I was at the Human Rights Campaign's annual awards dinner and gala in San Francisco Saturday night, where George Takei received HRC's Equality Award, Elizabeth Edwards gave the keynote address, and the always-gorgeous Lucy Lawless gave us three wardrobe changes and a whole lotta love for her gay fans. And I’m here to tell you it's official: Mr. Sulu loves him some Xena.

“Isn’t she fabulous?” he said of Lawless, who swished over in a low cut black gown. “I’ve never met her before.”

At the reception before the awards dinner, I told Takei I’d been a huge fan of the original Star Trek series, but had always felt excluded from the show’s Utopian vision, where queers like me – and him – were invisible.

“Well, Star Trek had as its core value what we call IDIC, Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,” he said. “And (Trek producer and creator) Gene Roddenberry always told us the diversity of the Starship Enterprise was where its strength was. There’s a diversity that we can see: the color of one’s skin, or the shape of one’s eyes. There’s the accent of a person, diversity we can hear. But there’s another diversity that we can’t see oftentimes, but that too is a part of the strength of America.”