"Maybe I'm Just Gay"

James Franco has played a good number of gay roles, most recently in the movies Milk and Howl—where he portrayed Harvey Milk’s longtime boyfriend Scott Smith and poet Allen Ginsberg, respectively. As a result, he’s faced a lot of questions about his own sexual orientation.

The actor, who told The Advocate last summer that he is straight, is now raising eyebrows by suggesting otherwise in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.

“There are lots of other reasons to be interested in gay characters than wanting myself to go out and have sex with guys,” Franco tells EW. “And there are also lots of other aspects about these characters that I’m interested in, in addition to their sexuality. So, in some ways it’s coincidental, in other ways it’s not. I mean, I’ve played a gay man who’s living in the ‘60s and ‘70s, a gay man who we depicted in the ‘50s, and one being in the ‘20s. And those were all periods when to be gay, at least being gay in public, was much more difficult. Part of what I’m interested in is how these people who were living anti-normative lifestyles contended with opposition. Or, you know what, maybe I’m just gay.”