Here's how the new generation does it: At the 2012 London Olympics, 18 year-old Tom Daley won a bronze medal in the 10-metre diving event and earned a lot of admirers, many of them gay, who wishfully or not claimed him as their own. He went out a few times with a female American diver whom the media dubbed his "girlfriend" to no objections. In September 2013, at 19, he said, "I think it’s funny when people say I’m gay... I laugh it off... I’m not. But even if I was, I wouldn’t be ashamed. It wouldn’t bother me in the slightest what people thought. But I’m cool with my gay following. It’s great to have gay fans even though my friends gently take the mick." Cue straight sports commentators angrily denouncing gaydar. Three months later, in December, Tom came out as bisexual, surprising his grandparents who said he "always had girlfriends." Four months later, this April, he came out as definitely gay, not bi, surprising no one. Today he celebrates his big 20th birthday with his live-in boyfriend of six-plus months, Oscar winner Dustin Lance Black, who next month celebrates his big 40th birthday. (Daley's father would be 42 now if he hadn't died in 2011.) The new rumors are that Tom and Dustin plan to marry. I can get behind hot gay power couples but I'm still strict: Oscars and Olympic medals are no excuse for matching outfits at their first joint charity event. (top photo via)
It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the doomed plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." However, one short-lived marriage can be documented.
Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years. Read Michael Starr's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.
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