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Source: riskybusiness.hollywoodreporter.com
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In addition to the two gay-themed poems he adapted for student films (Frank Bidart’s “Herbert White” being the other), Franco portrayed a 17-year-old swimmer dating an older man in the gay indie film Blind Spot and Harvey Milk’s lover in Milk. He also French-kissed Will Forte on Saturday Night Live, took a queer studies course at NYU, and created performance art pieces about gender and sexual confusion. And then there’s Franco’s first solo art show this past summer in New York City; it featured video monologues with lines like “We’re all gender-fucked—we’re all something in between, floating like angels.”
“If you were gay or bisexual, would you tell me?” I ask him. “Are we at a point where someone like yourself could matter-of-factly come out without the world stopping for a day or two?”
127 Hours, directed by Danny Boyle and starring James Franco, is a film based on the story of Aron Ralston, the mountain climber who amputated his own arm to free himself after being trapped by a boulder for nearly five days.
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He smiles and glances out the window. One of the college students shuffles closer. “Sure, I’d tell you if I was”, he says. “I guess the reason I wouldn’t is because I’d be worried that it would hurt my career. I suppose that’s the reason one wouldn’t do that, right? But no, that wouldn’t be something that would deter me. I’m going to do projects that I want to do. Everyone thinks I’m a stoner, and some people think I’m gay because I’ve played these gay roles. That’s what people think, but it’s not true. I don’t smoke pot. I’m not gay.
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As serious as Franco takes his writing—and his life—O’Reilly says he’s also “the goofiest” person she knows. “Prior to these last couple of years, I think people only saw James as this brooding James Dean kind of guy,” she says. “Then people saw him in Pineapple Express”—where Franco plays a lovable, Guatemalan pants–wearing weed dealer—“and realized what all of his friends have always known.
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Minus the weed, of course. Unlike Ginsberg, who took LSD for the first time in 1959 in Franco’s hometown of Palo Alto, Franco doesn’t drink or do drugs. When I e-mail him weeks after our meeting to ask why, his reply is short and sweet. “No time, really.” Source: www.advocate.com