NEWS

James Franco has a very important question for James Franco – and it’s one many other people have wondered over the years – is he gay?

Franco doesn’t like to do the usual thing, so for an interview in Four Two Nine magazine, he decided he was going to interview himself, or at least the straight James was going to interview the gay James. That led to him asking himself the inevitable question

Here’s what he had to say: “Well, I like to think that I’m gay in my art and straight in my life. Although, I’m also gay in my life up to the point of intercourse, and then you could say I’m straight. So I guess it depends on how you define gay. If it means whom you have sex with, I guess I’m straight. In the twenties and thirties, they used to define homosexuality by how you acted and not by whom you slept with. Sailors would fuck guys all the time, but as long as they behaved in masculine ways, they weren’t considered gay.”

As so often with Franco, it’s an answer that sounds well thought out and articulate, but is actually less smart than it first appears. For a start, you can’t define homosexuality as anything but being sexually attracted to other men, as that’s what it means in a very literal sense. Being ‘gay’ meanwhile has a far greater social component, but even there justifying it by how people thought of it in the past ignores the role of prejudice and also ignorant perceptions of gender roles in how those earlier conceptions of sexuality were formed.

It also leaves open what it means to be ‘gay in my life up to the point of intercourse’, as it starts to sound like he’s trying to co-opt what he sees as the upside of gay-ness without having to personally deal with the downside – not the sex, but the bigotry and oppression many gay people face.

Franco is dealing with an interesting issue – how much of being ‘gay’ is to do with sexual attraction and how much is socially constructed, but what he says is rather ill-thought out. It’s nice he’s trying to work it out, but he could do with digging a little deeper.

The actor/director definitely has a fascination with gay subjects in his work, whether it’s starring in Howl and I Am Michael, or directing Sal and Interior Leather Bar – although even he needs to admit that in all those things, men having sex with other men (or at least having genuine sexual attraction to men) is not something that can be conveniently extracted from being gay.