The husband & I saw the film when we first became a couple, & Brad Davis’s mighty performance as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express had us shaking with anxiety & sexual heat, but I always found Davis to have an underlying sweetness & vulnerability. He was not hard. He had the body of a compulsive athlete, but soul seemed soft, & his emotions accessible. He was a good looking man, he could never play ugly, but he is able to suggest many emotions: rage, helplessness, love, shame, fear. Davis was a fearless of actor. His involvement in gay themed projects was not always a good idea in the late 1970s, it was thought he was wrecking his career, & he never really bounced back from Querelle (love that movie!) & his stage work with gay playwrights. The gay speculation was working against him, despite his spectacular acting. It’s a shame, but so much about Brad Davis is a shame.
Amid persistent gay rumors, Brad Davis rode drugs & sex to an early death from AIDS complications. Since his excesses killed him, why are we still hooked on his tragic glamour? His best friend, a gay man, insists: "just because Brad had sex with men doesn't mean he was a homosexual." His former colleagues refuse to go on record saying that Davis wasn't straight. His widow Susan Bluestein, in After Midnight: The Life & Death of Brad Davis, admits that he worked in a gay hustler bar & lived with a drag queen before making it big: "I don't know why everyone wants to believe Brad was gay."
I want to believe Davis was gay because of the all gay roles he played during his 20 year career. He had a very sexy vulnerability in his performances. Davis had to handle rumors about his sexuality during his life, & since his death he has become a gay icon whose assisted suicide in 1991 only adds to his tragic memory.
His hard partying, promiscuous image has stayed with him since his death, giving me a small connection with Davis. Susan Bluestein: "Brad was a bad boy for a very long time. He was always partying, always very promiscuous. For a lot of people, that meant he was gay."
His best friend, gay writer Rodger McFarlane: “Davis was the perfect 1970s clone. He was scrumptious. Anyone who ever had a budding gay libido,including me, saw him on the screen & projected all their postadolescent fantasies onto him. Long before we became best friends, I had a huge crush on him." So did I.
In gay role after gay role, Davis teased: The shower scene in a Turkish prison in Midnight Express (1978), & the gay sailor in Querelle (1982), in a tank top & white jeans so tight that the film's legendary gay directo-, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, declared that the trousers "revealed what religion Davis wasn't." Davis's stage roles were often queer: He starred in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart & Bent in NYC.
Mc Farlane: "On the stage & screen, Brad said everything gay there was to say at the time. Plus, he was the last example of that decadent free-love era."
Davis can also be held up as an example of the consequences of leading a closeted life. If he was gay, it's possible that Davis's carousing was a means of pushing back against the pressures of the Hollywood closet. Davis literally partied himself to death. Bluestein writes about of her husband's drug abuse, & McFarlane suggests that Davis may have contracted HIV from "passing around needles at A-list parties." Neither makes much of the fact that Davis worked as a prostitute when he first moved to New York in the early 1970s.
In 1991, Davis died of AIDS in Los Angeles; he was described as "the first heterosexual actor to die of AIDS". He kept his condition secret until shortly before his death. His widow continues to campaign against AIDS.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Born On This Day- November 6th... Actor Robert Creel Davis
Labels:
Birthdays,
Brad Davis,
famous gay people,
Film,
Midnight Express,
Querelle
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