Just a few weeks ago, I celebrated my...
00:54Happy birthday!
00:55And the Japanese have this lore, 88 is the age at which you enter your second childhood.
01:04And so, Brad helped me celebrate by inviting all our friends and relatives to a beautiful luncheon,
01:11and I entered my second childhood, so here I am.
01:15Oh, that's amazing.
01:16Oh, it's such an honor to have you here.
01:18On Star Trek, we had this gesture that we call the Vulcan greeting.
01:23It means live long and prosper.
01:26And so, I've lived 88, that's considered reasonably long.
01:32I'm reasonably prosperous because I have a brand new book that's coming out, which is about my life.
01:41Amazing.
01:41You have some stories to tell.
01:43Tell us about it.
01:44It's beautiful.
01:45Well, the title is, It Rhymes With Takei.
01:50Now, I want to challenge our potential book buyers.
01:54What does that title mean?
01:56It Rhymes With Takei.
01:58Many people mispronounce my surname.
02:01They call me Takai.
02:03So, this is my opportunity to correct them.
02:06It's pronounced Takei.
02:07However, Takei is a legitimate Japanese word, which means expensive.
02:14So, they'll have to pay up if they want to insist that I'm expensive.
02:20But Takei rhymes with other words like,
02:26They say, may, play, gay.
02:31Oh, gay.
02:33Is it about George being gay?
02:37It's about my closeted life.
02:40I came out at 68 years old, and I released all the closeted me that came running out of there.
02:48I didn't want the world to know, particularly because I'm an actor, and I'm dependent on public popularity.
02:56At 68 years old, I came out because I was so angry at some of these hypocritical politicians,
03:07and the worst of them happened to be the governor of our state.
03:12I felt guilty because there were all these other people who were sacrificing their careers,
03:20some of them their families, to be out there advocating for equality for gays and lesbians.
03:28And I was benefiting from their activism.
03:31In 2005, the activism of these others was starting to produce results.
03:39And the California legislature passed the marriage equality bill,
03:44which meant that gays, lesbians, bisexual people could marry each other.
03:50And I've been together with my partner, Brad, for almost 40 years now.
03:56And now we could at least have the dignity of being legally married,
04:02except that our governor didn't think so.
04:05He was the governor who ran for public office saying,
04:10I'm from Hollywood, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
04:14I've worked with the gays and lesbians, and some of my best friends are gay people,
04:21creating the illusion that he was liberal, open, and supportive of gay people.
04:27But when the marriage equality bill passed both houses of our state legislature,
04:34the Senate and the Assembly, and it landed on his desk,
04:39and his signature was the only thing that was needed, he vetoed it.
04:43And I was so angry that I decided I'm going to come out
04:48and get at this hypocritical governor who has no business being in public office.
04:56Wow. Wow. And it worked.
04:59You're instrumental in helping people feel that they can come out too.
05:04You're kind of a beacon of hope.
05:06Well, I wanted to get that hypocrite out of the office.
05:10I partnered up with the Human Rights Campaign, a group that advocates for LGBTQ people,
05:18and went on a nationwide speaking tour against Arnold Schwarzenegger specifically,
05:27but for marriage equality.
05:29What made you after so many years?
05:32Was it very difficult being an actor?
05:34What was it like being gay?
05:36Well, I'm Asian American.
05:38I have this face.
05:40So the opportunities would be limited to those roles.
05:45But I was lucky.
05:46Luck plays a big part in that.
05:49And thanks to the good fortune that I have,
05:52I landed a role on Star Trek.
05:55It became a very popular series.
05:58And blessed by that, I became a name.
06:02That's amazing.
06:03I love it.
06:04I love it.
06:05Really perseverance about perseverance.
06:08I can't believe you waited that long.
06:10Did you feel like, I mean, your life must have been like it just started again.
06:15You know?
06:16It did feel like that.
06:17It was a new, different start in my life.
06:21But I had that success that I did have because if I were out when I started my acting career,
06:30I probably would not have had an acting career because you could not be known that you're a gay person
06:37and hope to be cast in shows.
