I heard on the news that “Tiger Woods and his wife are on a* family outing*”. Does anybody know if this means they’re all gay or are they just going to expose Anderson Cooper and his boyfriend?
Jeffrey Donovan of Burn Notice pings my gaydar (which is far from 100% reliable). Any “evidence” is circumstantial: the fact he’s 40, slim, and was a ballet dancer and theater major in college and has never been married. Anybody know him, and if so do you know whether he has a thing for overweight librarians his own age?
Michael Urie- who plays the flamingly gay assistant in UGLY BETTY- was referred to as gay in some periodical and got angry and had them retract it saying that he didn’t discuss his private life as “I’m young and it’s not all black and white, I’m still figuring it out”. Since then he has come out, which was a major surprise to nobody.
Another celebrity I was surprised to learn was straight was Bronson Pinchot. He’s also a great disher on the celebs he’s worked with (Tom Hanks-great guy, Tom Cruise- weird and homophobic, Denzel Washington- asshole, etc.) in articles like this one.
Robert Reid suprised me as well as Raymond Burr (I’m pretty sure that I heard about Burr before and forgot about it).
My brother-in-law used to live near Robert Reid about 15 or so years ago and told me about it before it came out. I have to say that I’ve come to trust his insticts in regards to who is or isn’t gay in Hollywood. He’s the master of playing “Fat, Gay or Dead.”
Definitely. There are a number of biographies of Selznick (David Thomson’s, Showman, is probably the best and most comprehensive) and in none of them is his sexual orientation ever called into question. Also, if some of his films are any indication, he had some sort of Madonna/Whore Complex going on with his eventual second wife, Jennifer Jones (but that’s just some superficial pop psychology on my part).
The reason he hasn’t come out is because it’s so blatently obvious that he doesn’t have to. It would be like telling the world that his hair is frizzy.
Heh, he sounds a lot like his character (Dennis) on the show. As Dee (his character’s sister) once told him–“You’re not gay; you’re just really really vain.”
So far, the only people who have surprised me are the people from the past. I don’t know if it’s because you had to hide it better back then, but I think it’s more because I wasn’t exposed to the idea of gay people till my late teenage years. So anyone I remember from before that defaults as heterosexual. (Unless they acted like Uncle Arthur on Bewitched).
And has anyone noticed that, as soon as you’re told someone is gay, and you go back and watch them, it looks freaking obvious?
eTA: I was surprised by Grandpa Walton and Miss Garrett. Not surprised by Sulu, because of his voice, or NPH once I saw him as an adult.) It’s not like I knew for sure, but the second I heard, I was like “yeah, I could see it.”
Seriously??? :eek: You could actually look at the guy, listen to him, observe his outre body of work, and think, wow, a rich celebrity like him must get more pussy than the SPCA? Really???
Although a manly man’s author, Chuck Palihauk (sorry, don’t know how to spell it) is ‘out’, supposedly, though he doesn’t blab about it.
Troy Donahue said once he’s always getting mixed up with Tab Hunter. I think he actually said, “I’m the straight one, dammit!”
Well I almost made it through the entire thread without finding a name that truly surprised me, but then I came to Daniel Travanti. That one does surprise me, partly because even though Hill Street Blues was and remains my favorite T.V. show, I was never attracted to him, and I am almost always attracted to the gay guys.
My pick for the thread would be Suze Orman. Watching her now it seems completely obvious, but until she came out it had never ocurred to me that she might be a lesbian.
**Bijou, Install: **Thanks for the correction. I guess the Pete Townsend thing is a mis-remembered fact from my youth. Guess I’ll have to fire my fact checkers. (We’ll blame it on the economy.)
As far as surprises, I’ll go with John Mahoney and Portia Del Rossi. Wow. Really? I guess John’s a better actor than I gave him credit for.
To the OP, I’ll go with Robert Reid, though as many have said, in retrospect . . . well, specifically when he came back for the television special 20 years later with a perm . . . .
BTW, and contrary to what someone said upthread, Reid is a good example of how an unmarried guy could fly under radar (someone had suggested the need for fake romances to prevent an inference of homosexuality). At the time, conservative/mainstream Americans weren’t thinking “oh, he’s homosexual” – most weren’t even aware of that whole world. Setting Rock Hudson up with beard girlfriends was as much a case of giving female movie fans the vicarious hunk boyfriend they dreamed of in the pages of their gossip mags as it was guarding against a suspicion most fans were probably too naive to entertain. For many, many years news articles and obituaries could refer to a guy as a “confirmed bachelor” without the great majority of people suspecting that to be code for anything.
It’s kind of like the homosexual lobby’s notion that conservative religious groups spend the majority of their time damning homosexuals from the pulpit. I’ve attended my share of religious services and, certainly in my youth, the issue never came up – partly because it was just so far removed from what anyone was thinking/talking about (well, my peer group), partly because it would have been an Uncomfortable Subject. I think the closest I came to even suspecting people would want to do “that stuff” was reading Leviticus and saying – “what the Hell did they need a rule against that for?”
Troy Donahue was straight? Who knew! (wiki-ing) Oh, an undoubtedly-torrential part of a year married to Suzanne Pleshette in her prime?* If he survived that intact… ;)**
It was a surprise to me, too. Mostly because I cannot find any evidence on the first page of Google results to support it, and that’s where the best rumors reside.
Note to others: Could you make an effort to support these claims? Not having remarried when your husband died when you were 51 ain’t evidence. It can also just show that you are sick of cooking for and cleaning up after some old fart and don’t feel a need for a new old fart.
Said prime having extended from roughly 1955 (depending on the state) to the present.
** - She was #2 of 4. If he was compensating, he worked hard at it.
I was also surprised about reading in this thread that Travanti’s come out. However, I have to admit it’s been awhile since I’ve thought of him because he practically disappeared within a few years of “Hill Street Blues” going off the air. This may have been by choice but it seems just as likely that producers didn’t feel comfortable casting him.
