Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 29

C5 Austin American-Statesman Saturday, July 2, 1988 Hollywood still believes America doesn't accept gay actors By Hal Boedeker Knight-Ridder News Service Homosexual celebrities reveal their own stories after dying ZZ Gay (Fatal Vision, the recent Inherit the Wind remake) will do the script. "It's an important story that's affecting everyone in this country, everyone in the world, really," Michael Barnathan said. Delays and false starts have dogged The Front Runner, the story of a gay coach. For years, Paul Newman tried to film the Patricia Nell Warren novel. He wanted to play the coach; now, at 63, he's too old for the role.

Three years ago, producer Jerry Wheeler bought the book. Hemdale Releasing Corp. agreed to finance the $4.5 million film. Worried about its investment, it set a condition: A major star must play the coach. Just about every star in the late 30s-early 40s age group was offered the part, says Kim Garfield, unit publicist for the film.

"Either they feel uncomfortable. Or their agent has insisted they not consider it. It would hurt their careers." Desperate, the producer placed an ad in Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. "Myth: If I play a gay role, I'll never work in this town again." Then the ad listed 92 performers who have played gay characters. Among them: Cher (Silkwood), William Hurt (Kiss of the Spider Woman), Shirley Mac-Laine (The Children's Hour), Al Pacino (Dog Day Afternoon, Cruising), Robert Redford (Inside Daisy Clover), Barbara Stanwyck (Walk on the Wild Side) and Elizabeth Taylor (X, Zee).

Michael Kearns: 'I don't think the climate in Hollywood has ever been more homophobic' Reynolds said the alliance asked. "These attitudes shape America." In response, Hunter's producers asked for script ideas from gay and lesbian writers. "What we're fighting for is showing a man who does his job, who's up, who's down and he JUST happens to be gay," Reynolds says. "That's what we want. It doesn't always have to be, 'Oh, my God, I'm There are a lot of us out here who lead normal lives." Hollywood is getting the message.

NBC plans a miniseries of And the Band Played On, Randy Shilts' acclaimed study of the AIDS crisis. Veteran writer John "Rock, how many top actors in Hollywood do you think are gay?" "Whew! Too many for me to name. Trust me, Boze, America does not want to know." Rock Hudson to author Boze Hadleigh, from Conversations With My Elders. Even though gay characters are appearing these days on ABC's Hooperman and Heartbeat and Showtime's Brothers, Hollywood clings to the belief that, indeed, America does not want to know. In the old days, studios protected homosexual actors.

Marriages were arranged, bribes paid. The underlying fear: If performers acknowledged their sexuality, they would destroy their careers. The truth would shatter Hollywood's product, the dreams it manufactures. Two and a half years after the death of Rock Hudson from AIDS, the film industry is more accepting of homosexuality. But still: The Last Emperor sweeps the Oscars, with a plot that deletes all references to Pu Yi's homosexuality.

A producer tries to film The Front Runner, the love story of a gay coach and his track star. The big hitch? No name actor will play the coach. Bisexual and homosexual actors still live closeted lives, ever fearful their careers could end. "It couldn't be worse," said Michael Kearns, who describes himself as Hollywood's only openly gay actor. "I don't think the climate in Hollywood has ever been more homophobic." The reason? AIDS.

Said Dale Reynolds, founder of the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Entertainment Industry: "It's easy to be a gay actor today on a personal level. Most people out here don't care." The professional level for actors is totally different. "If you want a career, living openly gay is death." The studios, author Boze Hadleigh said, "are more accepting as long as an actor or actress is hush-hush about being gay." Hollywood homosexuality is a sensitive subject, a point where gossipy revelations collide with the right to privacy, where glamorous images touch a not-so-glamorous reality. Among the book's insights: Cukor, the director of My Fair Lady, Born Yesterday and the greatest Tracy-Hepburn movies, sadly remembers James Whale, the director of Frankenstein, whose career was ruined because he refused to keep his homosexuality quiet. "You couldn't be open then today you can't be if you're a performer.

Until the '60s, almost nothing changed. If you were not heterosexual, you were discreet. I'm sure the victims were aware of this rule, but possibly it was too difficult for them to follow." Visconti reveals that the Italian cinema had a casting couch more sexist than Hollywood's, with "every kind of sex." Fassbinder lambastes "Hollywood-style homosexuals." "They act like they're not homosexuals, and they don't want to be associated with that. So they become the oppressor." Mineo says executives use rumors about actors' homosexuality as "a way of tearing a star down to size. Envying him but despising him; that kind of thing real twisted." Hudson on himself: "There is no real Rock Hudson.

(Winks.) Hell, if you scratched and scratched beneath the surface of most of the roles I played, you wouldn't find any kind of human being there. (Laughs dourly.) I'm not like anyone I've ever played." Recent books about dead celebrities have focused on their sex lives. Shirley Eder, a syndicated columnist for The Detroit Free Press, deplores the trend. "It's such an invasion, not of privacy but of a human mind and a human body, to write about someone's sexuality." New York Daily News columnist Liz Smith defends the practice. "Of course famous people will be written about when they are dead.

They always have been." Knight-Ridder News Service The book's title, Conversations With My Elders, is misleading, writer Boze Hadleigh confesses. "A lot of people thought it was about senior citizens," he says. "One woman said she thought it was about Mormon church leaders." Hardly. Conversations is about six celebrities. All were homosexual or bisexual.

Of course, there's a catch: Yes, now the truth can be told all six are dead. The subjects: actors Rock Hudson and Sal Mineo, photographerdesigner Cecil Beaton and directors George Cukor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Luchino Visconti. Over 10 years, the author tape-recorded their views about their lives, their careers, their sexuality. Hadleigh asked Hudson if he and Montgomery Clift, the late gay actor, were friends. Hudson responded: "Friends yeah.

Listen, someday I'll make a list of 'friends' and 'more than friends' and everybody'U flip out." For years authors have offered tell-all biographies about the dead. But Conversations is different. The book, which St. Martin's Press released in March in paperback, lets its subjects tell stories on themselves. "I think, in general, it's a good trend in revealing that everyone was not straight," Hadleigh says from his home in Beverly Hills.

"These people are role models for the world. When it's revealed one of the role models is gay, then the stereotype vanishes. The closet is the result of the public not knowing gay people can be successful and normal-acting." Some of the interviews were published during the men's lives, but editors usually cut the homosexual references. Rock Hudson: 'American does not want to know (how many top actors in Hollywood are Hadleigh remembers a woman's revulsion at learning Hudson was gay. Her romantic ideal had been ruined.

"Even if he had been straight, what would her chances have been of going to Hollywood to make love with him?" the writer asked. Gay actors "have to hide all their lives so the housewife in Poughkeepsie can have an illusion." Hollywood itself has few illusions. Money is the bottom line. Yet the industry pursues once-taboo gay stories with intelligence and interest. Beyond Hooperman, Heartbeat and Brothers, other productions take on AIDS, among them Designing Women and St.

Elsewhere. CBS presents an afternoon special for children titled What If Fm Gay? Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, a Tony-winning Broadway drama, starts filming this month. The trend encourages Reynolds of the Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists. "The self-image of gay people has been very poor. It's beginning to turn around." The alliance, formed in 1979, has 300 members.

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