HBO’s Hung star, Thomas Jane, just admitted that he experimented with gay sex as a struggling teen in Los Angeles. And hopes that gay men will understand his reasoning for a comment in which he said that the HBO show would be over if his character had a penis in his mouth.
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“You’re a lot more open to experimentation as a young man,” he tells the L.A. Times. “And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way.”
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His confession followed after the newspaper gave the actor a chance to clear up some comments he made last year that angered the gay media.
“I think they took my comment that it would be the last year of the show when I ended up with a [penis] in my mouth, think they took that comment to be anti-gay,” he explains. “And then I got a chance to explain myself a little further, and I think people respected the explanation that I gave.”
Basically, Jane says that it would take a lot for his male hustler character, Ray, on the HBO show to resort to having gay sex for money. And if it happened, then it would mean that the character had reached the end of his development arc.
“Ray’s definition of sex is very narrow, and that makes for good television,” he says. “If we had a character that was very accepting and free and open to trying new things, we’d be [having sex with] an elephant in a circus by Season 3. We get much more mileage out of taking a guy who’s very repressed but doesn’t even know that he’s repressed.”
In the end, Jane says that gay sex wasn’t for him. And here’s where he may get himself in trouble with the gays once again. He says that sexuality is a choice to a point, but adds a qualification to the statement.
“But I’ll tell you what,” he adds. “It’s not a choice until you’re open enough to experience both male and female sexuality. Until you’ve tasted the food, you don’t know whether you’ll like it or not, as my mom always said.”
Hung airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO.
Do you get where the actor is coming from?
Email: Jethro.Nededog@thr.com; Twitter: @TheRealJethro
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