Director: Jeffrey Schwarz
Running Time: 90 mins
Certificate: NR
Release Date: July 11th 2015 (Outfest)
Some younger people may have never heard of Tab Hunter, but if you say the name to any straight woman or gay man who was young in the 1950s, you can often see their eyes glaze as they remember the teen heartthrob who was the biggest dreamboat crush of an entire generation. However, while he was setting millions of teenage hearts aflutter in the likes of Damn Yankees and Battle Cry, he was also hiding the fact that he was gay (with the help of the studio system).
Hunter only officially came out when he wrote his autobiography in 2006, on which this documentary is based. The film includes extensive interviews with Hunter, who still seems somewhat reticent to talk about his sexuality – an entire lifetime of not talking publicly about that side of his life hasn’t disappeared now he’s ‘outed’ himself – but even so he does open up about his career, his relationships with the likes of Psycho star Anthony Perkins, and the studio-mandated dates he went on with a string of young starlets. [Read more…]