I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

To do theater you need to block off a hunk of time.

Well, it gives, certainly to my father, who is the one that suffered the most in our family, and understanding of how the ideals of a country are only as good as the people who give it flesh and blood.

This is supposed to be a participatory democracy and if we're not in there participating then the people that will manipulate and exploit the system will step in there.

Every time we had a hot war going on in Asia, it was difficult for Asian Americans here.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

I thought this convention phenomenon was very flattering, but that's about the extent of it.

You know, I grew up in two American internment camps, and at that time I was very young.

My memories of camp - I was four years old to eight years old - they're fond memories.

Yes, I remember the barbed wire and the guard towers and the machine guns, but they became part of my normal landscape. What would be abnormal in normal times became my normality in camp.

Well, the whole history of Star Trek is the market demand.

Then that did very well at the box office, so before you knew it, we were in a string of feature motion pictures. Then they announced that they were going to do some spinoffs of us.

But when we came out of camp, that's when I first realized that being in camp, that being Japanese-American, was something shameful.

I'm a civic busybody and I've been blessed with an active career.

As you know, when Star Trek was canceled after the second season, it was the activism of the fans that revived it for a third season.

I spent my boyhood behind the barbed wire fences of American internment camps and that part of my life is something that I wanted to share with more people.

I'm an anglophile. I visit England regularly, sometimes three or four times a year, at least once a year.

And it seems to me important for a country, for a nation to certainly know about its glorious achievements but also to know where its ideals failed, in order to keep that from happening again.

STAR TREK is a show that had a vision about a future that was positive.

Plays close, movies wrap and TV series eventually get cancelled, and we were cancelled in three season.

I've run the marathon several times, so I definitely don't look like the Great Ancestor!

'Star Trek' fans totally accepted my sexual orientation. There are a great number of LGBT people across 'Star Trek' fandom. The show always appealed to people that were different - the geeks and the nerds, and the people who felt they were not quite a part of society, sometimes because they may have been gay or lesbian.

'Star Trek' is about acceptance, and the strength of the Starship Enterprise is that it embraces diversity in all its forms.

Arguments that we will never stop all shootings by restricting access to such weapons fails to account for our strong and common desire at least to stop many of them - or any of them.

As my audience grew more diverse, I started interjecting social justice advocacy and commentaries about LGBT equality, and it just kept growing more.

At the core of 'Star Trek' is Gene Roddenberry's vision of the future. So much of science-fiction is about a dystopian society with human civilization having crumbled. He had an affirmative, shining, positive view of the future.

Back in the day, coming out was something very personal. You began by acknowledging the truth, first to yourself, then to close family and friends. Those of us more in the public spotlight, though, also had to 'come out' to the press.

Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower.

Dramatic shows are the ones that I am attracted to.

Even before I could vote, I was involved in the political arena. My father was an admirer of Adlai Stevenson, and he took me to the Stevenson for President headquarters, and he volunteered me. That was my introduction to electoral politics, which was exciting and fun and thrilling and very theatrical.

Following the Orlando attack, ISIS claimed the attacker as one of its own and called for even more such killings worldwide.

Gene Roddenberry continually reminded us that the Star Trek Enterprise was a metaphor for starship Earth. And the strength in this starship came from its diversity, coming together and working in concert as a team. That is the strength of our countries, Canada and the United States. We are nations of diversity.

Gene Roddenbury felt that television was being wasted. That it had the potential for enlightenment and even inspiration.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there.

I discovered that funny animal pictures - memes - would get a lot of likes and shares.

I do find things funny. When you see life through the eyes of someone with a good sense of humor, which my grandmother did, life is a human comedy.

I do think that Japan will be one of the nations that have equality, and that, too, will serve as an example for other Asian nations.

I had convinced my father to let me pursue this career, and I passionately wanted it. And here was this conflict in me, and I hadn't shared it with my father. And it was excruciating to always have your guard up. Particularly because, being an actor, you're public and visible. I could be seen coming out of a gay bar. Who could have seen me?

I have a sister who is technophobic; she doesn't even use a computer.

I have two passions in my life. One is to raise the awareness of the internment of Japanese-American citizens. My other passion is the theater. And I've been able to wed the two passions.

I intend to live life, not just exist.

I love being an actor.

I love people. When you're engaged with society and trying to make it a better society, you're an optimist.

I may not have trekked through the galaxies in reality. But I have trekked all over this planet: Australia, Asia, Latin America, Europe.

I remembered some people who lived across the street from our home as we were being taken away. When I was a teenager, I had many after-dinner conversations with my father about our internment. He told me that after we were taken away, they came to our house and took everything. We were literally stripped clean.

I think Donald Trump's interpretation of marriage is something that he himself doesn't really believe in. 'Traditional marriage' is where two people love each other, commit to each other, care for each other over the years. It is a meaningful ceremony, and his interpretation of that is not recognizing what real marriage is.

I think being optimistic is ensuring your success. If you start out saying 'I've got this problem,' or 'I'm angry at that,' you will not succeed.

I think my whole life has been shaped by my childhood incarceration in America's concentration camps.