Here you will discover the back stories of kings, titans of industry, stellar athletes, giants of the entertainment field, scientists, politicians, artists and heroes – all of them gay or bisexual men. If their lives can serve as role models to young men who have been bullied or taught to think less of themselves for their sexual orientation, all the better. The sexual orientation of those featured here did not stand in the way of their achievements.
A full-length trailer for a new film that focuses on screen icon James Dean’s homosexual relationships has been released. The biopic comes from queer director/screenwriter Matthew Mishory, who says, “I did a lot of research, and found sources that were interesting to me. I stepped back and found the elements that inspired me. I found a few literary texts that framed the world and framed the story that inspired James Dean, and I sat down and constructed the story.”
Joshua Tree 1951: A Portrait of James Dean tackles its approach head-on. One scene shows James Dean making love to his male roommate in a corridor. Another shows him indulging in a tryst with another male, this time on top of a mountain.
Dean's first biographer was close friend William Bast, who had a intimate relationship with the actor. Dean was also described as homosexual by screenwriter Gavin Lambert and Nicholas Ray, who directed Rebel Without A Cause. Dean avoided being drafted into the war by registering as a homosexual, which was classified as a mental disorder by the US government.
However, when questioned about being gay, Dean famously stated, “I am not a homosexual. But, I'm also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back.” He was known to have sexual relations with both men and women. Dean died in a car crash in 1955, aged 24, one month before the release of Rebel Without A Cause.
Dean is played by actor James Preston, who is most famous for his role as a werewolf in the supernatural ABC TV drama The Gates. Also starring, in the role of a film director, is Robert Gant of Showtime’s Queer as Folk fame. Preston was recommended to Mishory by another actor already cast in a different role; they had taken an acting class together. Preston had been discovered by filmmaker David DeCoteau and subsequently cast in the movie The Brotherhood 6: Initiation (2009), a beyond cheesy grade D horror movie in which the male “stars” appear in only boxer briefs 90% of their on-screen time. Oops. Preston will have huge shoes to fill when the inevitable comparisons to James Franco’s turn in TNT’s TV film, James Dean (2001), come to light.
Cinematographer Michael Marius Pessah shot the black-and-white sequences on Fuji color film, removing the color in the transfer to create the glossy yet contrasted look. Film locations include Joshua Tree National Park, Laguna Beach and Hollywood. IMDB shows a release date of August, 2012.
Iconoclastic Features was co-founded by Matthew Mishory and actor/producer Edward Singletary, Jr. The company launched at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
"I thought Newman was arrogant.
When I finally got him into bed, I taught him who the man was." – Steve McQueen on Paul Newman
They first met on the set of Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956, rooftop photo below). McQueen approached Newman and propositioned him after engaging in crude, even insulting banter. Newman later told his friend Janice Rule that as they ended their conversation, McQueen planted a wet, sloppy kiss on him. With tongue.
Thus began a rivalrous relationship that was frequently acrimonious. McQueen turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) because he wouldn’t accept second billing to Newman. The two fought like cats and dogs over the positioning of their names on the movie poster for Towering Inferno (1974). McQueen was a brash liar, but Newman found himself strangely attracted to him, and there was obvious sexual tension between the two. But Paul was also having a sexual relationship with Sal Mineo at the time, and Mineo had fallen madly in love with him and wanted to live together as a couple. When Paul rejected that offer, Mineo attempted suicide.
By this time Newman had moved his mistress, Joanne Woodward, into the Chateau Marmont. If those walls could talk. Christopher Isherwood called on Paul and Joanne. Gore Vidal was a resident on a different floor (as a cover, Woodward considered marrying Vidal to further the future of his race for the U.S. presidency). Marilyn Monroe once knocked on Newman’s door with a bottle of champagne and got lucky, since Paul was alone that afternoon. Grace Kelly hit on him at the Chateau Marmont – it was Newman who felt lucky that day.
Photo: Rivals McQueen and Newman spar on the rooftop in Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)
When a friend took Newman to task for using a clean-cut image to hide a calculating, black heart, Paul had to listen to a life assessment as one of betrayal, deceit and lies. His friend suggested that Woodward had no inkling of the nefarious activity Paul was up to. Newman replied, “You’re right. Secretly I’m a devil. I can be a very, very bad boy.”
But I digress.
