The Sunday broadsheets are lightly sprinkled with the magical stardust of interviews with gayer celebs today.
The Sunday Times
serves up Zachary Quinto; "Quietly impressive as Spock in Star Trek, Zachary Quinto on making a bang as the first openly gay American movie star".
Natch Mr Quinto talks about coming out - “I didn’t tell anybody I was going to do it. I didn’t tell my agent,
I didn’t tell my business partners, I didn’t tell my publicists..." - and the Hollywood closet.
The Sunday Times' Tom Shone writes;
'Despite its public avowals of liberalism, Hollywood’s history with
homosexuality has been frightful. One thinks of the blackmailing of Rock Hudson,
the hounding of Tab Hunter, the alcoholic demise of Montgomery Clift. Straight
actors such as Tom Hanks, Sean Penn and Colin Firth win praise and awards for
the “bravery” needed to play gay, as long as the character ends up in the
dumpster — Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised
in 1987, features a “necrology” of gay characters’ on-screen deaths — but woe
betide the gay actor within a mile radius of heart-throb status who decides to
come out.
“The torment those people feel — and I know it because I’ve seen it, I know
it in people — is so heavy, so painful,” Quinto says. “Things need to change.
This is just bullshit at a certain point. I’m not going to live my life based on
fear of other people’s judgments. If somebody doesn’t want to work with me
because I’m gay, then I don’t want to work with them anyway.” Still, one can’t
help wondering about mainstream audiences — the soda-sucking multiplexers and
burping mall rats. I ask if his decision, or the factors that weighed into it,
might have been different had he been playing Kirk, rather than Spock...'
Just between you, me and the bedbugs, Fagburn thinks Mr Shone's last two sentences there are snobbish and quite, quite daft.
Antony Sher was interviewed
by The Observer; "I was gay. Jewish. A white South African," he says. "And for different reasons,
I was ashamed of all those things." As a result, he suggests, the actors he most
admired were those who best masked themselves on stage: "Olivier, Peter Sellers,
Alec Guinness."
Mr Sher said something rather similar
to The Guardian last year.
Incidentally, the actor he most admires these days is Judi Dench - go figure.
Edmund White told Observer readers
This Much I Know.
Ed's turned into the gay Norman Mailer, really; the grand old man of letters, desperate to tell the world that old age has not withered his all-conquering libido.
And boy, girls, does Ed like to drop names; "Some of the best advice I've been given is from Truman Capote..."
Mr White's top - namedropping, self-mythologising, possibly made-up - showbiz anecdote; "Competition among writers is a strange
thing
. Years ago, Gore Vidal was with Johnathan Burnham from Chatto at
the River Café and they used to have these big tall bottles of olive oil on the
table. He mistook one for wine, poured himself a glass and drank it. He
spluttered it all out and said to Jonathan: 'You saw that and you didn't stop
me. You want me to die so your writer Edward White will be
King Fag!'"
Gripping stuff all round, I'm sure you'll agree.
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