Here’s one of the tried-and-true rules of Hollywood: If a dude has dated or married Patricia Arquette, that dude is significantly weird. Not necessarily in a bad way, and not always in a “OMG, cray-cray” way, but the dude just won’t be “conventional”. See also: Nicolas Cage. But this post is about one of Patricia’s last lovers (they split up & got back together several times, but the last we heard he was dating some 21-year-old), Thomas Jane. Jane has a newish interview in the LAT, and… he’s just odd. He’s promoting Hung, and he’s obviously just being honest and answering the questions thoroughly (exhaustively) – my problem isn’t that he comes across as douchey, because he really doesn’t. He just sounds like a man who has no issue with talking about how he used to be a gay hustler/hooker who would do anything with random dudes for some cash or some food. On the positive side, he also seems like a pretty easy-going, well-spoken dude.
In Hung, he plays a hetero-only male prostitute, and he doesn’t think his character will ever go gay: “Honestly, an actor is not going to tell HBO what to do or dictate the tenets of the role, although there is some wiggle room there. They like to think they can tell you what to do, but really, sorry, I’m the guy that has to come out of my trailer to perform the feat. I’ve always said that the year that Ray ends up with a penis in his mouth is the last year of the show. And I’ve said it jokingly. The comment functions on a couple of different levels. There’s the idea that Ray is a very heterosexual, corn-fed, red-blooded American, so I’m not comfortable with the definitions of sex that are outside of the heterosexual man-on-top, female-on-the-bottom definition. I’m talking as Ray. Ray’s definition of sex is very narrow, and that makes for good television. If we had a character that was very accepting and free and open to trying new things, we’d be [having sex with] an elephant in a circus by Season 3. We get much more mileage out of taking a guy who’s very repressed but doesn’t even know that he’s repressed.”
Getting complaints from the gay media: “I think they took my comment that it would be the last year of the show when I ended up with a [penis] in my mouth, think they took that comment to be anti-gay. And then I got a chance to explain myself a little further, and I think people respected the explanation that I gave. And then I had to get up and pee during the Herve Leger [fashion] show, and everybody flipped out about that. That became a separate issue. Our entertainment has become so politically correct that we can no longer comment on social issues in a meaningful way. At the same time we’ve become so jaded that whatever you have to say about something seems passé before it passes through your lips. So this combination makes for really poor controversy, and controversy breeds discussion, and discussion breeds elucidation. And elucidation breeds change.”
His gay hustling days: “Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn’t have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn’t averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?
Was it survival or experimentation? “You’re a lot more open to experimentation as a young man. And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way… It blew the doors off of my conventional upbringing and thinking and opened up possibilities for me that were akin to World War III. And then you actually have a choice, and I chose to be a heterosexual guy because that’s what my DNA dictates and my nurture dictates that I am.
So is sexuality a choice? “I don’t know. I think up to a point it’s a choice. But I’ll tell you what — it’s not a choice until you’re open enough to experience both male and female sexuality. Until you’ve tasted the food, you don’t know whether you’ll like it or not, as my mom always said.”
[From The LAT]
I don’t have a problem with what Thomas Jane said – if he had just made it about HIS experience, without extrapolating and generalizing about everyone else. Some people don’t need to have a dong inside of them to realize that perhaps dongs hold no interest to them. Same situation with vadges. Everybody’s different. Some people don’t need to experiment with their sexuality, and some people like to. Some people manage to experiment without becoming gay hustlers too. No judgment, Thomas. I actually liked this interview.
Re: the NYFW incident when Thomas Jane crashed the Herve Leger show – The Fug Girls broke that story, and it‘s pretty funny. Go here to read it.
Photos courtesy of WENN.
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