# George Takei Born George Hosato Takei on April 20, 1937 in Los Angeles. Japanese-American actor best known for his role as **Hikaru Sulu** on the original *Star Trek* television series (1966-1969) and subsequent *Star Trek* films, who in his post-acting career has become one of the most-followed LGBTQ-rights public figures in American social media. ## Internment Takei was 4 years old when his family was forcibly relocated under the U.S. government's World War II Japanese-American internment program, following [[Executive Order 9066]] (February 1942). The Takei family was incarcerated first at the Rohwer Relocation Center in Arkansas, then at the Tule Lake Segregation Center in California — held until the end of the war in 1945. His childhood experience of internment has been the central narrative of his late-career memoir work, particularly: - The 2012 Broadway musical ***Allegiance***, in which Takei starred and which he co-developed - The 2019 graphic memoir ***They Called Us Enemy***, which has become one of the most-assigned American books for middle-school and high-school readers in the post-2020 anti-internment-history educational wave ## Star Trek and Career Takei joined the original *Star Trek* cast in 1966 as Lt. Hikaru Sulu. The role made him one of the **first Asian-American actors cast in a recurring American television series role** as a competent professional rather than an exoticized side character. He reprised the role across multiple *Star Trek* films through 1991. ## Coming Out (2005) and Activism Takei came out publicly as gay in **October 2005**, at age 68, after the California state legislature passed and Governor Schwarzenegger vetoed marriage-equality legislation. He had been in a relationship with his partner Brad Altman since 1987; the two married in California in September 2008 during the brief pre-Prop-8 window of legal same-sex marriage. Takei has used his post-2005 platform — anchored by one of the most-followed American social-media accounts (peak ~10 million Facebook followers in the 2010s) — for sustained LGBTQ-rights and Japanese-American-internment-history advocacy. His distinctive contribution has been the **late-career visibility model**: an established mainstream actor coming out at retirement age and using accumulated public goodwill for direct LGBTQ advocacy. ## Place in the Vault Takei occupies a specific niche in the contemporary American LGBTQ ecosystem: the **cross-generational public-figure ally** whose visibility connects World War II Japanese-American civil-liberties history, the *Star Trek* fan community, and contemporary LGBTQ-rights organizing in a way few other American public figures bridge. The fact that an 88-year-old internment survivor is one of the most-followed LGBTQ social-media voices in the country has structural significance for the contemporary politics of immigration, anti-LGBTQ legislation, and authoritarian-warning historical analogy. --- ## See Also - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]]