Actor Is an Activist

Star Trek made George Takei famous and he’s not shy about that. The actor gamely flashed the Vulcan salute for his CU admirers.

But he has also transcended his role as Lt. Hikaru Sulu of Star Ship Enterprise, reinventing himself as an outspoken political activist and cheeky social media presence with nearly two million Twitter followers.

“I was out, and it was liberating,” Takei said Oct. 26 of his 2005 announcement, at age 68, that he was gay.

Indeed, the fans who lined up to ask questions after Takei’s Macky Auditorium talk seemed far more interested in George Takei, now 79, than in Hikaru Sulu. They sought his guidance on fighting stereotypes of Asian Americans, prodding NASA to hire LGBTQ astronauts and heading off Islamophobia, for instance. An audibly emotional young woman asked him how she should address political differences with her Chinese immigrant parents. No one asked about Star Trek.

Takei, the guest of the student-run Distinguished Speakers Board, set the tone for the evening.

Dressed in a dark suit and reddish tie, he took center stage and, without notes, talked for about an hour. After opening with brief reminiscences of “Star Trek,” which first broadcast from 1966-69, then spawned decades of spinoffs, Takei turned to sober topics — his family’s experience in an internment camp for Japanese Americans during World War II, his life as a gay man and the necessity of citizen participation in democracies.

Takei confessed that he’d hid his sexual orientation for decades, fearing homophobia would harm his career.

But since coming out, the opposite has happened, he said: “My career thrived.”

The actor was a hit with the CU crowd and basked amid thunderous applause and repeated standing ovations.

“Just saw George Takei speak here in Boulder,” Wyvern Aldinger (MBA’18) tweeted. “Inspirational!”

Photos by Glenn Asakawa