Beloved out actor and author George Takei will help spread awareness on book bans and censorship by serving as the honorary chair for The American Library Association’s (ALA) Banned Books Week from October 5 to 11, the ALA announced on Monday.

“I remember all too well the lack of access to books and media that I needed growing up. First as a child in a barbed-wire prison camp, then as a gay young man in the closet, I felt confused and hungry for understanding about myself and the world around me,” Takei said in a statement. “Now, as an author, I share my own stories so that new generations will be better informed about their history and themselves. Please stand with me in opposing censorship, so that we all can find ourselves — and each other — in books.”

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The ALA’s theme for its 43rd Banned Book Week will be “Censorship is so 1984. Read for Your Rights.” The ALA has also named Iris Mogul as its youth honorary chair for that week. Mogul is a teen who created the “Banned Books Club” after Florida Education Department removed roughly 300 books from school library shelves statewide.

ALA and the free speech group PEN America said that, in 2024, about 72% of book challenges were by organized movements or government entities.

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“Books are an essential foundation of democracy,” he added, according to The Hill. “Our ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ depends on a public that is informed and empathetic, and books teach us both information and empathy. Yet the right to read is now under attack from school boards and politicians across America.” 

Best known for playing Hikaru Sulu on the original Star Trek TV series, Takei came out as gay at age 68, and won multiple awards for his outspoken LGBTQ+ advocacy. He incorporated his experience living with his parents in a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II into his 2012 “legacy project” Allegiance (a stage musical) and his 2019 graphic memoir They Called Us Enemy. He and his husband, Brad Altman, appeared in the 2014 documentary To Be Takei.

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School bans on LGBTQ books “escalating dramatically” over last year

Seven of 10 of the most banned books in American libraries featured LGBTQ+ characters, according to the latest banned books report from ALA, while 2024 ranked as the third-biggest year for book-banning efforts in the U.S. since the ALA started tracking them in 1990.

In 2022, four of the most frequently banned books all had LGBTQ characters or themes including the nonbinary and asexual graphic novel Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe (banned in 30 districts), the autobiographic YA memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue by George M. Johnson (banned in 21 states), a coming-of-age novel Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison (banned in 16 districts), and the non-fiction trans/nonbinary book Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin (banned in 11 districts).

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