TO THE STARS: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu

TO THE STARS: The Autobiography of George Takei, Star Trek's Mr. Sulu
GEORGE TAKEI
Pocket Books
$8.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Best known as Mr. Sulu, helmsman of the Starship Enterprise™ and captain of the Starship Excelsior, George Takei is beloved by millions as part of the command team that has taken audiences to new vistas of adventure in Star Trek®—the unprecedented television and feature film phenomenon.

From the program’s birth in the changing world of the 1960s and death at the hands of the network to its rebirth in the hearts and minds of loyal fans, the Star Trek story has blazed its own path into our recent cultural history, leading to a series of blockbuster feature films and three new versions of Star Trek for television.

The Star Trek story is one of boundless hope and crushing disappointment, wrenching rivalries and incredible achievements. It is also the story of how, after nearly thirty years, the cast of characters from a unique but poorly rated television show have come to be known to millions of Americans and people around the world as family.

For George Takei, the Star Trek adventure is intertwined with his personal odyssey through adversity in which four-year-old George and his family were forced by the United States government into internment camps during World War II.

Star Trek means much more to George Takei than an extraordinary career that has spanned thirty years. For an American whose ideals faced such a severe test, Star Trek represents a shining embodiment of the American Dream—the promise of an optimistic future in which people from all over the world contribute to a common destiny.

I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM THE GOODREADS M/M GIFT EXCHANGE. THANKS!

My Review: The fascistic turn new Trek has taken has a hard job erasing the original series' legacy, as there are still some dollars to be extracted from the nostalgia for those bygone, halcyon days of TOS (The Original Series in Trekspeak), of inclusion and celebration of human decency over disgusting, primitive violence and hatred of Others.

Thirty years ago, this book stood out. Nowadays, it's a bloody unicorn. See my review of They Called Us Enemy for the expanded and more self-focused story of Takei's childhood experiences with US racism and exclusion.

This is the story of Takei the man, the actor, the ground-breaking Asian role model. What it isn't, to the moaning of superfans of TOS, is a gossipy tea-spilling tell-all about the shenanigans behind the scenes of TOS. I was mildly miffed by this on my 1990s read; but this is a re-read, and it's been an entire generation for news to have filtered out about this fact, so no pearl-clutching from me.

Takei does not shy away from discussing his on-set conflicts with Shatner, of course, because they're part of his ground-breaking for actors who aren't white. He stood up for the integrity of his vision of Sulu. That would've been unthinkable even ten years earlier. Better contracts for actors! Imagine! The entertainment industry, like all capitalist enterprises, demands workers sacrifice for the profits of the owners. Takei stood against that; his actions might be small, but they were in concert with others, and had a real impact on the well-being of those across the industry who were also not white.

I mostly reveled, if I'm honest, in the opportunity to hear Takei's voice in my head as I read his conversational writing style. Of course, in the 1990s, the conversation didn't include even a whisper of his now-public gayness. He came out when the legalization of "gay marriage" was vetoed by Arnie the Terminator; around the was when Proposition 8 began being mooted. Never think, babyqueers, that straight people are your friends. Anything "granted" to you by their charity is something they can, and will, take away. May take them a long time, may take them a week, but anything they can take away they will eventually.

Would his very open (in fandom, anyway) secret have caused a stir had he discussed it in 1994? You bet! Remember how very different the landscape was then: AIDS was still a death sentence, though it was now deferrable to those who could afford the meds. There was the travesty of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" that the inexperience and indifference of the Clintons gifted us with wreaking havoc; also the indefensible "Defense of Marriage" Act. The social landscape was not such that the revelation to the normies that George was a big ol' 'mo would've done more good than harm...to the book, to the franchise, to his inclusion in the Star Trek/industrial complex of convention appearances and tat-sales.

I understood that then, I'm more clear than ever about it now, and I urge those unhappy with this decision made by a stranger they do not know personally to accept a perspective check from one who was there, who knew that landscape intimately.

He had our backs when the chips were down and his voice really counted. Let go of judgment, let the past be the past, accept that now things are different in part because of a brave man who's lost it all more than once in his life.

FRIDA KAHLO'S LOVE LETTERS, passionate Love for others in her own words

FRIDA KAHLO'S LOVE LETTERS
SUZANNE BARBEZAT
Frances Lincoln Ltd (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$24.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: ‘I don’t know how to write love letters. But I wanted to tell you that my whole being opened for you. Since I fell in love with you everything is transformed and is full of beauty . . . love is like an aroma, like a current, like rain’

Frida Kahlo lived a passionate life and the letters shared between her and those she loved are an intimate insight into her life. Letters were sent to her first love, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and to her husband Diego Rivera. But she wrote declarations of love to many others, including Leon Trotsky, Nickolas Muray and Jose Bartoli.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Is somebody, other than the spy agencies, archiving people's emails? I doubt a book like this will be possible to collect in thirty years. That makes me sad.

