George Takei

[la_vie_noire]

Now is time for an icon. laurus_nobilis asked for him.

Okay, first of all, I'm going to talk about a post I read some way back, please tell me if you wrote it because for some reason I can't find the entry anywhere. Basically, I remember how someone described pretty good what Hikaru Sulu, George Takei's character means. If I don't remember wrong, that post mentioned John Cho saying that he watched Star Trek: The Original Series because Sulu was there, and wow! He wasn't an stereotype! He was Asian and was a full character who didn't talked and dressed like a caricature, which was extremely rare for the time.

George Takei is also an LGTB icon and activist, he married Brad Altman after being together for twenty years, and participates in numerous Human Rights campaigns.

You can read his biography here.

Here is a wonderful interview:

MW: What other groups or causes are dear to you?

TAKEI: I've been involved with the Civil Rights Movement from the '60s. We sang at many rallies, one where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke. We marched with him.

Through that, I got involved in the movement to get redress for Japanese Americans who were incarcerated unconstitutionally during the Second World War, simply because we happened to look like the people who bombed Pearl Harbor. With no charges, no trials, no due process, we were summarily rounded up. I still remember that day when soldiers with bayoneted rifles came to our front door to order our family out. [...]

[...] Right after 9/11, in the plaza in front of our Japanese-American National Museum, we held a candlelight vigil and we invited leaders from the Arab-American community as well as some of the older Japanese-Americans who remembered the imprisonment here in the United States. They spoke out on the importance of our learning from the internment of Japanese-Americans and not letting it happen again. We held a symposium, inviting leaders from the Arab-American community, the Japanese-American community, representatives from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and a representative from the County Human Relations Commission. We also extended an invitation to the FBI. They demurred.

George Takei, people.















Japanese-American, born in LA, California. Again a ginourmous filmography is here. I'm lazy, I know.

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I have exams this week. Will do these, but won't be here much otherwise.