Hollywood Gays
Authors: Boze Hadleigh
Tags: #Gay, #Hollywood, #Cesar Romero, #Anthony Perkins, #Liberace, #Cary Grant, #Paul Lynde
Also by the Author
Broadway Babylon
Celebrity Feuds!
Celluloid Gaze
Hispanic Hollywood
In or Out
Hollywood Babble On
Celebrity Diss & Tell
Sing Out!
The Lavender Screen
Celebrity Lies!
Hollywood Lesbians
Bette Davis Speaks
Copyright © 2013 by Boze Hadleigh
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First Magnus Books edition
Originally published by Barricade Books, Inc. in 1996
Cover by: Paul Chamberlain, Cerebral Itch
Print ISBN: 978-1936833-04-7
Digital ISBN: 978-1936833-12-2
To Ronnie
Table of Contents
Introduction: Inside the Showbiz Closet
Hollywood Gays
first came out in hardcover in 1996, when the possibility of legalized gay marriage was just a pipe dream (gay marriages have existed as long as heterosexual ones, only usually bullied into silence). The book is comprised of ten interviews with gay and bisexual men of the movies. This version features eight of the original ten, plus two men familiar to most TV viewers and film buffs—one, thanks to a still-rerunning sitcom with special gay resonance, the other from the oft-aired movie that made Marilyn Monroe a megastar.
Now for a bit of updating:
Cary Grant
: Some superstars of yesteryear are forgotten, others aren’t. Grant remains a symbol of
suave
, of gentlemanly romance (as opposed to crude passion), and mid-Atlantic cool. Word of his gayness or bisexuality has traveled far, despite the determined efforts of some biographers and memoirists, including an ex-wife and his daughter. The more admired the celebrity, the more resistance to their being accurately labeled as other than heterosexual. The unadmired, the stereotypically gay, and those who died of AIDS—unless they’d also acquired a wife and kids—are more readily accepted as gay by a still vastly biased media.
When cable channel A&E, which used to actually run arts and entertainment programming, advertised a documentary on Cary Grant, it trumpeted that rare photos had been provided by the late star’s family—which obliged the show to adhere to the family’s official version of the icon’s sexual orientation. The long-awaited 2012 sexual memoir
Full Service
by legendary procurer-to-the-stars Scotty Bowers became a mainstream bestseller by recounting and reaffirming the usually closeted truths about Grant and his longtime lover Randolph Scott, also the mutual bearding of Katharine Hepburn and a bisexual but usually alcoholically impotent Spencer Tracy, among others.
Liberace
: The showman who put everything out there but the truth became known as the queen of denial via his death from AIDS. A memoir by his ex-lover Scott Thorson became a movie,
Behind the Candelabra
, directed by Steven Soderbergh, some of whose previous films have not lacked homophobia. Michael Douglas starred as “Lee” and Matt Damon as Thorson (Douglas’s late half-brother Eric was gay). The movie aired on HBO in the U.S., where gay-themed feature films rarely do well at the box office—and whose fault is that, kids?—but overseas was released into cinemas.
The most authoritative of various Liberace biographies is
Liberace
(2000), subtitled
An American Boy
, by Darden Asbury Pyron. Seven pages of the thick tome present yours truly as a leader of some kind of anti-Liberace movement, stating that I refused “to disguise his contempt for the performer” in
Hollywood Gays
and
Sing Out!: Gays & Lesbians in the Music World
(originally published as
The Vinyl Closet
). Is one supposed to honor the memory of a man who sued or tried to sue every time he was correctly labeled as gay and whose political affiliation was with the party that not only denies gay people equal (not “special”) rights but still doesn’t even want gay people to exist?
Anthony Perkins
: There have since been biographies about Perkins, but he turns up more often in books about Alfred Hitchcock and
Psycho
. One, about the making of the film, became a movie,
Hitchcock
, starring Anthony Hopkins as the Master of Suspense. In it, Perkins is briefly and matter-of-factly portrayed as gay. When Perkins died of AIDS, one Los Angeles newscaster tried to present the late actor as heterosexual, in view of his wife and children being at his bedside when he passed. I wrote him a letter of rebuke and noted his closeted hypocrisy (the “family man” was known to frequent gay bars in the San Fernando Valley, minus his on-camera toupee).
Though one of Perkins’s two sons became an actor, both seem to live out of the public eye. Coincidentally, Berry Berenson Perkins also died a horrific and highly publicized death on 9/11, when the airplane in which she was traveling was crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers by Muslim terrorists.
