It is so difficult to believe that no one knew Rock Hudson’s sexuality. Especially with him playing such extreme masculine characters. It almost seems like an attempt to repair what someone knew. I remember watching Rock Hudson in Lover Come Back, just watching him at the table with Tony Randall having a cup of tea. If Tony Randall were not there, I think Rock Hudson’s masculinity would have wavered slightly, but that was the gig. To use Rock Hudson, but to make sure there was someone there to make him look more like a macho man.
In the film Pillow Talk, Rock Hudson actually misleads Doris Day into thinking he gay in order to befriend her, and even then, no one questions it, how? Was it just a sign of the times or was it because he embraced the role he could not be?
It reminds me of Neil Patrick Harris, an amazing actor, he has a husband and two kids. He is very homosexual but is known for his character on How I Met Your Mother in which he plays a bachelor who uses tricks to pick up women and is a womanizer. Neil Patrick Harris is an amazing actor on screen, but once the lights are off, he returns to his loving husband because he knows that he can play one part and be another. Of course, we are in the twenty-first century.
Neil Patrick Harris’s story makes me wonder about Rock Hudson though. It makes me curious about what he did off that screen. Who he was because we know that Harris is not his character Barney, so why would people expect Hudson to be the same? Then I remember that he lied as well. He lied because it was dangerous to be anything else, to think differently, to be different. It was the era.