About this time Newman developed a serious man crush on Robert Wagner, but it did not turn sexual. Two later crushes (Robert Redford and Tom Cruise) also ended with similar results. Fortunately Newman was able to satisfy his need for man-on-man sex with McQueen, who was still hitting on him. Once Newman agreed to meet Steve in a cheap hotel in Long Beach, where McQueen said, “I’ve got every horny woman in Hollywood trying to get me to f*ck her. I need a break, a different kind of action now and then. You’re the kind of change I have in mind.” This sort of clandestine activity between the Hollywood rivals went on for years.
Just around the corner was one of Newman’s great cinematic triumphs, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), in which he plays a repressed homosexual by the name of Brick. James Dean was lined up for the role, but he died in a car crash before production began. In the film version, the direct homosexual references were removed from the Tennessee Williams script in order to satisfy then current production codes. The film script dances around the reasons Brick and Cat (Elizabeth Taylor) haven’t slept together in years, but mention of the suicide of Brick’s close football chum Skipper is retained.
Newman told Tennessee Williams, "The role of Brick is perfect for me. All my life I've been split into two different directions. One side of me wants to live life with my gay football buddy Skipper, the other side is tempted to fuck the living shit out of Maggie the Cat and be the heterosexual stud most of my fans want me to be."
Hollywood insiders divulge that Elvis Presley was considered for the part of Brick, and that Elvis and Paul got together to talk about it. Elvis asked about Newman’s friendship with James Dean. Newman swore that Elvis told him, “I’ll make a confession. I’m about the straightest dude that ever walked the planet. But if that f*cker ever called me, I’d come running. I guess you’d say I have an obsession with Dean.”
Faye Dunaway tries to keep the rivals apart in Towering Inferno (1974)
Well, honestly. The next time I go shopping for salad dressing, it won't be the image of starving children that comes to mind.
Source:
Darwin Porter’s biography, “Paul Newman: The Man Behind the Baby Blues” (2009).
At the Actors Studio in NYC, James Dean introduced himself to Newman and came on to him in a direct way, suggesting that the two of them play a love scene in front of the students, saying that they’d “set the studio on fire.” Paul was taken aback. He told Dean, “Hey pal, let’s slow down. Where I come from, we like to work up to things.”
They didn't play a love scene, but Dean had his way with him, and it was 6:00 am when Paul boarded the Staten Island Ferry back to his apartment, where he was living with his wife and son. Because Dean bragged about his conquests to his lover/patron Rogers Brackett, we are handed down this story of their first tryst. It was not the last.
Dean told Brackett, “I fucked him, he fucked me, and I taught him to swallow my spit, just like you do. One night I got him to fuck me in the doorway of an abandoned building in the meat-packing district. Sex is all the more exciting when it’s done in a dangerous public space.”
Dean soon explained to Newman that he was a “kept boy” and took him to the posh apartment he shared with Brackett. During the next three weeks a volcano of lust erupted between the two. Paul Newman fell head over heels, and Dean was fully in charge of their relationship. Dean made Newman wear a red baseball cap to match his own, so that people would see them as a pair. Paul complied willingly. Paul was seen on the West Coast wearing that red cap even after Dean’s untimely death.
Echoing the experience with Shelley Winters and Brando, Eartha Kitt once bedded Dean and Newman after a dance lesson. “I had both of them that afternoon, and I came to the conclusion that white boys are so delicious. That time back in my dance studio ranks as one of the most celestial experiences of my life. Those two beauties transported me to heaven. I never knew that lovemaking could be so beautiful.”
It was awkward that often Dean and Newman were up for the same part. Kazan’s asked them to take a joint screen test (photo below) for East of Eden, and Paul was devastated when Dean got the part of Caleb. Newman begged to be given a lesser role in the film – any role – but no offer was forthcoming. But Newman’s greatest humiliation was losing the role of Danny in Battle Cry to Tab Hunter. “Losing out to James Dean was one thing, but how could I ever live down losing a role to Tab Hunter?”
Paul’s impossibly handsome face made life complicated for a family man. Rod Steiger said, “He was the Golden Boy of Broadway. Hell, he was so fucking beautiful. Everybody wanted him, and he was willing to share with both men and women. Paul was so pretty I would have fucked him if he asked me to, and I’m about the straightest actor in the business.”
