James Franco oscillating between gay and straight

James Franco is definitely part of the LGBT world, one way or another. From playing a gay activist in I am Michael to taking another role in a gay film, Wild Horses, Franco never denied that he wasn’t gay. He actually confirmed that he was gay to some point.

Here’s the ways in which Franco explains how he is “gay in [his] art and straight in [his] life,” and “until the point of intercourse.”

James Franco is gay in his art… and in the way he’s acting on and off stage.

“I like to think that I’m gay in my art and straight in my life. Although, I’m also gay in my life up to the point of intercourse, and then you could say I’m straight. So I guess it depends on how you define gay. If it means whom you have sex with, I guess I’m straight. In the twenties and thirties, they used to define homosexuality by how you acted and not by whom you slept with. Sailors would fuck guys all the time, but as long as they behaved in masculine ways, they weren’t considered gay.”

He thinks that sex with a man could make a change but he doesn’t mention what kind of change, he keeps on covering sexuality with art. 

“Maybe sex with a guy would change things, but I doubt it. Like I said, I’m gay in my art. Or, I should say, queer in my art. And I’m not this way for political reasons, although sometimes it becomes political, like when I voted for same-sex marriage, etc. But what it’s really about is making queer art that destabilizes engrained ways of being, art that challenges hegemonic thinking.”

He pretends playing a role for the public…

“I guess I mean that I like my queer public persona. I like that it’s so hard to define me and that people always have to guess about me. They don’t know what the hell is up with me, and that’s great. Not that I do what I do to confuse people, but as long as they are confused, I get time to play.”

He sees the beauty of being gay!

“I am a figure who can show the straight community that many of their definitions are outdated and boring. And I can also show the gay community that many of the things about themselves that they are giving up to join the straight community are actually valuable and beautiful.”

James Franco has made a point of the idea that he likes playing a role, and that role is of a gay man. He takes his role on the screen, he put it in a poetry book called Straight James / Gay James and he parades with it in front of us.

And isn’t art a form of expressing who we are? If we see it from this point of view, James Franco might be fulfilling his need to be who he really is by transforming it into art. But I am not the one to judge what the artist wants to express.

My personal opinion is that he is bisexual and he feels the need to explore love/sex with a man and the gay lifestyle but for now he’s only taking it to the level of art manifestations.

In a recent interview Yoko Ono talked about how John Lennon experienced almost the same feelings as James Franco, yet we never heard about it until now. What is different, is that Yoko made it clear that Lennon had a desire to have sex with men and he was interested in same-sex deep connections, but he was too inhibited. Her conclusion was that John Lennon was bisexual.

What do you think about James Franco’s constantly pendulating between two worlds, gay/straight, to the point of emerging them, yet covering the one where he is gay with art, claiming that is fiction.