Jon Schwarz recently tweeted:
As Harry Truman said, "The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know." I thought of this quote when I found out Richard Pryor and Marlon Brando had sex with each other.
Well, cool. It's not news that Brando had sex with men and women; he told a French interviewer so in 1976, adding "But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing." (The stilted language presumably comes due to translation.) Pryor wrote in his late autobiography Pryor Convictions that he once had an affair with a drag queen, "But after two weeks of being gay … I went back to life as a heterosexual."
This doesn't prove that Pryor and Brando had sex, of course; it only puts the story into the realm of plausibility. Schwarz linked to a 2018 article from the Guardian, which reported that the rumor came from the music producer Quincy Jones, and was confirmed by Pryor's widow (well, one of them) Jennifer Lee Pryor. She said that Pryor "was always very open about his bisexuality with friends, and documented it extensively in diaries. Jennifer says she'll publish them later this year." (No sign of the diaries yet.)
Neither Jones nor Ms. Pryor inspires a lot of confidence, however. Jones reportedly told New York magazine that "He’d fuck anything. Anything! He’d fuck a mailbox. James Baldwin. Richard Pryor. Marvin Gaye." Ms. Pryor told TMZ, "It was the '70s! Drugs were still good, especially quaaludes. If you did enough cocaine, you'd f*** a radiator and send it flowers in the morning." Remarks like these are just the flip side of the popular homophobic evasion that goes something like "I don't care if X had sex with men, women, or drainpipes." Pryor, especially, was openly a heterosexual horndog and an abuser of alcohol and other drugs; he famously burned himself badly when the crack he was smoking blew up in his face. Who can say who got into his pants when he was drunk or high? But that's not a sign of erotic free-spiritedness, rather the reverse.
The rumor sparked predictable responses. Pryor's daughter Rain, posted on Facebook (excerpted by People):
“Y’all so thirsty and LOVE THEM but ever know the real source or full story, and you’re gonna wonder how 45 became president? WAKE UP!!!” she wrote.Yeah, no. Even if I consider that Rain Pryor was a child in the 70s and is not a knowledgeable source about who her father was having sex with, there's nothing here but ranting.
“So read this, I don’t need you as a fan or a friend. I don’t need anyone in my life that thinks a sensationalized interview is relevant and ‘incredibly well done,’” Rain added. “People who lie or share information to raise themselves up are bottom feeders no matter how much money or influence they have. Wrong is still wrong!!! #GTFOH.”
People also quoted "Miko, Brando's oldest living son": "The Marlon Brando family has heard the recent comments by Quincy Jones and we are disappointed that anyone would make such a wrongful comment about either Marlon Brando or Richard Pryor." It's not clear how Jones's claim about Brando and Pryor could be "wrongful," given both men's known sexual promiscuity. It certainly couldn't harm either one of them, even if it isn't true, any more than the many rumors and known facts about their heterosexual activity.
People touted the story as "the rumor rocking Hollywood," and allowed that the idea of a tryst between Pryor and Brando "sounds scandalous." In 1978, maybe; in 2018, no, except for people who dote and excite themselves on scandal. Nowadays the news that any two adult celebrities copulated consensually shouldn't be a big deal, except as fodder for masturbatory fantasy, and that doesn't require factual accuracy anyway.
But back to Twitter. Schwarz's tweet didn't draw a lot of response, but some of the responses were revealing. One straight leftist male commented, "I'll take 'Mental images we could do without' for $600." I presume he wrote "we" when he meant "I," but to each his own.
Another person, who turned out not to be straight, complained "Remind me why this is any of our business?" I replied that Pryor himself had claimed in Pryor Convictions that he walked into the dressing room of a club he was working to find jazz legends Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie making out. Was that our business? Pryor evidently thought so. Plus Pryor had reported his own supposedly one-time gay affair with a drag queen, let alone his abused childhood and his alcohol and drug abuse.
The person replied: "It took years for me to be public with life. I also know lots of ppl choose not to. I reflexively protect them. I prbly [sic] always will. I thought I saw it happening." Someone wasn't paying much attention. Pryor had not been 'private' with his life during his lifetime, and now that he and Brando are both dead it's not an invasion of their privacy to report or speculate about it, any more than it would be to report a sexual liaison between Pryor and a female celebrity. We can dispute the truth of Quincy Jones's gossip, but as a very wise man* once said, "Gossip is the food of the gods." We've come a long way since the 70s, but as long as queer revelations still upset closet cases and homophobes, we still have a long way to go.
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*Sutherland, a character in Andrew Holleran's 1978 novel Dancer from the Dance.