Eventually Newman decided to abandon his wife and two children for Hollywood. He signed a Warner Brothers contract for $1000 a week, enough to buy a motorcycle to match the one James Dean rode up and down the coast in Santa Monica and Malibu. On weekends the two would get off their bikes, strip naked and frolic in the surf, followed by lovemaking by moonlight on the sand. Dean told all the lurid details to his sugar daddy, Rogers Brackett, to fuel his jealousy. Dean and Newman also spent many wild weekends in Tijuana.
Dean pushed Newman into moving into the Chateau Marmont, where Paul met Tony Perkins lounging by the pool the very first day of his residence. This was the start of a friendship and decades-long love affair, but that story will have to wait 'til next time.
Paul Newman photographed by John R. Hamilton, 1958
Source:
Darwin Porter’s biography, “Paul Newman: The Man Behind the Baby Blues” (2009).
"In my own mind, I'm not sure that acting is something for a grown man to be doing."
– Steve McQueen
His father abandoned him and his mother was an alcoholic prostitute who seduced him sexually; so did some of her “johns”. A gang member practically from the day he could walk, he bounced back and forth between his mother and grandparents and seemed set for a career as a petty thief and vandal (arson was among his specialties), before ending up in a California reformatory, where he was gang raped. Upon release, he enlisted in the Marine Corps at age 17. Since he was already a fan of bikes and fast cars, he enjoyed his duties as a mechanic and tank driver, but continued to have trouble with authority figures. After three years of military service he drifted around the the Caribbean. In a bordello in Santo Domingo, he hired himself out as a sex object and porn performer. Those early years would lead to McQueen's future problems with authority and relationships.
Gravitating to New York City, he hustled on the streets of Times Square to support his two loves: acting and motorcycles. A little later, in a borrowed tux, he became a "gentleman for rent," the boy toy of rich, aging women, two of whom were Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. When stardom finally came, the abused became the abuser, and sex was his weapon of choice. "The last thing I want is to fall in love with a broad," he said. The string of seductions that followed earned him an almost mythical status as a pansexual Love Machine. His A-list conquests included Jacqueline Bissett, Faye Dunaway, Lauren Hutton, Sharon Tate, Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood, and Marilyn Monroe. He married one of them, Ali MacGraw, for whom he abandoned the mother of his two children (and wife of sixteen years), Filipino-born actress Neile Adams.
Publicly, he insisted that he loathed homosexuals (nice try!), yet he often went to bed with them, favoring bikers and race car drivers. To admit to any of this would have meant the end of his acting career. Nevertheless, he had a tumultuous sexual relationship with James Dean, and a longer love/hate affair with Paul Newman. Other sexual relations developed with Peter Lawford, Montgomery Clift, Sal Mineo, Rock Hudson, Chuck Connors, and George Peppard.
By all accounts McQueen was a difficult, prickly individual. He abused drugs, drank to excess, smoked three packs a day and was riddled with self-destructive urges . He landed bit parts in stage dramas and TV episodes, and his role on Dead or Alive made him a bona fide TV star. This led to the film role in The Magnificent Seven, and the rest is a lightning fast trajectory into Hollywood superstardom. Like his onscreen characters, McQueen went his own way and pretty much did what he wanted. He turned down the film Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid because he refused second billing to Paul Newman. He was an independent, sexy movie star whose sense of “cool” defined the era.
In his heyday, with a salary of $5 million a movie, Steve McQueen was the highest paid actor in the world. If you want to see him at his best, watch Love with the Proper Stranger (1963) or The Getaway (1972). In the former he is sexy and appealing; in the latter he is sexy, tough and violent (his costar was future wife Ali MacGraw). McQueen was a good actor and a true cinema icon.
McQueen lived life at top speed, like the machines he raced so famously. Always difficult on film sets, he became a diva, firing crew on a whim. In the end fewer scripts came his way, because he had burned too many bridges. He was well on his way out in Hollywood when he contracted cancer. His early death at age 50 in 1980 remains a source of speculation, all of it explored in a biography by celebrity chronicler Darwin Porter: Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life. Others were shocked by the sex and violence in this book; I was shocked to learn that he was a staunch Republican and evangelical Christian.
His actor grandson, Steven R. McQueen (Vampire Diaries), is doing his best to follow in the footsteps of his iconic Hollywood relative (finger at right).
