How do we look at the future with hope? George Takei says the answer lies in ‘Star Trek’

In the 2020 graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy, George Takei took readers into the U.S. government’s internment of approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps during World War II. Takei, best known for his role as Star Trek’s Hikaru Sulu, can claim an unfortunate degree of authority on the topic. He and his family were among those imprisoned.

In his new book, he writes about confinement behind what he calls his own personal “invisible barbed-wire fence.” The title, It Rhymes With Takei, is a witty bit of wordplay inspired by a lifetime of hearing his name mispronounced.

What particular word could rhyme with Takei?

“Play. Say. Yay. Oh…gay! That’s what the book is about,” said Takei (pronounced tuh-KAY), who will be in Philadelphia this week for the American Library Association’s annual conference.

This latest book is also a graphic memoir, and it briefly touches on many of his 88 years — his incarceration at age 5, his early years in film and TV, his breakthrough role on Star Trek in the 1960s that made him an enduring part of American pop culture, and his ongoing activism.

But the memoir mostly focuses on the parallel story of his life as a gay man finding his way at a time when disclosing one’s sexual orientation carried life-changing consequences.

“You could not be known publicly as a gay person and hope to maintain a career,” he said.

Then, in the 2000s, the issue of gay marriage bubbled up, and in 2005 a California bill that would have legalized gay marriage reached the desk of then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“He vetoed it, and that got me so angry. And it turns out that he was having an affair with his housekeeper at the very same time under his wife Maria Shriver’s nose and had a son by the housekeeper. And that’s when I said, ‘I’ve had a good enough career. I’m coming out,’ and the book is about that process.”

Takei was 68.

“People have known me as an activist and actor,” he writes in It Rhymes With Takei. “Now with this story told, I am the whole George Takei.”

The colorful, 336-page textbook-shaped volume — illustrated by Harmony Becker and co-written with Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott — arrives with added resonance.

“I believe so much of life is cyclical,” said Takei, referring to the historical echo between the internment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s and the detentions and deportations currently being carried out by the Trump administration.

“The Latino community in not only Los Angeles but throughout the country — their lives are in absolute chaos, defined by fear and terror, and that’s what it was like for my parents.”

Takei says his life was shaped by his childhood imprisonment.

“It’s a shameful history. It’s a history of the weakness, the vulnerability, the fragility of our democracy. I want all Americans to know our American history.”

Takei remembers “the terror and how scary the whole event was, but I was too young to understand it.” Later, as a teenager, he peppered his father with questions.

“How he explained it — he frequently quoted from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Ours is a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’ He said those are noble words that make this nation great. But the weakness of American democracy is also ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people,’ because people are fallible human beings. They get stampeded and they do irrational things or things that we regret later on.”

Takei spent three years in internment camps, and that experience is the reason he became an activist. He says that despite that time and what’s happening now — he refers to President Trump as “that Klingon in the White House” — he remains an optimist.

“I think of my parents. How dark a future do you think they could face with three young children? Yet they persevered. And we are now facing a dark future. But when you give up and cave into radicalism yourself, then you’ve lost.”

He is also girded by the ethos of the science fiction franchise that made him famous.

“On Star Trek, we had this acronym — IDIC, which stands for ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’ — working together, and you saw that personified in the characters. We saw that diversity. Captain Kirk was a white North American, but he wasn’t an American. He [actor William Shatner] was a French Canadian from Montreal. The second in command was a half alien — his father was a Vulcan and his mother was an Earthling. We had a Scottish engineer. At the height of the Cold War, we had a character, Chekov, who spoke with a Russian accent. That’s optimism.”

He points out that the show was conceived and produced in the 1960s, “another turbulent time, and so, infinite diversity in infinite combinations, that diversity coming together, working together to face a common challenge, [is how] we move forward.

“That’s going to help us overcome some of these seemingly insuperable differences.”