James Dean’s alleged secret gay romance might soon be coming to the big screen
East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant solidified him as an eternal star with an on-screen smolder that still makes audiences weak in the knees.Naturally, the media was utterly obsessed with who Dean was dating back in the day, linking him to fellow performers like Teresa‘s Pier Angeli and Dr.
No‘s Ursula Andress. But his seeming unwillingness to “settle down” with any one person (it really was a different time!) frequently led to him being group with names like Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter as the town’s most “eligible bachelors.”Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.Now, hmmm… what do all of those men have in common?There have long been rumors about Dean’s sexuality, but the strongest case we have of the actor’s alleged romantic history with men came in the 2006 book Surviving James Dean, a memoir written by his good friend and one-time roommate—and former lover???—William Bast.Bast was 19 when he first met Dean in the theater program at UCLA.
The two roomed together, and apparently went on frequent double dates with female classmates. But Bast was completely in love with the star, and alleges things eventually became sexual between the two.It was complicated, of course, especially after Dean dropped out of college and his career exploded, meaning the pair had to keep their affair private while the actor paraded around his high-profile “showmances” with women.Bast shares he was always hopeful that they could one day be together, though that dream quickly faded with Dean’s sudden death on September 30, 1955—69 years ago this week!Long publicly acknowledged as one of Dean’s “closest friends,” Bast even wrote the star’s first official biography.
While he built a career of his own career as a respected screenwriter, he would frequently return to his favorite subject: James Dean, eventually revealing the true nature of their relationship in the aforementioned ’06 memoir.
