James Dean: A New Film Tells the Sexual Truth

I'm not one for "outing" people after they have died, but at the same time until the lives and successes of gays from past generations becomes common place knowledge among society, it will continue make it easier for our enemies to malign us all collectively as freaks, perverts and whatever other derogatory terms folks in the anti-gay industry dream up.   While James Dean was perhaps not a role model in some ways, he was nonetheless a major stay who became a legend after his untimely death.  Thus, it is appropriate that the general public know the truth about who he was.  A new movie,  Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, seeks to set the historical record straight.  Here are highlights from The Advocate:

What could possibly be left to say about late screen icon James Dean? After countless books, documentaries, and film bios, director Matthew Mishory thinks there’s plenty. Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean, his feature directorial debut currently making the rounds of film festivals around the globe, offers a breathtaking look at a little-known period in the actor’s life. 

Set in the early 1950s when the charismatic Indiana native was just another determined hopeful, Mishory’s Dean (portrayed by The Gates star James Preston) depends on the kindess of well-to-do gentlemen friends, while experimenting sexually with his male roomate as well as numerous females. It’s a portrayal that will likely excite many fans of the mercurial star but upset others unready for the sexual frankness on display here — all told in glorious black-and-white cinematography.

We wanted to create a very intimate and perhaps unexpected portrait of who this man was. And that is the core of James Preston’s performance — actually conveying who James Dean was, not as an icon but as a person.

What is it about Dean that keeps people enthralled nearly 60 years after his death?
On the one hand, there is the sort of self-created mythology of James Dean as sensitive rebel bad boy that perhaps exists in at least one of the screen performances but largely was created through publicity photographs and the public imagination.  .   .  .   .  Dean continues to enthrall and always will because he fundamentally changed acting. He changed the way actors act on-screen. He brought a naturalism and an intensity to his performance that I feel didn’t exist before him. As many have pointed out, watching him act opposite his contemporaries, one often wonders if he is in an entirely different movie. Without Dean, we would never have had the great young method actors who followed — River Phoenix, for instance. So I think he fundamentally changed the way actors act and also the way Hollywood portrayed young people. The three Dean performances represent probably the first three truly realistic and compelling young characters in studio movies. Dean marks perhaps the first real American teenager put to film.

One area of Dean’s persona that’s still constantly debated is his sexuality. Do you think he privately conformed to some label? Was he bi? Was he gay?
One of the things I really like about our film is that you’ll never hear the words “gay” or “bisexual” or “heterosexual” spoken. You won’t hear any sexual labels expressed because we approach the topic of sexuality without any angst or hand-wringing at all. The characters are who are they are and were, and we leave any judgments or labels to the audience. That said, the notion that James Dean was nonheterosexual hardly begins with this film, and what is essentially common knowledge is, to my mind, entirely uncontroversial. One thing that so fascinates about this era, the late ’40s and early ’50s, especially among the Hollywood elite, is that people lived much more freely, sexually, than they do in our more conservative times. The great difference is that privacy still existed, so they did so behind closed doors. And of course there was an entire studio publicity machine in place to keep certain realities hidden from prying eyes.

Do you think that grappling with his sexual orientation really gave him insight into playing these tortured characters?
I think that, as James Preston has often remarked, Dean had no lack of pain to draw upon. His mother died horrendously of brain cancer when he was 8 years old. He had a father who probably didn’t love him enough and definitely didn’t know how to show it. And then he made his way to Hollywood, without a trust fund or family name, to chase a truly impossible dream  . . . .

James Preston gives a mesmerizing performance. How did you decide he was right to play Dean?

.   .   .  .  When we got to the callbacks, it was between James, who had come to us through [Joshua Tree actress] Dalilah Rain, and a few others. And when James came in we knew that we had our Jimmy. It wasn’t that he looked more or less like James Dean, although he did, and it wasn’t that he could do a mimicry or an impersonation, because we didn’t want that at all. James had a naturalism to his performance style that fit what we were trying to do.

Do Gay Celebrities Have an Obligation to Come Out?

In the wake of Anderson Cooper's decision to belatedly "come out" yesterday, the debate has been ratcheted up on whether or not gay celebrities have an obligation to come out.  One view sees celebrity and the access to the media that it provides as putting pressure on closeted individuals to come out and shatter the stereotypes and stigma.  Others view the issue of coming out as a personal choice.  I guess I fall some where in the middle - unless the closeted celebrity or politician is engaged in anti-gay activity, in which case then my view is "out the bastard."  Our former Congressman in this area Ed Schrock who I helped expose was a case in point: second most anti-gay voting record in Congress even as he solicited gay sex trysts.  The New York Times as a dialogue on the issue.  First, the view that gay celebrities need to come out:   

Not all gay people in the media feel as radical as I do about why it’s important for gay celebrities to come out of the closet. But having been a teenager in the 1980s, I remember when there were no — as in zero — out role models for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender kids to emulate. Instead, we survived on rumors of Sapphic superstar love triangles and A-list leading men who joined cults that helped keep their gay secrets. Gossip has its own power, not to mention pleasure, but let’s face it: The world is a better place when people aren’t lying. 

So much has changed since that time, and there is now a platter of options for celebrities who want to come out. There’s the People magazine route (splashy, safe, widely-circulated); there’s the recent Matt Bomer path, when he casually, yet seismically, thanked his longtime male partner during a speech (see also: Jodie Foster); and there’s a new road that I really like, which is the Zachary Quinto/Jim Parsons method, in which an actor simply identifies himself as gay as part of a bigger story in a highbrow news outlet.