06:40There was that societal prejudice against that.
06:44I'm glad that I was closeted.
06:47It was a strategically wise thing to be doing.
06:52But I'm also glad that we helped open up American society to be a better, more accepting,
07:01and a much more equal and fair society.
07:05But now we are engaged in another challenge with the same kind of issue that we had when I was a child in prison
07:16because we looked like this.
07:17We looked just like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.
07:20When we're Americans, we were categorized as enemy aliens.
07:26The Enemy Alien Act, you recognize that sound?
07:29The Enemy Alien Act?
07:31We're hearing it very regularly today.
07:35And because of that, we are having all the turmoil, uncertainty, and the chaos in Washington now.
07:43I know, it's a shame.
07:45It's all these years later and we're still dealing with things that we dealt with so long ago.
07:50You've dealt with wartime, of course, racism.
07:53What was that like?
07:54In the 60s, 70s, 80s, there were many, many vital issues of our time.
08:00There was the Civil Rights Movement going on.
08:04And I knew that my childhood was based on racism when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
08:15We looked just like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor, but we're Americans.
08:20My parents were born and raised and educated here.
08:23But the racism in this country put us into those Barbar prison camps simply because we looked like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor.
08:33We have that heritage.
08:35So I know that history.
08:36And so having come from that, even though I was closeted about my most personal issue because I wanted to protect my career, I was active in all these other social issues.
08:50The Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, the Peace Movement during the Vietnam War.
08:56I was an activist because when I was a teenager, my father taught me about American democracy.
09:03It's active participation in our American citizenship.
09:08He said, he quoted it to me often, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, that phrase, ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
09:22Those are noble words.
09:24That's what makes our democracy wonderful, good.
09:27But, he said, the weakness of American democracy is also in those words, of the people, by the people, for the people, because people are fallible human beings.
09:40Even the President of the United States is a fallible human being.
09:44We make mistakes.
09:47And so it's important for people who understand our democracy.
09:52They have a responsibility as citizens to actively participate in democracy.
10:00And he urged all three of his children.
10:04I was the oldest.
10:05I have a younger brother and a younger sister.
10:09And we became, at my father's urging, at school, active.
10:13We joined clubs, supported charitable causes.
10:17And I ran for a student government office, became student body president in middle school, senior board president in high school.
10:29And my father, when I was in my late teens, took me to the Adelaide Stevenson for President campaign headquarters and introduced me to electoral politics.
10:40And so, as an adult, I've been active in presidential campaigns, U.S. Senate campaigns, campaign for mayor of Los Angeles.
10:50So, I was practicing good citizenship to be a better American.
10:56And so, I've become a proselytizer for all Americans to become responsible citizens and take on the responsibilities of citizenship.
11:09Excellent.
11:10Beautiful.
11:11How important is it, do you feel, to use your voice?
11:14You have a platform, obviously.
11:17Well, you don't need to have a platform, as I do.
11:20My career and my previous activism has given me a platform.
11:26Even without platform, in a democracy, we need everybody who's concerned about our society to participate.
11:34It's for everybody to participate in an election, volunteering for campaigns when there's a horrific tragedy, care boxes.
11:46These are all participate, jobs of a good citizen to be a participant in our democracy.
11:53Excellent.
11:54I kind of want to know what you tell people that are still in the closet that just, like, are too afraid.
11:58What would you tell them as somebody that's just afraid?
12:01Well, you are equal.
12:03Nowadays, young people are coming out in their teens, some maybe even earlier.
12:09But what I discovered when I came out, I was prepared to find a different career.
12:17But instead, they started casting me in one TV series after another as gay George Takei.
12:27And so, coming out as gay was good for my career.
12:35It had a new resurgence.
12:38You can't predict what the future holds.
12:41Surprising things happen, even though you bite the bullet and gird your loins and come out prepared for that disaster.
12:52The need to find a different career.
12:56And the career that you've established becomes much more accepting and productive.
