Harvey Milk believed it was the responsibility of the queer community to come out, but not indiscriminately, and not on the behalf of other people: Activists like to use Harvey Milk as the justification for insinuations and invasive questions like the ones Graeme Coleman asked, but this view comes from as limited a read of Milk’s words and actions as Kim Davis’s read is of the Bible. It’s not so long since the days of Perez Hilton using his site as a means to push celebrities out of the closet, and the practice persists at more focused gay publications.īut pressing a man to confess his sexual history is inhumane and antiquated, especially in the present day-hopefully in 2015, we’re able to acknowledge that people’s identities change over time, or better still, that people might not have fixed sexual identities in the first place. But Coleman was writing on the behalf of a gay publication, and as gay rights have become more and more mainstream, it’s the gay press who have become the most militant pursuers of celebrity outings. If it had been a straight interviewer for a straight publication asking the question, there would be no debate-it would be a simple invasion of privacy. Are you really arrogant enough to accuse Tom Hardy of living a lie in a press room, in front of a half-dozen of his coworkers and hundreds of journalists? Even for an openly gay individual, it seems unlikely that a press conference would be the desired place to answer questions about one’s sexual history. If you already know the answer, then “What is your sexuality?” is not so much a question as it is a McCarthyesque accusation. You received your answer seven years ago, and every six months or so since.
There is a satisfaction now to interviews that attempt to be frank, that attempt to push past the decorous tact that makes so many of the interactions between performers and press feel obligatory and unilluminating.īut what happened at Toronto was not just tactlessness, it’s a willful and self-righteous refusal to acknowledge boundaries. With campaigns like #AskHerMore pushing interviewers out of their comfort zone and regular think piece roundups for actors who speak before thinking, the celebrity interview has never been more political, even when they are not politicized.
Back in May, Gawker finally discovered the interview and, as is their wont, ran a salacious story with the inaccurate headline, “Remember When Tom Hardy Had Sex With Men?” I’m not into men in a sexual way, but I’m a f-king artist and I was asked once, ‘Have you ever had relations with men?’ and I said, ‘I’m an artist-I’ve done everything and everyone,’ but like everything salacious, people run amok with that information.”Īnd Hardy, who’s married to the British actress Charlotte Riley and has a 2-year-old son with a former girlfriend, has had to field questions about that interview time and again (and again, and again) in the years since, and his answer is always the same, and every six months a new tabloid publication has dug up the quotes in order to service a clickbait piece on Hardy. It’s a relatively cut-and-dry answer that feels juicy because there’s backstory that Hardy doesn’t elaborate upon, and maybe because we are unaccustomed to actors treating interviews as a time for frankness in the first place.īack in 2011, when the Attitude interview initially resurfaced, The Daily Beast asked Hardy about it, and he did not take offense, saying, “I’m not gay, I’m very hetero. I’ve played with everything and everybody”-his primary interest was in women and that he’d not only never had gay sex, but that it had no appeal to him. Hardy answered frankly, saying that while he had experimented-“I’m an artist.
The allusion Coleman made was to an interview Hardy gave in 2008 with Attitude, a gay lifestyle magazine in Britain, which asked Hardy upfront about his sexual history.
Hardy continued the press conference seemingly unbothered. But by that point Coleman’s confidence had seemingly run out, and Hardy cut him off before he could finish responding.