Adam Baldwin Comes Out

I just found this post over in rat. Seems the world is getting more unpredictable by the minute.
Cheers,
Jaime
Path:
uni-berlin.de!fu-berlin.de!postnews.google.com!i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: "Paul"
Newsgroups:
alt.tv.firefly,rec.arts.sf.tv,alt.tv.angel,rec.arts.tv,alt.fan.tom-servo Subject: Adam Baldwin Comes Out
Followup-To: alt.tv.firefly, rec.arts.sf.tv, alt.tv.angel, rec.arts.tv, alt.fan.tom-servo, alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer Date: 31 Mar 2006 23:25:34 -0800
Organization:
Lines: 96
Message-ID: (Email Removed) NNTP-Posting-Host: 69.243.47.6
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Trace: posting.google.com 1143876339 9817 127.0.0.1 (1 Apr 2006 07:25:39 GMT)
X-Complaints-To: (Email Removed)
NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 1 Apr 2006 07:25:39 +0000 (UTC) User-Agent: G2/0.2
X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.1) Gecko/20060111 Firefox/1.5.0.1,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Complaints-To: (Email Removed)
Injection-Info: i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com;
posting-host=69.243.47.6;
posting-account=n88FegwAAABtgjokPGEjKmABIMCbk2Gl
Xref: uni-berlin.de alt.tv.firefly:51325 rec.arts.sf.tv:475478 alt.tv.angel:201504 rec.arts.tv:1091790 alt.fan.tom-servo:137107
Actor Adam Baldwin, better known to genre fans for guest roles in series such as The X-Files, Angel and for the memorable character of Jayne Cobb in Joss Whedon's Firefly (a role which he reprised for the feature movie version Serenity), has casually come out in an interview that will be published in the upcoming Frontiers magazine. "Basically, it's been an on/off thing for me throughout the last 18 years," Baldwin tells Frontiers. "I've finally decided to be more open about it."
The 44-year-old Baldwin was born in Chicago, but has spent the last 22 year in Los Angeles and has appeared in over 60 movies since he was chosen in 1980 to play the title role in My Bodyguard. He later played the character of Animal Mother in Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket, a character that defined the tough guy roles that Baldwin has played over and over for nearly two decades.
"My dad used to take me to what he called Shoot ' Em Ups" Baldwin told Fred Topel earlier this year, "The Wild Bunch, The Good, Bad and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Time in the West, movies with great character actors like Eli Wallach, Warren Oates, Jason Robards, guys like that who kind of rang my bell when I was a kid, and later I modeled many of my favorite characters (like Jayne) after them." In addition to his feature acting Baldwin, who considers himself "a working class actor," has done considerable work on television.
Baldwin often felt close to other boys from a young age, and he deftly integrated this into his own personal bonding style of camaraderie. "I just thought this was the way guys generally felt about one another. It certainly did not occur to me that I was anything but normal".
As a long-haired teenager, Baldwin sometimes struggled with feelings of shame over the fact that he felt attracted to some of his male friends. "I had a hard time admitting these feelings to myself and I certainly didn't want other guys thinking I was a homo. So I went back to the scruffy tough guy persona. But I was also genuinely angry because my parents had divorced. I pretended to be a rebel but I was really such a jerk! I probably overdid it a lot." He laughs.

"In retrospect it seems ironic but being an actor was something that I was doing from very early on, only I wasn't getting paid for it!" After three years of high school, Baldwin dropped out and tried a slew of other things. Eventually he turned to acting and auditioned for My Bodyguard, beating 4,000 other aspirants.
Throughout his years of acting professionally and even for a while after his marriage, he came to accept that he might be bisexual. Eventually he grew disillusioned with this posture and came to regard his bisexual lifestyle as another pretence. "There comes a day when you quit beating yourself over the head, when you are ready to realize and make peace with who you really are. And then you say to yourself 'Enough with the pretences. I know what I like, and I like a lot of it!' But then you are still terrified over how your family is going to take it, what are they going to think and say!"
Surprisingly, Baldwin's family appeared to take it pretty well. "My wife has been so incredibly supportive-I would have never gone public with it if she had not been OK with it-she wasn't shocked or disappointed, and, you know, we still have this amazingly powerful relationship going. As for my children, they think I'm this totally cool dad! I am a very lucky man and my family means a lot to me."

In private, Baldwin has recently talked about his sexuality with some of his closes friends and associates, including Jamie Lee Curtis and some members of the cast of Serenity. "They have all been so accepting and supportive. Jamie had more or less known about it already for a while, she encouraged me to go public. Nathan (Fillion) was there for me as usual and Joss (Whedon) in particular was very cool about it, he was joking about how if they ever agree to fund another (Serenity) movie, it might be something that he could incorporate into the story."
Does that mean that a substantial retooling of Jayne Cobb's character might be in the works? Baldwin just laughs. "Joss is brilliant and you can never tell what might be coming out of that brain of his. But Jayne is a far more complex character than most people seem to realize. I mean, if Adam Baldwin can come out of the closet, who is to say that Jayne cannot? Television and film are increasingly embracing sexual diversity. Look at Brokeback Mountain. My cowboy heroes were Eli Wallach and Lee Van Cleef and today you have Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal. Whatever Joss comes up with, I think the audience might just be able to handle it."
Through nearly a quarter of a century of acting, Baldwin has established himself as a solid and reliable actor, mainly through all-American "tough guy" roles similar to the ones that inspired him as a child. Yet he has also managed to inject his own particular sensitivity into many of them. Perhaps in future roles he will continue to broaden the horizons of young Americans today, even as his coming out helps improve the self-image, self-esteem and visibility of gay Americans males.
Copyright © 2006 AfterElton