Still not interested, Uhura? I could change your mind!

I'm enough of a George Takei fan that anything that gets people praising the star of PT 109, The Green Berets, and Return From the River Kwai is OK by me. But the hubbub over Mr. Sulu's emergence from the closet suggests one social skill has started to atrophy in the era of general acceptance of homosexuality—apparently nobody has gaydar anymore.

I'm not saying you would have assumed Takei was gay from his Star Trek days (well, come to think of it, he did swing that fencing foil around with a little too much panache), but nobody who heard Kidd Chris' prank phone call with Takei a few years back could have been in any doubt that the actor was queer as a French Horn. Good on him! Takei and his companion have been at most lightly closeted, and if this "revelation" gets a few more butts in the seats for his run in Equus, well, that's what actors are supposed to do. So congratulations, George. Hearing this news item is a little like when I heard that Burgess Meredith died after years of assuming he'd actually died in Rocky III, but it does add texture to the reverse-Enterprise Sulu's aggressively het lechery in the classic "Mirror, Mirror" episode.