‘Star Trek’ Legend George Takei Opens Up About Coming Out

George Takei is sharing his story more than he ever has.

The Star Trek icon, known for playing helmsman Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek series, has a new book out where he discusses coming out of the closet in 2005 at 68 years old.

The book, titled It Rhymes With Takei, goes through his experiences throughout childhood and adulthood as a gay man, and says that the actor didn’t come out until his late 60s because he thought it would end his career.

His childhood was filled with all sorts of strife. As he mentioned in his 2019 memoir, They Called Us Enemy, Takei spent his childhood in unjust imprisonment behind barbed wire fences inside a Japanese internment camp during the Second World War. After the war ended and his family was allowed to live as normal Americans, he realized he was gay.

“I decided I didn’t want to be different again,” he said in a recent interview. “I started acting like the other boys…. I was able to build another kind of barbed wire fence, an invisible barbed wire fence that kept me confined in my body and not visibly identifiable.”

He said that coming out is a “lifelong process” and not as simple as just opening a door.

“I use the metaphor for a long, narrow, dark corridor,” he said. “But then you come to a window that allows a little light in…and you keep walking down that corridor and you finally reach that doorknob and you make a decision: you grab it and you open it, ready for combat, if you will.”

Thankfully, his career did not end like he feared after he came out.

“The very opposite happened,” he said. “Media seemed to love it. And I started getting calls from CBS, NBC, ABC, from various magazine periodicals. They wanted to know the story behind gay George Takei. Or they wrote roles, like on The Big Bang Theory, for gay George Takei in my Star Trek uniform. And my career blossomed.”