Steve McQueen, as sexy as his car, is shown here with one of his signature muscle cars, a 1956 Jaguar XKSS Le Mans racer. Only 16 were produced. This Jaguar was powered by a straight six engine with triple Webers, packing 250 horsepower. It was said to be brain-meltingly loud at 6,000 RPM, and also very pretty – like its owner.
The film Bullitt (1968) contains one of the most influential car chase sequences in movie history. Screeching through the streets of San Francisco, McQueen, in a 1968 green Ford Mustang GT390 Fastback, chases a 1968 black Dodge Charger R/T 440 Magnum. When McQueen, an accomplished race car driver, overshot a turn and smoked the tires (around the 1:10 mark), it was decided to replace him with a stunt driver. The Mustang’s interior rear view mirror gives clues as to who is behind the wheel. When the mirror is up (visible) McQueen is behind the wheel, and when it is down (not visible) stuntman Ekins is driving. It took more than three weeks to shoot the footage that took up less than ten minutes of screen time in the final edit.
Other than acting, McQueen's great love was fast cars and motorcycles. He filmed a spectacular motorcycle jump in the 1963 film, The Great Escape. Worth checking out. Here he's riding with one hand behind his back.
James Dean was born February 8, 1931, in Marion, Indiana. He had a very short Hollywood career, just two years, before his untimely death at the age of 25. However, he became a lasting icon of American film, one of disaffected non-conformity.
A basketball player in high school, Dean lost his front teeth in a sports related accident and had to wear false teeth for the rest of his life. He had terrible eyesight, as well. However, he excelled at acting, and his brooding handsomeness helped lead to a successful television, stage and film career.
When Dean was living in NYC, studying at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, he was supported by an older homosexual gentleman, Rogers Brackett, who had become his lover and mentor. Brackett was the radio director for an advertising agency. While attending a class conducted by Marlon Brando in 1951, Dean stayed after the session to meet his idol, beginning an intense sexual affair with Marlon that lasted through the winter. Dean was completely smitten with Brando, often stalking him when Marlon was out on dates with others. Dean groomed himself to become a Brando clone, copying his walk, speech and acting style. Dean immersed himself in the techniques of method acting, and he landed a role on Broadway as a boy who seduces a male tourist in André Gide's The Immoralist (1954). He quit the show after just three weeks in order to fly to Hollywood in April, 1954, to film East of Eden (1955). On the set Dean had disagreements with director Elia Kazan, but he delivered an outstanding performance. Dean had several romances with actresses and with men, as well. Cited by biographers as having had affairs with Dean are actors Clifton Webb, Bill Bast, and Jack Simmons, as well as Brando and producer Rogers Brackett.
Dean's engagement to actress Pier Angeli quieted rumors of his bisexuality, but he was widely quoted as saying, when pressed about his sexual orientation, that he wouldn't go through life with one hand tied behind his back. Angeli's abrupt breaking off of the engagement and her subsequent marriage to singer Vic Damone left Dean the subject of further speculation. Bill Bast, one of Dean’s closest friends and his roommate at UCLA, stated that he and Dean had been lovers. It is known that Dean frequented gay bars, and people who knew him at the time said he was homosexual (not bisexual), including screenwriter Gavin Lambert and “Rebel without a Cause” director Nicholas Ray.
Dean busied himself with work on Rebel without a Cause (1955, photo above), the film that would establish him as an enduring Hollywood star, even though it was released after his death. A classic film about teenage alienation and angst, it features prominently a gay subtext embodied in the relationship between the characters portrayed by Dean and Sal Mineo. In its honesty and tenderness, the coded relationship between these characters has touched generations of gay youth. Dean portrayed a non-conformist masculinity that challenged the rigid gender-role expectations of 1950s America.
After completing Rebel without a Cause, Dean began working on the epic film Giant (1956, photo at left with Elizabeth Taylor), based on the Edna Feber novel. In this film, Dean's transformation from farmhand to oil baron is masterful, although on-set tempers flared between Dean and closeted co-star Rock Hudson. Soon after finishing all his scenes for Giant, Dean went for a drive with a mechanic friend in his Porsche on September 30, 1955, in which Dean was nearly decapitated in a car accident near Salinas, California. His untimely death, just as he was on the verge of a major acting career, catapulted him to fame and helped make both Rebel without a Cause and Giant huge box office hits.