Cooper has struck me in recent years as an example of a closeted famous person who didn’t mean for his secret to become such a big deal, and found himself stuck. But I think he’ll find that it’s easy to go from being a part of the toxic problem of homophobic self-hatred to a hero. And who wouldn’t want that? 

But as I said, not everyone shares this view and I know people locally who continue to live a lie in the public life while having either enduring relationships or a string of conquests.  Their very behavior suggests that being gay is still something that is shameful.  Here's a countering view from the Times:

If we suggested that gay celebrities have a moral obligation to come out, then any celebrity would have the same responsibility to acknowledge any hidden situation whose disclosure could theoretically help society. The heartbreak of psoriasis? Do a public service announcement. A victim of sexual abuse? You need to go talk about it on “The View.” Going bankrupt? Get ahead of this story and help other Americans in similar situations.

Obviously this is a ridiculous standard. We’re talking about people’s romantic lives, which are, by definition, notoriously confusing and fickle.

I’ve always said there are four kinds of gays in Hollywood. There's the openly gay; the gay and everybody knows it but nobody talks about it; the married, closeted gay who doesn't talk about it; and the screaming “I’ll sue you if you say I'm gay” person. In other words, the no closet, the glass closet, the cast iron closet and the closet you get buried in.

Of course, it’s 2012. Celebrities and the rest of us have less privacy than ever before. But you still get to choose how openly you want to live your life — or at least you can try until blogs and tabloids out you. 

That being said, surely every celebrity who has ever come out is happier and freer of fear, helps other people, furthers the cause of gay civil rights, and lives a more open and authentic life. So if someone wants to stay in the closet, they’re not being immoral — just silly.

With the suicides of gay teens far too prevalent, the more celebrities who come out and provide a glimmer of hope to LGBT youth the better.   Remaining in the closet sends a potentially dangerous message to or youth and underscores the hate and bigotry preached weekly in far too many church pulpits.  To me making a difference and making life better for those who come after us should be a top aspiration in life.  Staying in the closet doesn't accomplish that goal.

R.I.P Farley Granger

Farley Granger died on Sunday at the age of 85. While he had a very successful career in many respects, he never achieved the stardom that he might have found if he had been willing to succumb to studio pressure and manufactured PR stories to cover up the fact that he was not straight. His story is yet another one of a list of those who paid - and many continue to pay the price even at this moment - for their failure to conform to the religious dictates of a warped version of Christianity which seems more identified by who and what it hates than any love of neighbor lauded by the Christ of the Gospels. Despite career set backs, it seems that Granger had the courage to be his own man and to live his life for who he was as opposed to living a lie to please others. In 2007, he published a memoir, Include Me Out, co-written with his long-term partner (they were together since the 1960's), the producer Robert Calhoun, who died in 2008. Would that more in Hollywood had the courage that Granger displayed. Here are highlights from The Guardian:
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Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world's greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.
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The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being "a naughty boy".
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Luckily, he had also been loaned out for the claustrophobic Rope, filmed in 10-minute takes, resulting in an elegantly artificial movie, with the actors even more puppet-like than was usual with Hitchcock. Granger and John Dall were ideally cast as gay students who murder a friend to display a Nietzschean concept of supremacy. Granger played the highly strung Phillip, who cracks under the probing of their tutor (James Stewart). The public were less than enthusiastic. The director Jean Renoir scathingly dismissed the film, adding that it was "a film about homosexuals in which they don't even show the boys kissing".
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[In 2001 he] retired, devoting himself to travel and his greatest love, the theatre, now as a spectator. In 2007, he published a memoir, Include Me Out, co-written with his long-term partner, the producer Robert Calhoun, who died in 2008.
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As I know first hand after coming out in mid-life, being true to who one is can carry a high price career wise. But the alternative is selling one's soul. That's something Granger apparently refused to do. I applaud his decision.

Yet Another Closeted Gay Movie Star

The list of closeted gays from Hollywood's past just seems to get longer and longer. Besides Tony Perkins, Merv Griffin, Raymond Burr, Rock Hudson, Richard Chamberlain, and Tab Hunter to name a few, it appears that the name Van Johnson can be added to the list. Johnson died on Friday in Nyack, New York at the age of 92. The Los Angeles Times and New York Times both avoid any mention of Johnson's sexual orientation and apparent arranged marriage back in 1947 at the directive of MGM chief Louis B. Mayer with Evie Wynn. Her obituary from back in 2004 shows a far different reality from the one engineered by Mayer, et al. It is unfortunate that even in this day and age major stars feel compelled to pretend to be someone other than who they really are. Hopefully, some day soon a star will feel that he/she can be out and not suffer damage to his/her career. Here are some highlights from the Independent's 2004 article:

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In 1999, when Evie was bitter and near poverty, she finally stated that MGM had persuaded her to marry Johnson, one of their top stars of the Forties. "They needed their `big star' to be married to quell rumours about his sexual preferences," she said, "and unfortunately, I was `It' - the only woman he would marry."

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Although rumours quickly circulated that the MGM chief Louis B. Mayer had ordered the union to cover up potential scandal, the truth is cloudy. The writer Arthur Laurents states in his memoirs, a sunny male star caught performing in public urinals once too often was ordered by his studio to get married. His best friends, a young comedian and his wife, divorced so that he could marry the wife.

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She was briefly reconciled with Johnson and travelled with him to London in 1961 when he starred on stage in The Music Man, but the couple finally parted when Johnson began an affair with a member of the show's cast. Ned Wynn writes that his mother told him that Johnson had left her "for a man - a boy, really. He's the lead boy dancer."