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yonmei to have the best links... Interview with George Takei about his role as Dysart in 'Equus' and coming out.
And in case you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the bits I thought were the highlights:
This bit is background to the coming out thing, but probably not essential to read - I just thought it was really cool.
...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.
This is something that I’ve mused on for a long time. I’ve been thinking on sharing it with the media, but the media is an ungovernable creature. [But] it’s still a constraint in life, [and] you want to act on those constraints, like the marriage bill [AB 849]. Arnold Schwarzenegger is like some of those duplicitous Southern politicians who would say one thing and yet maintain segregation in the South. And that’s what he’s doing here. He’s a dangerous politician, in the same way that Strom Thurmond or other politicians who say one thing in order to try to curry a broad base of support, and then when push comes to shove, they act in a segregationist way. You know, that’s what Arnold Schwarzenegger is. When he first was mouthing the words he was mouthing I thought, “Hmmm, alright, let’s see.” And then this bill was passed, which was landmark, and it hung on him. And he failed utterly. When you see things like that, you say, “I can play a part in trying to change some of those constraints that we have to struggle with.” We talk about diversity, ethnic diversity, but there’s another kind of diversity [sexual orientation] that we haven’t really come to grips with as a society. And the segregationist mentality is so strong, but it’s as destructive as racial segregation was in the South, or incarceration on the basis of looking like the enemy, as in the case of Japanese-Americans during the second World War—you know, it’s that same mentality, and in order to be vocal on those issues, I think I need to address those issues as who I am.
Just as when I saw him speak in person (some fifteen years ago probably), he struck me as being somewhat egotistical and long-winded, but I forgave him both. Most actors have this problem of wanting to be the center of attention; he doesn't hide it so well as some, but he also has some stuff worth hearing.
yonmei to have the best links... Interview with George Takei about his role as Dysart in 'Equus' and coming out.And in case you don't want to read the whole thing, here's the bits I thought were the highlights:
This bit is background to the coming out thing, but probably not essential to read - I just thought it was really cool.
...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.
This is something that I’ve mused on for a long time. I’ve been thinking on sharing it with the media, but the media is an ungovernable creature. [But] it’s still a constraint in life, [and] you want to act on those constraints, like the marriage bill [AB 849]. Arnold Schwarzenegger is like some of those duplicitous Southern politicians who would say one thing and yet maintain segregation in the South. And that’s what he’s doing here. He’s a dangerous politician, in the same way that Strom Thurmond or other politicians who say one thing in order to try to curry a broad base of support, and then when push comes to shove, they act in a segregationist way. You know, that’s what Arnold Schwarzenegger is. When he first was mouthing the words he was mouthing I thought, “Hmmm, alright, let’s see.” And then this bill was passed, which was landmark, and it hung on him. And he failed utterly. When you see things like that, you say, “I can play a part in trying to change some of those constraints that we have to struggle with.” We talk about diversity, ethnic diversity, but there’s another kind of diversity [sexual orientation] that we haven’t really come to grips with as a society. And the segregationist mentality is so strong, but it’s as destructive as racial segregation was in the South, or incarceration on the basis of looking like the enemy, as in the case of Japanese-Americans during the second World War—you know, it’s that same mentality, and in order to be vocal on those issues, I think I need to address those issues as who I am.
Just as when I saw him speak in person (some fifteen years ago probably), he struck me as being somewhat egotistical and long-winded, but I forgave him both. Most actors have this problem of wanting to be the center of attention; he doesn't hide it so well as some, but he also has some stuff worth hearing.