I think Colin Farrell is baiting me. There’s no other excuse for his behavior. Just when I think he might settle down to a quiet life of being annoyingly attractive in mediocre movies, he goes and does something stupid, like open his mouth to speak. I’ve only recently recovered from Colin’s claim in Entertainment Weekly that the public has no need to see his penis; such outrageous ignorance always sends me into a kind of depression. Now he’s chatted with The Advocate about his role as bisexual bad boy Alexander the Great in the upcoming Oliver Stone bio. Needless to say, it’s no use hoping that the emperor has no clothes.
If you’ve managed to miss the trailer (featuring a hilariously solemn Anthony Hopkins voice-over) or the publicity photos for Alexander, you’re probably not aware that Colin in blond warrior do circa 330 B.C. looks like Debby Boone circa 1977. For a second, I hoped this meant Alexander would be serenading his reallyclosefriend Hephaestion (Jared Leto) with a sincere “You Light Up My Life” after an enthusiastic romp at some Macedonian bed and breakfast. Then I remembered that, dammit, Colin put the kibosh on that pipe dream when he told EW, “I don’t have a kiss with Jared, but I have a sex scene with the woman who plays my wife.” He takes the opportunity in The Advocate to put the final nail in any remaining fantasy I might have had.
“You know [Alexander is] bisexual [by the way he’s portrayed in the film],” he told interviewer Mike Szymanski. “That’s all you really need to know, and you don’t even need to know that, because there was no term for sexuality back then in respect to categorizing it as homosexuality, bisexuality, heterosexuality.” All right, Colin—maybe there wasn’t a term for it back then, but we all know that Macedonians, Greeks, and all those other B.C. boys were doing everything but sniffing poppers and listening to Donna Summer.
It’s always infuriatingly handy for Hollywood to swear that there weren’t any Friends of Dorothy in a time before The Wizard of Oz; it neatly erases the need to include homosexuality in the history of the world. I’ve just about had it with this popular notion that ancient he-man cornholers couldn’t have been gay, historically speaking, because they didn’t battle under the rainbow flag or download Czech porn in their cubicles at lunchtime (not that anyone I know has ever done that). If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck and frosts its Macedonian mullet like a duck, you can call it reductive categorizing all you want, but I’m labeling it a duck.
Go ahead, everybody: Tell me I’m preoccupied. I don’t care. In a society that’s still trumpeting this “1-in-10” nonsense about homosexuality, I think it’s only fair to insist that every one of those instances get treated with as much respect as the hetero hedgehogging that makes up 90 percent of every other movie. I’ve already apologized for not calling Troy on its denial of the renowned love between Achilles and Patroclus—I’m sorry, but when Brad Pitt dropped trou, the movie could’ve told me the world was actually flat and I would have slavishly nodded my head—so I’m not going to let Alexander flounce by if it opens in two months and doesn’t give us a little heartfelt Leto lovefest.
