by George Takei
Truth be told, I wasn’t even quite sure what Twitter was for, or what good it would do anyone other than to read breaking news. But as the Tsunami relief efforts taught me, social media can be a powerful force for change. And so, with my daily tweet, I not only hoped to share funny advice or anecdotes, but to effect some kind of change.
One opportunity arose unexpectedly, when I suddenly found myself in a unique position to respond to the world’s homophobes with my own brand of humor. Victoria Jackson, a comedienne who had a stint on Saturday Night Live many years ago, was the first I felt compelled to answer. She had gone on a very public rant about how the show Glee was supposedly turning boys gay, presumably because it is filled with musical theater moments. At first, I thought she must be joking or had lost her marbles. Anyone these days knows that you don’t “turn” someone gay, nor can you “convert” them through “therapy”, bringing them squealing back from the Great Pink Path. Indeed, I’m pleased that a recent California law expressly rejects and outlaws such practices. Even more ludicrous is the idea that a few song and dance numbers on a FOX television show might spread The Gay. But Ms. Jackson continued her shrill tirade, and so out of “exasperation,” I tweeted this:
Now, normally I don’t care to make fun of someone’s physical appearance unless it’s my husband’s (he once was a svelte marathon runner; now I just tell him there’s more of him to love). But you must admit, Ms. Jackson was asking for this kind of response. If she really believes exposure to some external influence can turn young boys gay, surely the sight of her in all her present corpulence would have a greater gay-ifying effect.
The “comedian” Tracy Morgan was another real piece of work. He is filled with such hatred toward LGBT people that, during one routine, he actually declared that he would kill his own son if he found out he were gay. I was shocked to hear such a horrifying threat, particularly from someone in the entertainment field who works daily with gay people and LGBT allies such as the remarkable Tina Fey, who — to her great credit — took Morgan to task for his outburst. This time news outlets began contacting me for a response. My tweet followed quickly after:
Now, I didn’t know at the time that Tracy’s father was already dead, or I would have tempered that a bit. That was an “oops.” But my objective was to answer hatred with humor, to “defang the snake,” as it were. I could spend hours arguing about how violence, or even the threat of violence against LGBT people is a societal plague. I could expound at length on how bullying and homophobia account for up to one-third of all teen suicides. I could ask someone like Tracy directly if he condones violence against minorities, or how he would feel if someone threatened to kill his son if he were born black, as I presume he would be. But that’s really someone else’s job. My own feeling is that laughter, irony, and ridicule are the best responses to this type of behavior. Giving someone like Tracy any more stage time for his weird, sad rant would solve nothing.
Another person for whom I share little love is former Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This movie actor-cum-politician ran on a platform of liberal social policy and fiscal conservatism, and I believed in my heart that he would stand by his principles on the question of same-sex marriage. After many years, the California Legislature finally passed a marriage bill that would allow my then-partner of nearly 20 years Brad and me to be married and enjoy the same rights and privileges afforded to heterosexual couples in the Golden State. I thought to myself, “This is going to happen. The Governor said he supports equality, and we are finally going to have it.”
Imagine my surprise and indignation when The Governator instead vetoed the legislation, saying, among other things, that this was a matter for the courts to decide, not our elected representatives. Of course, when courts overturn same-sex marriage bans, you’ll hear the same people complaining the courts are legislating from the bench; they’ll simply blame whichever branch of government sides with LGBT rights at the time. Schwarzenegger’s act of vetoing the bill was the heat that finally got me steamed enough to take action. I’m speaking specifically about the step of coming out publicly to the press. I had been “out” for some time among family and friends, but had never taken the public step of alerting the press. And as an actor, you’re not really out until you’re out to the press, believe me.
As the world now knows, for Arnold Schwarzenegger to take any position with respect to family values, marriage or morality is truly the height of irony. So when his own scandal broke, I saw no reason to hold back. I tweeted this, with a geeky Sci-fi reference thrown in for good measure:
This turned out to be one of my most popular tweets. But I only learned this after the Webmaster for Allegiance pointed me to a site that actually tracks Twitter virality. I had no idea anyone even cared enough to monitor such things.
Another popular tweet played upon the hypocrisy of some of the rants of the Fundamentalists. They frequently cite The Old Testament as proof not only that God is on their side, but that He really doesn’t like gay people. The truth is, you can find almost anything in the Bible to latch onto if you are really determined. The prohibitions in the Old Testament are not only archaic, but wide reaching. So, after hearing yet another righteous citation to restrictions thousands of years past their usefulness, I tweeted this:
It wasn’t really true. I don’t care for polyester. But the tweet resonated, I believe, not only because it pointed out an obvious double standard, but also because there’s something funny about imagining a senior citizen violating Leviticus.
We don’t have that many elderly spokespersons of comedy these days. We once had the great George Burns, and Bob Hope, and Johnny Carson. Today, of course, we have Betty White, who recently turned 90. I’ve learned that when you get to be a certain age, you can get away with saying a lot of things, some of which wouldn’t even be remotely funny if someone forty years younger said them. The Golden Girls ran for years off the same theory and basically used the same four jokes for seven marvelous seasons. I’ve recently suggested that Betty and I should do a TV series about two seniors living together in an unlikely pairing of a widow and a naughty gay best buddy. We could call it Friends with Government Benefits.
