Okay, well. When I heard this news I wasn’t in any way shocked; it’s something I never thought about before, but suddenly seems obvious and unsurprising: George Takei, the erstwhile Sulu from Star Trek, has come out of the closet.
“The world has changed from when I was a young teen feeling ashamed for being gay,” he said. “The issue of gay marriage is now a political issue. That would have been unthinkable when I was young.”
The 68-year-old actor said he considers himself as “having been out for quite some time.” Takei and his partner, Brad Altman, have been together for 18 years.
Takei, a Japanese-American who lived in a U.S. internment camp from age 4 to 8, said he grew up feeling shameful about his ethnicity and sexuality. He likened prejudice against gays to racial segregation.
“It’s against basic decency and what American values stand for,” he said.
Good for him. Now we gay Star Trek fans can finally reconcile those little twinges we felt when Mr. Sulu, drunk from some alien virus, swashbuckled around the Enterprise without his shirt.
Is this the part where I make some caddy quip about “going where a few men have gone before?”