George, I remember from the very first few times
we were together in the late '80s,
I was so impressed and inspired and in awe
of your activism.
You seem like a person who, even without Star Trek,
would be pursuing justice and equality for all.
How has Star Trek affected
that activist impulse?
How has Star Trek intersected with your values
over all of these years?
Well, you're very kind to give me credit for all that,
but you gotta remember, as I said, I was closeted.
I wasn't that gutsy.
The reason that I have been an issues-oriented guy
is because when I was five years old,
I had
one of the most egregious failures of our democracy
thrown in my face.
My parents got me up, together with my brother,
a year younger, and my baby sister was an infant.
And my brother and I were told to wait in the living room
while my parents did some last minute packing
back in the bedroom.
And so the two of us were just gazing out
the living room window at the neighborhood, and suddenly,
we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway
carrying rifles with shiny bayonets on them.
They stomped up the front porch and, with their fist,
began pounding on the door.
My father came up and answered the door,
and literally at gunpoint, we were ordered out of our home.
As it turned out, it was simply because we look like this.
We were Americans, and yet our government,
our own government, the United States of America,
categorized us as enemy alien, which was crazy,
totally irrational.
I mean, I wasn't an enemy, I was a five-year-old kid.
And I wasn't an alien.
I was born right here in Los Angeles, California.
My mother was born in Sacramento.
My father was San Francisco, yet because of this face,
we became enemy aliens and imprisoned in barbed wire
American concentration camps.
Barbed wire fences, sentry towers,
machine guns pointed at us.
When I made the night runs from my barrack to the latrine,
searchlights followed me.
We grew up in an American concentration camp,
and it wasn't until I was a teenager--the war was over,
and we were just as irrational.
You know, if we were enemy aliens,
how come the gates were thrown open, and we were free to go?
My parents were impoverished.
They took everything from us.
My father's business, our bank account,
our home because we couldn't make the mortgage payment.
We were impoverished.
The government gave us $25 each and a one-way ticket
to anywhere in the United States that we wanted to go to,
and we came back to Los Angeles,
and our first home was on Skid Row, which for us kids,
was the worst part of the internment.
It was terrorizing.
I mean, because we, children are amazingly adaptable.
We adjusted to imprisonment, the routine,
the regimentation, the order,
but coming home was to us terrifying.
Here, it was Skid Row with the chaos
and the noise all day, all night long.
Sirens screaming.
Our hotel room would suddenly glow red with the police car,
police lights there.
It was a terrifying place.
In fact, my baby sister shrieked once when a derelict
staggered in front of us and barfed.
She said, "Mama, let's go back home
behind barbed wire fences,"
-: Oh my goodness. -: and so you know,
this was my childhood, and when I became a teenager,
I became very curious about our imprisonment,
and I sat down with my father after dinner to have,
to find out more about why we were imprisoned.