But from that point forward, I was seeking out Perkins' repertoire of movies on late night TV and in the VHS tapes (no, make that Beta!) that I could rent from the corner store. I became fascinated by this fairy-tale (excuse the pun) story of a man terrified of women, who admittedly DID have sex with men which he claimed felt "unreal", and who suddenly met this earth-mother paragon who completely set him free from the shackles of his (unreal-feeling) homoerotic impulses.
Well, that's pretty much it, isn't it? That's the myth, and it fit in well with the times and with the wild popularity of Mildred Newman. Her sappy self-help screed How to Be your Own Best Friend (which I dealt with in my last post) demonstrated that even someone as intelligent as Perkins could fall for an utter sham, since all his gay friends seemed to be doing the same thing.
I didn't catch up with all this until - probably - Perkins' death from AIDS in the early 1990s. It all began to make sense to me then, and since then I have read two biographies: one sanitized and respectful, the other incredibly detailed and full of rather nasty gossip and hearsay. I had to average the two and guess at the rest. What the People article didn't say was that Perkins had had several long-term, committed relationships with men, most notably Tab Hunter and the dancer/choreographer Grover Dale, with whom he lived for years. (Sadly, Dale too fell for Mildred Newman's poisonous indoctrination.)
It's too bad his close relationships with men, which obviously went far beyond casual pickups, were completely negated in this article. But what horrified his family and close friends was the way he "outed" himself as a man who for years and years had had sex with other men. His claim that his mother sexually abused him as a child (clearly, the reason he was so terrified of women) was also met with shock. Was he throwing in all these lurid details mainly to sell tickets? If so, it worked very well.
Andy Warhol wryly observed in his infamous diary that he guessed Psycho II would make a lot of money, and that he found the People article hilarious because Perkins claimed his gay life was "all in the past". Somehow, I think Warhol and his whole erotic subculture knew him better than that.
So how far have we come? It's been said that there are STILL no leading men in Hollywood who are openly gay. Only a straight actor can play a gay character. This was true when Tom Hanks played a man dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, but it seems equally true today. You just don't see gay playing gay. Too unbelievable, I guess. Tom Cruise and his longtime companion John Travolta are still in the closet (with, presumably, that Scientology guy David Miscavige).
I am a little embarrassed to admit that I ordered an extra copy of the Perkins issue from People, and kept it for years. The scan you see above, which I had to chop up and blow up to make it readable, came from a website. This thing is still around, along with the attitudes that still drive men and women to stay in the closet and live a secret life, or no life at all in which they can be truly themselves.