It's lovely to have this peek into Frida's life of love.

who we're talkin' about
I deliberately said it that way because "love life" carries an entirely different meaning in English. I think no one exemplifies a "life of love" better than wounded, damaged Kahlo. Her many surgeries, her intense pain after the accident that mangled her, the earliness of her death...she was FORTY-SEVEN! I mean, I knew she was too young to die, but that's barely middle age!...all conspired to keep her isolated. It was inevitable. No wonder her artwork is a riot of color, is so intensely involved in portraying volumes in space...it had to be, or she'd go mad. Madder.

Frida in 1926, pre-accident
How I wish she'd lived in the time of the internet. How grateful I am that she didn't. It's like wishing her accident never happened, or she was not so severely broken by it...she wouldn't have been herself, then. Would we know of her as the monadnock of art she is had she not been made famous for overcoming her physical disadvantages? 17 September 1925 ruined one life, opened another. From the life before, her love letters to Alejandro Gómez Arias show a callow, intense crush on this handsome guy:

hubba hubba! me likee!
...who, to be honest, is very crushwortthy on value of face. The letters are, well, those of a young, very young, woman finding out about this amazing thing called Love:

It's the sort of thing that causes some people to insist their papers be burned after their death. I'm not sure that's wrong of them. After all, outpourings of Love are utterly cringe if you're not also in love; sometimes even if you are, but in a good way then.

I thoroughly enjoyed this collection of Frida's letters as an object, and as per usual give Frances Lincoln Ltd's designers big ups for their presentation. I understand this is a gift object. I would give it five of five stars if it had included some of the responses the recipients returned. I'm not al all sure that would've been the same book, of course, so that's why I got as close to the full five as I did. I'm quite sure I'd gift this to my lesbian pal (she's still iconic among us, despite the careful heteronormativity of this selection), or my Frida freak cousin, or just pretend I'll give it to someone and end up keeping it on my coffee table for people to flip through.

It's two hours well-spent learning about the close relationship between a gifted artist's openness to Love, and her creative intensity. This was a spirit not to be trapped, not to be bound, not to be trammelled; this was a woman who Loved where she would, who she would.

BAD GAYS: A Homosexual History, spill the tea on these mad, bad, dangerous to know men

BAD GAYS: A Homosexual History
HUW LEMMEY & BEN MILLER
Verso Books
$19.95 trade paper, available now

NOW $1.99 ON KINDLE!

Rating: 4* of five

WINNER 2022 GOODREADS CHOICE AWARD—History & Biography

The Publisher Says: An unconventional history of homosexuality

We all remember Oscar Wilde, but who speaks for Bosie? What about those ‘bad gays’ whose unexemplary lives reveal more than we might expect? Many popular histories seek to establish homosexual heroes, pioneers, and martyrs but, as Huw Lemmey and Ben Miller argue, the past is filled with queer people whose sexualities and dastardly deeds have been overlooked despite their being informative and instructive.

Based on the hugely popular podcast series of the same name, Bad Gays asks what we can learn about LGBTQ+ history, sexuality and identity through its villains, failures, and baddies. With characters such as the Emperor Hadrian, anthropologist Margaret Mead and notorious gangster Ronnie Kray, the authors tell the story of how the figure of the white gay man was born, and how he failed. They examine a cast of kings, fascist thugs, artists and debauched bon viveurs. Imperial-era figures Lawrence of Arabia and Roger Casement get a look-in, as do FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover, lawyer Roy Cohn, and architect Philip Johnson.

Together these amazing life stories expand and challenge mainstream assumptions about sexual identity: showing that homosexuality itself was an idea that emerged in the nineteenth century, one central to major historical events.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book made me laugh a lot more often than it made me angry...given the subject, that is quite a compliment.

Every so often it is useful–and let's not front, good catty fun–to contemplate the lives of those gay guys among us who exemplify the adage, ‘if you can't be a shining example, you can be a horrible warning...choose wisely.’ We in historically oppressed minority communities tend to hold up the shining examples and quietly ignore the shady, rotten, or even downright evil people that make up our world. Since those people are literally everywhere, some among them statistically must be gay...often we know they were, at least by modern lights, but we stay shtumm to avoid handing ammunition to Them, The Oppressors.

Time to wiggle out of that girdle, y'all, the haters gonna hate no matter what we do or don't celebrate, talk about, venerate.

This browser's garden of delights is so much fun to romp through, tutting in horror, chuckling in sympathy, staring slack-jawed in appalled repulsion. What these figures from the past would make of being lumped into a category based on what history—gossipy old thing, history—has to say about their sexual lives and/or natures, we will not likely ever find out. I'm pretty hopeful that the current round of gains made by the QUILTBAG spectrum of outlaws will solidify and become embedded in the culture. The sheer rage and hate that the thunderous scum on the reactionary end of the social spectrum tells me that they're very afraid of that happening and are doing everything they've ever done before to stop it from happening...but it seems to be less effective this go-round.

Books like this remind us all that just because They are worse, doesn't mean we are all good. Accepting that people are people, an inconsistent and highly changeable lot, every-damn-where on every metric and spectrum any huan mind can devise, is a key weapon to deploy against demonization by Them.

Learn your history...all of it...and no one can ever surprise you with a hurld accusation again.

Self-gifting for the whitest gay (not lesbian, trans, or PoC) guy this #Booksgiving. If you know some white gay man well enough to want to give him a gift, you can count on this one making a hit.