In my tweets, I also try to stay current, not only with news, but with pop culture. I read the Hollywood press, and I see every film up for an Academy Award for Best Picture (this is actually my responsibility, as I’m a voting member of the Academy). I don’t generally listen to rock music. But when I do, I believe some classics should remain undisturbed.
It’s hard to believe, but Kurt Cobain died more than 18 years ago, back in 1994. Miley Cyrus was only 1½ years old when he passed. For some reason, while the 1990s seemed to be a huge decade of change and progress, the years after 2000 all blend together.
Here’s another thing about tweets: You never know if something is going to get “retweeted” much, which is problematic because retweets are what draw fans to my account. Unlike more prolific tweeters, I tried to limit my tweets to one a day and to make them count. For a time, I actually made the effort to track how well they were received, if only to gauge whether they had any resonance with my followers. A pattern soon emerged. A tweet would receive high traction if it was among the first commentaries on breaking news. That traction would be increased greatly if it were funny, particularly if it made a pop cultural reference that had to be inferred. This latter point was important: I wanted to build a following of engaged thinkers, not merely fans. I had no need or patience for those who cared only about my work on TV or film. For me, social media needed to be an interactive, not reactive, endeavor. And a retweet had to say implicitly, “I get this joke and approve.”
Once a tweet enters the Twitterstream, however, there’s no real way to build much of any discussion around it. Sure, there are hashtags to provide a mechanism to enable me to go back and read what others had tweeted on the same topic, but I found the whole thing rather cumbersome. It admittedly took me a while even to figure out what the hashtag “#
FF @georgetakei” meant. Where my mind first went with that isn’t fit for print; let’s just say I thought it was pronounced “Pound-F-F George Takei.”
A tweet also lives on forever once it’s out, even if you delete it from your homepage. And there are some tweets that I’ve come to regret, even if they were funny at the time. For example, when Donald Trump was running for President, I was rather unimpressed with his “birther” campaign against Obama. It seemed to drag us into a non-issue over and over again.
So when his campaign finally ran out of steam, I was both relieved and amused, tweeting this:
I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Trump personally and even going on his show, Celebrity Apprentice, on which I only lasted three weeks. I’m told that my “exit” from the show was gracious, which I’m relieved to hear since it was an extremely frustrating loss that did not seem deserved at the time. While Mr. Trump and I disagree on many matters, including the question of marriage equality, I found him quite willing to listen to the other side. I’ve even invited him to sit down with me over lunch at Jean-Georges in Trump International Hotel Central Park to hear me out on the question, an invitation he’s accepted in principle, but we haven’t yet had the opportunity to make happen. So I wouldn’t describe him as a “douchebag” today, even after his awkward “October '12 Surprise” that fizzled like the career of an American Idol winner. This goes to show even my mind can be changed after seven and a half decades of living.
Some of the better times I spent on Twitter involved following the occasional Twitter feud (or in the case of the dispute between fans of Star Wars and Star Trek, the occasional Twitter peace — more on that later). I even had my own friendly feud with the comedian Gilbert Gottfried, whose name I always seem to misspell. Gottfreed roasted me at the Friars Club and I’ve worked with him on films before, including voicing Disney animations together, so let me first assure readers that we are on friendly terms. That didn’t stop Gottfreid from launching into me one fateful week.
It was shortly after the Japanese Tsunami in 2011, and Gotfreid had just been summarily fired from his job voicing the Aflac duck on account of his tasteless humor aimed at victims of the disaster. As one of the international spokesmen for disaster relief, and as a member of the Twitterati with a growing and active following, I was a natural target for Gilbert’s ribbing, particularly after I tagged him in a post but once again misspelled his name. He began posting things from his highly active Twitter account hoping to get my attention. Here is a quick sample of some of his tweets:
“@GeorgeTakei Hey #Queer, learn to spell my name.”
When I demurred, he upped the ante:
“Tracy Morgan is in trouble with the gays, me with the Japanese. Whatever you do, don’t make any jokes about @GeorgeTakei!!!”
“@GeorgeTakei Hey George, I heard when Star Trek was on, the pay was really low, but you received a lot in the back-end.”
I tried to deflect the attack, tweeting that unfortunately I don’t speak Chihuahua. But that only seemed to inflame him further:
“Hey @Georgetakei, That comment was hard to swallow. But I guess you’ve never had that problem.”
My followers started to point out on chat boards that Godtfreid was gunning for me, and try as I might to ignore the barrage, his Twitter guns kept firing. Then came this tweet:
Le sigh. I realized that “shields” were not enough to dissuade Godfreet; I needed to bring out my own Twitter torpedoes:
For this exchange, and others, Buzzfeed unexpectedly awarded me with the best Twitter stream of 2011, the above exchange being their #1 pick. Oh my, my, my. But for me, the real future of social media clearly wasn’t in a top-down, mostly text-based world of truncated messaging. Twitter was great for receiving instant news, posting quick updates and links, and growing a basic following. But answering fans became far too demanding, and going through my “interactions” and “mentions” on a daily basis was proving too much of a time sink.
