I intend to live life, not just exist.
George Takei
We were American citizens. We were incarcerated by our American government in American internment camps here in the United States. The term 'Japanese internment camp' is both grammatically and factually incorrect.
My grandmother lived to 104 years old, and part of her success was she woke up every morning to a brand new day. She said every morning is a new gift. Her favorite hobby was collecting birthdays.
I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.
I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.
When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service and categorized as enemy non-alien.
When Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the same-sex marriage bill, my blood was boiling. I had been silent, but that night, Brad and I watched the news and saw all these young people pouring out on Santa Monica Boulevard venting their rage, and I said, 'I have to speak out.'
It will be written on my tombstone in very large letters, 'Here lies Hikaru Sulu,' and in very tiny letters, 'aka George Takei.' I don't protest the inevitable.
Even before I could vote, I was involved in the political arena. My father was an admirer of Adlai Stevenson, and he took me to the Stevenson for President headquarters, and he volunteered me. That was my introduction to electoral politics, which was exciting and fun and thrilling and very theatrical.
I was doing a civil rights musical here in Los Angeles, and we sang at one of the rallies where Dr. Martin Luther King spoke, and I remember the thrill I felt when we were introduced to him. To have him shake your hand was an absolutely unforgettable experience.
I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.
I'm especially concerned about the future of this country, because I'm concerned about the gay people of the future. We need to ensure their good life by registering to vote.
The central pillar of our justice system is due process. You have got to be charged with a crime. Then you can challenge those charges in a court of law with a trial.
You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.
What is important is the reliability of my posts being there to greet my fans with a smile or a giggle every morning. That's how we keep on growing.
This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.
I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.
People want to start their day off with a smile or, better yet, a guffaw.
It was an egregious violation of the American Constitution. We were innocent American citizens, and we were imprisoned simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. It shows us just how fragile our Constitution is.
I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!
It's safe to assume none of us actually wants to see ISIS-inspired terrorists armed with semi-automatic rifles, able to attack at will within our own borders.
Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.
It has long been a dream of mine that this important story one day would be told on the great American stage of Broadway. In fact, I've dedicated much of the latter half of my life to ensuring the story of the internment is known.
At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.
I'm optimistic, and I have a lot of goals. And I obey the laws of nature: I eat, exercise, and rest properly. But mostly it's about keeping the mind engaged. My grandmother lived to 104, and she had all of her faculties. I'm physically active and devout - just not as Buddhistic as she was.
Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.
When I came out, I was 68, and I was totally prepared for my career to recede when I spoke to the press for the first time. What happened after that blew me away. I started getting more offers. My career blossomed.
I was pursuing my acting career, but I was silent on the LGBT issue, the issue that was closest to me. I knew if I came out then, I'd have had to change careers.
We need to get some rationality on the Second Amendment. This is crazy what we allow ourselves.
STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.
The arc of our history is toward more equality being expanded to more and more people.
I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria.
Gene Roddenberry continually reminded us that the Star Trek Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth. And the strength in this starship came from its diversity, coming together and working in concert as a team. That is the strength of our countries, Canada and the United States. We are nations of diversity.
Our democracy is dependent on people who passionately cherish the ideals of a democracy. Every man is created equal with an inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's a wonderful idea, and it takes people who cherish that idea to be actively involved in the process.
Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.
I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.
Social media affords me an opportunity to interact with fans on a daily basis, not just for a few seconds apiece at a science-fiction convention.
But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.
The Russians are taunting the IOC with the homophobic laws that they pass.
On a bus, your eyes, ears, and pores are open absorbing in the variety, the wonder, and the magic of the city. It's a wonderful way to get to know the city.
Up until the time I was cast in 'Star Trek,' the roles were pretty shallow - thin, stereotyped, one-dimensional roles. I knew this character was a breakthrough role, certainly for me as an individual actor but also for the image of an Asian character: no accent, a member of the elite leadership team.
'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.
When I was going to gay bars in my 20s and 30s, the older guys there explained to me that the police would occasionally raid these places and march the clients out, load them onto paddy wagons, drive them down to the station, photograph them, fingerprint them and put their names on a list. They were doing nothing wrong, and it was criminalized.
In the United States, we have a large, broad middle that are decent, fair-minded people who are too busy to really think about issues other than their next paycheck. Those are the people that we want to get to in order to change the social climate. And Howard Stern has that audience. So I said, 'Let's boldly go where I've never been before.'
To characterize all Muslims as terrorists is fear-mongering of the worst kind.
Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.
I'm most comfortable with my computer. Yes, I have an iPhone, but I've reached that point now where to read e-mails on my phone, I need my reading glasses. I'm most comfortable with the big-screen computer.
My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I've been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.
I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.
It kills me to hear Donald Trump talking.
