Women swooned for Tab Hunter—he was drop dead gorgeous and couldn’t seem to keep his shirt on in his movies. “Six feet of rugged manhood,” was how he was advertised, and he was a double threat as a singer and actor. The man for whom Jack Warner created Warner Bros. Records sold millions of albums while carving out a movie and television career. To keep the young ladies in a perpetual frenzy of hormones, the studio sponsored “Win a Date with Tab Hunter” contests and paired him socially with equally gorgeous stars like Natalie Wood and Debbie Reynolds. The Hollywood machine presented these romantic fantasies to a general female public who didn’t have a snowball’s chance in Hell of snaring Tab Hunter, or any male celebrity for that matter. And they fell for it.
Of course, Tab Hunter had many male admirers as fans (George Takei and John Waters as presented in this film as examples), but Hollywood didn’t dare consider their existence. This was the 1950’s, and such things were not part of a star’s marketing strategy. Actors like Hunter who were gay were not openly so, as homosexuality was a criminal offense that was also considered a mental illness. “Tab Hunter Confidential” uses Hunter’s story to explore how Hollywood kept its actors closeted by any means necessary, and whether that environment exists in more subtle fashion today.
Tab Hunter serves as our tour guide, spinning stories of his upbringing, career, romances and his retirement. He begins with a bit of foreshadowing at a cocktail party on October 14, 1950 in Los Angeles. “Parties like this were illegal,” he tells us, because of “boys dancing with boys and girls dancing with girls.” Eventually, the cops show up to “arrest a bunch of queers,” as Hunter puts it, and the lawyer who springs him gives him a stern lecture on protecting his burgeoning career. “You have to be a lot sharper than you are,” the attorney tells him, because the surest ways to end one’s Hollywood career were to be perceived as a Communist or a homosexual. While the government hunted the former, magazines like “Confidential” went after the latter.
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