And so, perhaps to the dismay of my avid Twitter followers, I backed off. By October of 2011, I had begun to focus on my Facebook page and was gaining much broader traction, and the ability to share images and talk about them collectively as a community was simply too enticing. My heavy Twitter days were more or less done — you might even say my Twitter campaign was in full retweet.
Waka Waka Into Mordor
ONE DOES NOT SIMPLY WAKA WAKA INTO MORDOR (FOZZY BEAR)
During my first few months of Facebooking, I discovered that my page had fostered a collective nostalgia for specific cultural icons. These started, unsurprisingly, within the realm of science fiction and fantasy. They commonly included a pointy-eared Vulcan from a certain groundbreaking 1960s television show.
Just as often, though, I found myself sharing images of a diminutive, ancient, green and disarmingly wise Jedi Master who speaks in flip-side down English. Or, if feeling more sinister, I’d post pictures of his black-cloaked, dark-sided, heavy-breathing nemesis. As an aside, I initially received from Star Trek fans considerable “push-back,” or at least many raised Spock brows, when I began sharing images of Yoda and Darth Vader. To the purists, this bordered on sacrilege.. But as I like to remind fans, I was the only actor to work within both franchises, having also voiced the part of Lok Durd from the animated show Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
It was the virality of these early posts, shared by thousands of fans without any prodding from me, that got me thinking. Why do we love Spock, Yoda and Darth Vader so much? And what is it about characters like these that causes fans to click “like” and “share” so readily?
One thing was clear: Cultural icons help people define who they are today because they shaped who they were as children. We all “like” Yoda because we all loved The Empire Strikes Back, probably watched it many times, and can recite our favorite lines. Indeed, we all can quote Yoda, and we all have tried out our best impression of him.
When someone posts a meme of Yoda, many immediately share it, not just because they think it is funny (though it usually is — it’s hard to go wrong with the Master), but because it says something about the sharer. It’s shorthand for saying, “This little guy made a huge impact on me, not sure what it is, but for certain a huge impact. Did it make one on you, too? I’m clicking ‘share’ to affirm something you may not know about me. I ‘like’ Yoda.”
And isn’t that what sharing on Facebook is all about? It’s not simply that the sharer wants you to snortle or “LOL” as it were. That’s part of it, but not the core. At its core is a statement about one’s belief system, one that includes the wisdom of Yoda.
Other eminently shareable icons included beloved Tolkien characters, particularly Gandalf (as played by the inimitable Sir Ian McKellan). Gandalf, like Yoda, is somehow always above reproach and unfailingly epic.
© Leticia Wilson, leremy - Fotolia.com. Used with Permission
Like Yoda, Gandalf has his darker counterpart. Gollum is a fan favorite because he is a fallen figure who could reform with the right guidance. It doesn’t hurt that his every meme is invariably read in his distinctive, blood-curdling rasp. I recall with fondness one popular meme:
Then there’s also Batman, who seems to have survived both Adam West and Christian Bale, but whose questionable relationship to the Boy Wonder left plenty of room for hilarious homoerotic undertones. But seriously, there is something about the brooding, misunderstood and “chaotic-good” nature of this superhero that touches all of our hearts.
Photo Credit © Keith G. Richie. Used with Permission
Although my “most-shared” posts began with sci-fi and fantasy, I found that fans universally longed for other things. For some reason, the Muppets — the classic, ragtag set of misbegotten optimists — also made their way commonly into pics shared on my wall. Perhaps it’s the simple wonder of a non-traditional, cross-species marriage between a frog and a pig that never fails to provoke a smile. I was particularly delighted to see Jim Henson’s estate pull its advertisements with “Chic
k-fil-A” after that company’s CEO and management came out strongly against same-sex marriage. Often when I’m stuck wondering about what I should post, I come back to these furred, fluffed, and fisted fellows. The latter adjective reminds me of a cartoon, which I can’t reprint here, depicting Kermit about to receive his X-ray results. The X-ray shows a skeletal arm deep inside
Kermit’s innards, the doctor saying, “What I’m about to tell you may come as a shock…”
For my fans born in the 1960s, Spock, Kermit, and Batman were icons of their early childhood that, to the delight of us all, maintain continued cultural relevance today. Indeed, Star Trek movies still roll out to entertain and inspire whole new audiences, even if the cast comprises a whole set of new, fresh faces. Kermit and Miss Piggy have made a comeback, moving back into their original stage in Hollywood. And meanwhile, after many franchises, The Dark Knight still rises in theaters.
I cannot mention the last fact without feeling profound sadness and loss for those killed by a lone, deranged gunman in Colorado while gathered for the midnight premiere showing of that film. I was so struck by the senselessness of it that I was compelled to put out a simple message that day:
