By GustavoLeao / 13:28, 28 October 2005 / People

Frontiers Online posted an exclusive interview with STAR TREK actor George Takei (Captain Sulu), in which he talks about his new play EQUUS, and decided to publicly acknowledge his homosexuality. Here are a few excerpts.



FRONTIERS: Let's talk about the character Dysart and the play, Equus. It's an amazingly meaty, compelling role, but was there anything personally that drew you to it?

GEORGE TAKEI: I first saw it in London at the National Theatre and I was blown away. I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year. I was roaming around England and I was in Leicester, subsequently, and I saw a small production there, with a different set of actors playing it; it still blew me away. And then I saw Anthony Hopkins in it.

Q: Wow.

Yes, I was so impressed by the play, and then I saw Tony Perkins [in the lead role]. I never did see Richard Burton play it on stage. And then finally, it was my Star Trek colleague Leonard Nimoy,who played Dysart on Broadway. And then I saw Burton's movie, and I was just so disappointed by that. And Burton's one of my heroes. My very first film that I got, while I was still a student at UCLA, I was seen in a theatre-arts department production by a casting director from Warner Brothers, plucked out of this student production, and put in my first feature film, starring Robert Ryan and Richard Burton [the film was Ice Palace]. It was two weeks on location in a small fishing village in Alaska and then two months back at the studio. Burton and I were a perfect fit, because here's this star-struck, stage-struck young actor, full of questions, and here's this legendary figure who loved to talk about himself. I would pose a question, and he would carry on, you know, holding court, and the assistant would come and say, 'Mr. Burton, we're ready for you on the set now,' and then he'd say, 'Hang on, George, hang on,' then go on the set and tear your heart out with a wonderfully performed scene, and when the director said, "Cut," he would come back...Now George, as I was telling you - I mean, it was amazing. And here I am now, playing the role that he played on Broadway and in the movie version. There's kind of a circularity about Dysart for me.

Q: What makes you want to come out, publicly?

You know, it's not really coming out, which suggests opening a door and stepping through. It's more like a long, long walk through what began as a narrow corridor that starts to widen. And then some doors are open and light comes in, and there are skylights and it widens. Brad's my partner, we've been together for 18 years. So, I've been "open," but I have not talked to the press. In that sense, maybe that's another opening of the corridor there.

Since this interview was coming up, I've been thinking on that. I've been thinking of my childhood. You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young. My memories of camp -- I was four years old to eight years old -- they're fond memories. We were first sent to a camp in Arkansas. I remember catching pollywogs and seeing them sprout legs, and then it snowed one winter in Arkansas, and for a Southern California kid, to discover snow was magical. 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. We had to line up three times a day, and take our meal in a noisy mess hall -- normal for me to go to school in a black tarpaper barracks, and I used to begin school every morning pledging allegiance to the flag, and I could see the barbed-wire fence out there, and the guard towers, saying, "With liberty and justice for all," without being aware of the irony of those words. But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful. That camp was sort of like jail, and bad people go to jail. So, when you're eight, nine... I didn't want to talk about being in an internment camp. They would ask me, where was I? I would say I was far away... Arkansas. But I never went into details. And there's a sense of some shame being Japanese-American.

Q: I would imagine so, if you have to basically disavow or pretend away four years of your life just because of that fact.

And I can never forget that teacher, Mrs. Rugen -- I hated that woman. She would refer to me as "that little Jap boy," and that stung. But I didn't even tell my parents about it, at home, because I thought, you know, it would hurt them to know that there was a teacher that was calling me "little jap boy." So I just swallowed the pain. I mean, everytime she said that -- she wouldn't say it to me, but I would hear her talking to other people about "that little Jap boy." It stung. But I just swallowed it. And you grow up like that, feeling ashamed of who you are, and having to swallow pain like that. And then when you get this realization that you have a different focus in life, you know, that other boys are interesting to you -- I remember certain boys, you know, who when they would hunker down their pants would go up and I would see their ankles, and that was exciting. At that time, that was exciting, but then you start realizing, that's not 'normal.' And so you start kind of hiding that as well. So [there's] that duality -- of feeling ashamed because you're Japanese-American, and feeling like you're different because of your [homosexuality]. And then [as you grow older], with reading, and talking to other people, your understanding of the situation starts to grow. And you think, 'It's wrong, this [shame] is not right.' And you start sharing it with more people, and you find other friends and organizations. As a matter of fact, I met Brad through Front Runners [an L.A.-based gay running club]. I was a runner from my junior-high-school days. And at a bar, you see a paper, and you see a gay running club. 'Oh, I'll show up,' you think. People would see me and they were kind of astounded, but I ran with them, they saw that I'm George, not Sulu. So your frame of reference, your community broadens. And as I said, that corridor that was narrow becomes wider and brighter. And you start realizing that this is 'normal.' For me. There's a lot of talk of normality. Equus talks about this, too. The large popular normality is that rigid, constrained normality. But there's another natural normality. And you come to realize, 'This is who I am. And by gum, I'm not going to let it be a constraint!' In the same way that I'm not going to let the fact that I am a Japanese-American, who was unjustly incarcerated and grew up with that, be a constraint.

Tell me more about how you met Brad.

We were runners. He was an outstanding runner; he's stopped running now. He's done more than me; I've done six marathons. We'd train together. And we were with the Front Runners, and there would be a lot of Front Runners that were planning on doing a particular marathon, training together. And then, you know, we discovered that we had common interests in the theatre -- he was a journalist -- we'd go to plays together and, you know, things happen. [Laughs]

Are you out to your family and friends?

You know, I've not had a good experience with one sibling. And I won't be specific because it's still a problem. My mother, initially, had some adjustments to make, but she got to like Brad very much. She got Alzheimer's, and it got very difficult for her, so we moved her in with us. Brad was wonderful. He was a saint. It's very difficult when you're dealing with someone with Alzheimer's. And some of the stages were... horrific. And Brad helped throughout that. She was with us for the last four years of her life. And I owe so much to him.

The full interview can be found here


George Takei has an official website, and his autobiography TO THE STARS is available via Amazon in the U.S.A., Canada, the United Kingdom, and Deutschland.

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