6/13/2014 | The New York Times
George Takei sat in a V.I.P. room at the Waldorf-Astoria as a young makeup artist named Eryk Datura dabbed foundation on his brow.
“Are you a native of this city?” the 77-year-old actor asked him, in the booming basso profundo that helped make him famous, beginning with his role as the galactic helmsman Hikaru Sulu on “Star Trek.”
“I’m from Nashville,” Mr. Datura said.
Mr. Takei perked up. “Do you know the state senator from eastern Tennessee named Stacey Campfield?” he asked. “He tried to get a law passed forbidding teachers from using the word ‘gay’ in schools.”
He cracked a satisfied grin and continued: “On YouTube I said, ‘Well, if it’s going to be illegal to use the word “gay,” then you can simply substitute it with the word “Takei,” which rhymes with “gay.” And you can march in a Takei Pride Parade.’ ”
That brand of winking online activism is why Mr. Takei was honored last month by Glaad, the gay rights advocacy group. Since coming out as gay in 2005 at the age of 68, Mr. Takei has used his bawdy social-media persona to build a following far beyond Trekkies. To his seven million Facebook fans and million or so Twitter followers, he supplies an endless stream of viral diversions (like a photo of a road sign saying “Elevated Man Holes”), often accompanied by his pseudoscandalized catchphrase, “Oh myyy.”
Like Betty White, Mr. Takei has used naughty-oldster humor to fuel a late-career surge. But his ribaldry is often in the service of social causes, whether gay rights or Japanese-American visibility. In 2007, after the former basketball player Tim Hardaway said, “I hate gay people,” Mr. Takei responded with a mock public service announcement on “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” telling Mr. Hardaway, “Let it be known: One day, when you least expect it, I will have sex with you.”
He concluded, with a cackle, “I love sweaty basketball players.”
This month, Mr. Takei is to appear in gay pride parades in Seattle and Columbus, Ohio.
“The moment he came out, it was all engines go,” said Wilson Cruz, an actor who appeared on “My So-Called Life” and is a Glaad national spokesman. “He was on the ground, making his opinion known.”
His rebooted fame is likely to grow. A documentary about his life, “To Be Takei” by Jennifer M. Kroot, showed at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is to open in theaters in August. And he is looking for a Broadway home for “Allegiance,” a musical inspired by his childhood experiences in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II.
At the Glaad awards, he was accompanied by his husband, Brad Takei (né Altman), a tightly wound 60-year-old who serves as Mr. Takei’s manager. A self-described “control freak,” Brad is a bustling presence in “To Be Takei,” playfully bickering with his husband and acting as a Klingon when fans get aggressive.
As they walked into the hotel ballroom, he eyed Mr. Takei’s cocktail glass and warned, “George, you have to give an acceptance speech.”
“This is juice!” his husband protested.
The couple, wearing matching tuxedos, took their seats. Moments later, Boy George wandered over in a bright red fedora. He slung his arm around Mr. Takei and posed for a photo, saying, “It should be ‘Live long and saunter.’ ”
When it came time to receive the group’s Vito Russo Award for promoting gay equality (past winners include Ricky Martin and Anderson Cooper), Mr. Takei gave a speech mixing gravitas and gags. He ended with a call for equality “for all people, and especially young straight couples, because they are going to be making the gay babies of tomorrow.”
Given Mr. Takei’s cheeky advocacy, it is hard to believe that he came out publicly just nine years ago. For that, his admirers can thank Arnold Schwarzenegger, who, when he was governor of California, vetoed a marriage-equality bill. Watching the news on TV at home, Mr. Takei felt his blood boil.
“We agreed that I had to speak out, which meant my voice had to be authentic,” he said in an interview with his husband in their Midtown Manhattan apartment. (They also have a home in Los Angeles: “We are bi … coastal!”)
Brad added, “The fiction that I was only George’s business manager, that was getting kind of stale for us.”
The couple met in 1984, in the gay running club Los Angeles Frontrunners. Brad, who was working as a journalist for a trade publishing company, caught George’s eye during a jog around the Silver Lake Reservoir.
“For you, it was lust at first sight,” Brad recalled.
Mr. Takei clutched his hand: “You were my first hunk.”
By 2005, their friends knew they were a couple, but the decision to go public had unexpected perks. Mr. Takei got a call from Howard Stern’s SiriusXM radio show asking him to be a regular announcer. It was Mr. Stern who popularized Mr. Takei as a gay pundit and comic gold mine. On one show, he put Mr. Takei on the phone with Mr. Schwarzenegger to debate same-sex marriage, only to reveal afterward that it was not the governor, but an impersonator.
From there, Mr. Takei’s comeback snowballed. He played himself on sitcoms like “Will & Grace” and “The Big Bang Theory,” and he and Brad became the first gay couple on “The Newlywed Game.” That was soon after their wedding in 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; Mr. Takei is a trustee. His “Star Trek” co-stars Walter Koenig and Nichelle Nichols served as best man and best lady.
Mr. Takei’s gay rights advocacy came after years of outspokenness on other fronts. By the time he revealed his sexuality, he had already dabbled in politics. He narrowly lost a race for Los Angeles City Council in 1973, and later served on the board of the Southern California Rapid Transit District. In 1981, he testified in a Congressional hearing, calling for redress for Japanese-Americans who had been in the internment camps.