13:04Yeah.
13:04So, what was it like, you know, your big break in Star Trek?
13:09And was it difficult being, you know, a gay man, an Asian gay man at that time?
13:13Well, I was very lucky.
13:15Luck plays a big part in the acting business, particularly because I'm a very specialized acting type.
13:24But Gene Roddenberry came up with this wonderful idea, a picture of the future.
13:31He created a star fleet made up of people from all over the galaxy.
13:38People of different backgrounds, different histories, different vantage point, coming together and working in concert as a team.
13:48I was fortunate enough to be cast in that, together with people like Nichelle Nichols,
13:56who was the first African-American woman to be cast in a regular role in a television series.
14:04We had a character who was of Russian ancestry at a time of the Cold War.
14:13And we had a Vulcan, an alien person, pointy-eared and brilliant and all-knowing, great wisdom, but totally devoid of humor.
14:26And so there's humor there.
14:28And all of us working on Starfleet as a team.
14:32That's a pretty progressive show, then, when you think about it.
14:36It took place in the 22nd century.
14:40So it was progressive.
14:43And it was based on Gene Roddenberry's optimistic view of the human future.
14:50And he told me about this acronym that defines what Star Trek is about.
14:55Idic, I-D-I-C, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
15:03And, first of all, the makeup of the primary cast personifies that.
15:09Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.
15:12Diversity, people of different backgrounds, different experiences, different colors, culture, coming together, contributing their specialty, their knowledge, their vantage point on an issue.
15:26All of those things being brought together is what makes the Starship Enterprise the successful Starship that it has been.
15:37It's amazing that you're on that show.
15:38And that's been your theme your whole life, isn't it?
15:41It's crazy.
15:42That we have a life.
15:43That's been your theme your whole life.
15:46Like, did he know that about you when he hired you for the role?
15:49Did he know that you were such an advocate?
15:51He was looking for that kind of diversity.
15:54And so we had the white North American as a captain.
15:58And he wasn't an American.
16:00He was a Canadian.
16:01Bill Shatner.
16:02Bill Shatner.
16:02Do you still talk to him at all?
16:04Well, our show has not been on for quite some time now.
16:08I was a young man in my 20s and 30s.
16:13Do you keep in touch with any of them?
16:15We occasionally meet at Star Trek conventions.
16:18But it's not as frequently as it used to be.
16:22We have many subsequent generations of Star Trek.
16:27But it's that diversity coming together that made Star Trek engaging.
16:33You know, diversity is what makes society interesting, as well as having armed with all that wisdom and knowledge and experience.
16:44Yes, it's amazing.
16:46It's amazing.
16:47Do you think, did anyone know in the acting community on the show that you were gay?
16:52Do you think they knew?
16:53I had many acting colleagues in Star Trek.
16:57And when you're working together for three years together, you know, you get to know each other well.
17:06Actors are sophisticated people.
17:10And a good number of my old colleagues knew that I was gay.
17:15But they also know the society that it would be difficult for me if they broadcast the fact that I'm gay.
17:26They're working with a gay actor.
17:29And they're friends.
17:31And they didn't want to hurt me.
17:32And so they knew, but they kept quiet.
17:36But in the book, I talk about some incidents where it's revealed to me that they knew, but they were covering it up.
17:44And I am so grateful that they were such good friends and such discreet good friends.
17:51Oh, that's beautiful.
17:52How did you become a star?
17:54Like, how did you even get into acting?
17:57Well, I always wanted to be an actor.
17:59That was a passion of mine.
18:01But my father wanted me to be an architect.
18:03So I began school at UC Berkeley as an architecture student.
18:11But after the second semester, I had to be true to myself.
18:17And I came back to Los Angeles.
18:20And I told my father, I want to go to New York, study at the actor's studio where all the great actors were coming from.
18:29Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Glyft.
18:34But my father said, that's a fine acting school, but they won't give you a diploma when you graduate from the actor's studio.
18:45And your mother and I want you to have that.
