It Rhymes With Takei
by George Takei and Harmony Becker (artist)
Adapted by Steven Scott and Justin Eisinger
Penquin Random House, 2025
[ #1 Year of the Snake: A book published in any of the Chinese Years of the Snake: 2025, 2013, 2001, 1989, etc. ]
Since I didn’t get into my Howdy, stranger (a book about immigration) pick for this year I substituted another category, Year of the Snake. The book was It Rhymes With Takei, George Takei’s autobiography of sorts. It’s a graphic novel like his award-winning earlier memoir They Called us Enemy which was about his childhood in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. It Rhymes with Takei is a sort-of sequel about his adult life and how he got into acting and — surprise! — activism, something I never knew about the actor. Mostly I knew him as Sulu from the 1960s Star Trek and in more recent years, memes where he utters “Oh my” over and over again and denounces certain politicians as douchebags in a stentorian tone. The two aspects never quite came together for me and though I was amused, I didn’t know he got from point A to point B.
The book explains all of that. Takei’s activism took many forms — civil rights, architectural preservation, city planning. But despite being gay, he didn’t participate in LGBT activism, at least not in his earlier decades. As he explains it, he stayed in the closet both because of the damage it would cause to his career and to his other activism, some of which involved state and city appointments to power. This was the focus of the book and it was handled very effectively. The same artist who worked They Called us Enemy, Harmony Becker, did the artwork which was just as lively and enjoyable as their earlier collaboration. Takei came out as gay in 2005 and since has burst into the limelight in way he never did in his more conventional career.
The book also serves as a concise history of gay rights in American from the 1990s forward. It’s sad to think that since the book’s release in June of this year the federal right to gay marriage, which came about in 2015. is now in danger of being taken away yet again.
The book was also fascinating in how it shows the behind-the-scenes aspect of an actor’s life. Though Takei accomplished a lot in his life and had a wide network of connections in Hollywood and the greater world, some of which interacted in surprising ways, I have the feeling he was not unique. Peel back the veneer of even a minor celebrity’s private life and one might find the same thing. That is pretty humbling.