Mr. Takei had made his way in Hollywood at a time when Asian actors were mostly relegated to playing servants or ninjas. His earliest film work was dubbing English dialogue for the Japanese monster movies “Godzilla Raids Again” and “Rodan.” Later on, he appeared in a pair of Jerry Lewis comedies, playing characters he knew were racial caricatures.
“Those were stereotypes, and I terribly regret them,” he says now, adding that his agent at the time (also of Japanese descent) urged him to take the parts.
But “Star Trek,” which had its premiere in 1966, offered something different: a chance to work with a multiethnic ensemble on a show that obliquely tackled hot-button issues like the Vietnam War and civil rights.
Sulu, Mr. Takei said, “was a groundbreaking character. I mean, there he was as part of the leadership team of the Enterprise, smart as a whip. In fact, he was the best helmsman in Starfleet, and he was an Asian driver!”
Throughout the series, Mr. Takei was careful not to indulge stereotypes. When a script called for Sulu to wield a samurai sword, he suggested a fencing foil instead.
But another part of his identity remained hidden. At night, he went to gay bars around Los Angeles, always terrified of a police raid.
“I immediately looked around at the exits where I could slip out and flee,” he said. “I couldn’t afford to be fingerprinted and photographed.”
Most of his “Star Trek” co-stars knew he was gay, but they were savvy enough not to say anything. He recalled Mr. Koenig nudging him on the set one day when a “drop-dead gorgeous” male extra in a skintight Starfleet suit was standing nearby.
“They knew,” Mr. Takei said. “Except for one. It went right over his head.”
The original “Star Trek” series was canceled in 1969, the same year as the Stonewall riots. Mr. Takei was aware that he was missing out on a movement, but as a newly unemployed actor, he couldn’t take the risk. When he went to parties where there were reporters, he brought “girlfriends.”
Nowadays, Mr. Takei’s life is less compartmentalized. Far from separating his ethnic history from his sexuality, or his humanitarian concerns from cat-video humor, he cross-pollinates them.
Three days after the Glaad awards, he and Brad took the train to Washington for another gala. It was an awards dinner for the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies, and Mr. Takei was to give the keynote address.
This was far more sedate than the Glaad affair, which had culminated with Kylie Minogue singing on a table. Lisa Ling introduced Mr. Takei, who gave a joke-free speech about his internment experience.
By now, he is used to telling the story. One morning when he was 5, two men with bayonet-tipped rifles banged on his family’s front door in Los Angeles. The Takeis were taken to a racetrack and spent several months living in the stables.
“I remember thinking, ‘We get to sleep where the horses sleep,’ ” he said later.
From there, they were taken by train to a “relocation center” in the swamps of Arkansas. He ate in a noisy mess hall and bathed with his father in a communal shower. After a year, his parents were given a questionnaire asking if they forswore their loyalty to the Japanese emperor. It was a trick question, akin to “When did you stop beating your wife?” His father answered no, proclaiming: “They took our business, they took our home, they took our freedom. The one thing I’m not going to give them is my dignity.”
For that, the Takeis were labeled “disloyals” and moved to a high-security camp in Northern California.
“We started every school day with the Pledge of Allegiance,” Mr. Takei recalled. “I can see the barbed-wire fence and the sentry tower right outside my schoolhouse window as I recited the words ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ each word stinging with irony. But I was just a kid who mouthed those words.”
It was not until they were freed that he realized anything was wrong. Back in Los Angeles, the Takei family moved to Skid Row, and his father, who had gone to business college, took a job washing dishes. In school, one of George’s teachers called him “Jap Boy” (George was born in Los Angeles) and refused to call on him in class. He learned to bury his feelings of ostracism, making it easier to hide his sexuality once he realized he was “more interested in Bobby than in Jane.”
As a teenager in the ’50s, he began looking back on internment and grew angry, directing his rage at his father over the dinner table. He had been attending civil rights rallies, and told his father that he would have protested rather than go to the camps.
“My father said: ‘If I were alone, maybe I would have done that. But I had you, your brother, your sister and your mother to worry about,’ ” he recalled.
Decades later, George and Brad Takei were attending an Off Broadway show and sat behind a young musical-theater team, Jay Kuo and Lorenzo Thione. The resulting collaboration, “Allegiance,” is in part Mr. Takei’s way of making peace with his father, Takekuma, who died in 1979.
The musical is also why Mr. Takei took up social media. He registered his Facebook account as a promotional tool, but it quickly became a comedic outlet.
“I discovered that funny animal pictures — memes — would get a lot of likes and shares,” he said. (A small staff, called Team Takei, helps run his online presence.)
Now, his younger fans are as likely to know him from Facebook as from the Enterprise. At the dinner in Washington, Mr. Takei gamely endured a long line of photo seekers, some of whom splayed their fingers in the Vulcan salute. Brad looked on, uncertain when to enter the frame.
Mark L. Keam, a member of the Virginia House of Delegates, leaned in for a photograph, then asked Mr. Takei if he would come to Virginia to help campaign against its same-sex marriage ban.
“I would be happy to,” he said tentatively, unsure of his schedule.
Between courses, Mr. Keam checked his Facebook page. His selfie with George Takei already had 44 likes.