18:48Here in town in Los Angeles, at UCLA, they have a well-respected acting school.
18:55And when you finish there, they'll give you your diploma.
18:58Your mother and I want you to have that.
19:01So if you go to UCLA, we'll take care of the expenses.
19:05If you insist on going to the actor's studio in New York, you'll have to do it all on your own.
19:14And you know what New York is like.
19:18Expensive.
19:19Weather's totally different from California.
19:22In the wintertime, it's bone-chilling cold.
19:25And in the summertime, it's absolutely swelterfying, if there's such a word.
19:32And you have to do it all on your own.
19:36I was a practical kid.
19:38I went with a subsidy.
19:41But they're glad you did it.
19:44Well, they weren't the happiest.
19:48They would have preferred for me to continue studying architecture.
19:53But, yes, they became happy when they started seeing me on the TV screen regularly.
20:01And I was getting those movie checks regularly.
20:08Amazing.
20:09Amazing.
20:10Iconic, really, like you.
20:14What else?
20:15What are your other secrets?
20:16What are your secrets to longevity?
20:17Secrets to longevity?
20:20Well, Brad, my husband, and I were runners.
20:25We ran marathons.
20:28But everything has its downside.
20:30I had a running accident that required surgery.
20:35I have a recurring problem with my feet.
20:39And I'm going to have another surgery here.
20:43So I'm walking with a cane.
20:46But I love running.
20:48And I hope to get back to the point where at least I can enjoy walking without a cane.
20:54You will.
20:54I know you will.
20:55And the book is about running, too.
20:57Really?
20:58Okay.
20:59I've been running since my teenage days.
21:02But I joined a gay running club.
21:05And that's where I met Brad.
21:07A running club called L.A. Front Runners.
21:10I joined it, and I met Brad.
21:13He trained me for my first marathon.
21:16And the book is all about both the challenges and the discipline and the determination to finish involved with running.
21:27And here I am.
21:29Excellent.
21:30When you and Brad aren't working or running or writing or advocating, what do you guys like to do to relax?
21:36Well, we enjoy what we do.
21:40But what we like to do is we're also theater people.
21:43I am an actor.
21:45I'm usually on the stage or before the cameras.
21:48But even if I'm not, I enjoy being in the audience, and particularly in this town, New York City, going to Broadway plays, going to off-Broadway plays, going to some two-bit theaters off in Brooklyn.
22:03Brooklyn, it's a very fulfilling life that we have, enjoying being here.
22:09What's your biggest life lesson?
22:12I suppose I've shared it with you.
22:14We live in a country that has a wonderful system called democracy.
22:20democracy, but democracy also is probably the most difficult form of government because we have to be responsible for it.
22:33We have to actively participate.
22:36And many people are lazy, and they're not good citizens.
22:40And so I'm here to urge all Americans that being an American is a challenging state, and you have to take on the duties of an American citizen.
22:59Know the issues, know the candidates, volunteer and participate.
23:05Participate, yeah.
23:06Participate, yeah.
23:07Ultimately, even offer yourself as a candidate for whatever office, city council, local dog catcher, if you're an animal lover.
23:19But we have to participate in our society.
23:23America is made up of people who give of themselves.
23:28What would your current self tell your younger self?
23:31I wouldn't play that game because I'm glad with the life I lived.
23:38I am who I am today because of what I learned about life within the closeted life.
23:45And first of all, it's impossible.
23:48I can't teach the young me because how do you do that?
23:52I didn't know me older.
23:55You gain the wisdom and the experience, and you become who you are.
23:59So every moment of your life is important, and you benefit from it.
24:05And I am who I am today because I was who I was then.
24:10I love it.
24:11That's a great, great answer.
24:13Well, your book.
24:15I know it's going to be a goodie.
24:16Can't wait to read it.
24:17Congratulations.
24:18Thank you so much for being here.
24:20It's such an honor and a pleasure to have you.
24:22To hear more of this interview, visit our podcast, Life Minute TV, on iTunes and all streaming podcast platforms.
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