- Richard Chamberlain
In an interview in the Advocate this week, Richard Chamberlain talked about the danger for young leading man-type actors who come out.
He’s right about one thing. Hollywood is still very closeted despite Will & Grace, Modern Family or the show he’s now appearing on, Brothers & Sisters. The article says he came out in 2003.
Chamberlain was one of the biggest teen heartthrobs of the early 1960s when he played the title role on Dr. Kildare, the debonnaire young doctor on one of TV’s first medical shows.
In the 1970s, I was working in a store on 5th Avenue in New York City. By then, black-and-white television shows were long forgotten. TV Land and Nick at Night hadn’t been thought of. Cable was mostly for places that had no other TV reception.
Chamberlain was a regular customer in our store. He always shopped with his boyfriend. No one in the store thought anything about it. Chamberlain was gay. Everyone knew it. He was just a friendly former TV star shopping with his boyfriend. There was no secret and no one really cared.
So when he advises actors not to come out just as he didn’t, he’s really just fooling himself. When he “came out” in 2003, about as many people were surprised by the announcement as when Ricky Martin announced earlier this year that he was gay. Will people be equally shocked by an announcement from Jodie Foster?
Although everyone has a right to privacy, if someone is living his life pretty openly, he shouldn’t be shocked or annoyed that people know he’s gay. In fact, he’s fooling himself if he thinks people didn’t.
He may have only done the big Advocate interview in 2003, but everyone he came in contact with knew he was gay since his Dr. Kildare days. And that includes the people at studios who were hiring him. I knew him in the mid-70s. His sexual orientation didn’t prevent him from getting the biggest role in his career when he starred in The Thornbirds in the early ’80s.
just act is all…..why the concern to tell the world?
I thought he was gay long before he came out. As a little girl,I knew My Grandmothers love for Liberace was more of a “motherly love” than anything else.They knew they didn’t stand a chance with him if they were 20 years younger-LOL!
It always facinates Me,a straight gal,how surprised some people are when they come out ,to find out nobody was -surprised.I have never turned My back on a friend who told me they were gay,but I know there are risks involved.
It just must be a very hard thing to do for some.I do wish anyone who decideds to come out well,and the MORE people come out,the more society will realize it is normal…
re: “…concern to tell the world”—-> because,
ultimately, it saves lives.
It’s surprising to me when a celebrity publicly announces he’s straight although many people thought he was gay but didn’t care one way or another.
I can’t remember… didn’t Elton John, Anthony Perkins, Tab Hunter and Tony Randall each make a big deal in the ’70s of telling the public they were straight?
Clear example that it does not affect an actor’s career to
be openly gay… Neil Patrick Harris who plays Barney Stinson of
How I Met Your Mother. He is freakin’ hilarious (and believable) as
a womanizer on that show. Yet, in real life, he’s a gay man in a
commmitted relationship, working to raise their newborns.