Paul Lynde
: What can you say about Paul Lynde (waggle-waggle)? The gay author of one of the Sal Mineo biographies is at work on a composite bio of three late gay comedians: Lynde, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Alan Sues of
Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In
. Paul, not a movie star, is less remembered today than in 1996, except by gay men of a certain age. Yet he turns up in small but indelible roles in films aired on TV—e.g.,
The Glass-Bottom Boat
—and of course on
Bewitched
as Uncle Arthur. When
Bye-Bye Birdie
was recently revived for Broadway, the either taste-free or gay-allergic director made a public point, practically an issue, of casting Lynde’s old role as Harry MacAfee with as minimal a camp quotient as possible. Bully for you.
Cesar Romero
: The press, including the gay press, is of course not without flaws. When
The Advocate
phoned me about an item they wished to run about Romero having orally serviced his pal and sometime employer (on
The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour
) Desi Arnaz, the reporter asked to hear that portion of the interview before the magazine’s days-away editorial deadline. I said I’d be glad to share the tape—not loan it, a sure way to lose a high percentage of tapes—but I couldn’t get hold of it that soon, as I was flying east next morning and the tape was in a bank vault. When the item ran, the reporter mendaciously claimed I didn’t seem to know if I had a tape! I demanded a retraction, which ran—but in a vague way that still left room for needless doubt.
Brad Davis
: The actor remains best known for
Midnight Express
. His authorized biography was written by widow and former agent Susan Bluestein, who presented Brad as totally “straight” (if heterosexuals are called “straight,” are gay people thus bent, warped, crooked? why should gays give heteros the monopoly of a word with only positive meanings, such as honest, trust-worthy, drug-free, sober, and pure…). Some of the media inaccurately described Davis, who wasn’t heterosexual and who had drug and alcohol problems, as “the first straight star to die of AIDS.”
Interestingly, Brad’s only child, Alexandra, opted, like the daughters of Cher and Warren Beatty, to become a son. Alexander, a musician and self-described “transman,” didn’t wish to be viewed as a lesbian. So now he’s viewed as a man who likes women. One wonders what Brad would think.
Randolph Scott
: The self-deprecating actor who seemed to welcome his lessening fame has by now all but merged into the shadow of Cary Grant. Scotty Bowers, despite his lust and affection for both stars, made clear in
Full Service
that Randy was the more fun, gentle, considerate, and affectionate of the two lovers who sometimes welcomed a gay ménage-a-trois. His more moderate ambition didn’t yield the public denials about his in-born sexuality that the former Archibald Leach made a habit of. Nor was Randolph Scott an alleged wife-beater early on, out of angry frustration at having to wed a woman and be separated from his preferred partner, nor did he later try to alter his sexuality via then-legal LSD.
One of hardly any books focusing on Scott is by his adopted son and adopts a tone of homophobic denial. Without particular reference to the latter, those celebrity fans who want their favorite star to be strictly “straight” and who hotly deny—online or off—that he could possibly be gay or bi, typically grouse that the late celeb “isn’t here to speak for himself.” Well, if he were here and speaking for himself, he’d likely still be using the same lies inherited from a time even more homophobic than ours. Whoever said speaking for oneself guarantees speaking the truth?
William Haines
: As with Cesar Romero but more so, Haines’s fame has receded significantly. Not surprising, as he was a silent movie star…and we know what silence, in another context, equals. Haines sometimes turns up as a vivid example of what Hollywood did to gay men who didn’t marry women and/or got caught with a man in their cot (at the Y or elsewhere). That Haines was able to thrive as an interior decorator was due to rich and famous female friends whom most victimized gay men didn’t have.
Occasionally one inaccurately reads or hears that Haines simply left the movies to start a second career. Robert Osborne, a Turner Classic Movies host who should know better, said the same on-air. (The cable channel very rarely acknowledges that Golden-Age movies included any gay or lesbian stars.) Reaction from viewers, including yours truly, resulted in Osborne later correcting the statement, which had erased the reality of Hollywood’s vindictive homophobia.
Still not included for thematic reasons, but deserving mention, is San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk, whom I interviewed six weeks before his assassination. The resultant
Christopher Street
cover story almost made it into my first gay book,
Conversations With My Elders
(later reissued as
Celluloid Gaze
). My proposed book title was
Man’s Laughter
, due to the mere manslaughter charge handed to double-murderer Dan White (he also killed Mayor Moscone, whose son later came out as gay) and because of the theme of man’s laughter running through the book, especially when I asked, “What makes you laugh?”
Happily, Harvey Milk became more widely known than ever via
Milk
, a successful Hollywood film. On Tom Snyder’s TV talk show to discuss my book
The Lavender Screen
, I was asked, in view of Robin Williams’s then-commitment to playing Harvey, whether the gay community would be offended if a heterosexual actor portrayed the late gay pioneer and hero. I said of course not; what counts is how the film is done. The long-delayed
Milk
was scripted and directed by openly gay men, and won a Best Actor Oscar for non-gay Sean Penn, whose rousing acceptance speech featured more guts and integrity than anything dreamt of by his selfishly closeted peers.