I chose during that interview to discuss the fact that, earlier in my life, I had been in relationship with a woman. It was the first time I revealed this fact in a public forum, and I chose to do so for two reasons. One was that a woman whom I was in relationship with had died a few months beforehand and I felt, in the context of our conversation, it was safe and appropriate to bring it up. Many years beforehand, and well beyond our time together, this woman had called me out of the blue at the height of my television fame to say that she had been offered $60,000 by a tabloid to provide a picture of us together. At the time, for various reasons, not including shame, I did not want that information in the public domain and despite the fact that she was struggling to pay her rent, I asked her not to sell our story. She took what at the time I considered to be the high road. To this day I regret asking her to do that. That 60 grand would have had a greater positive effect on her life than a negative effect on mine. By discussing our relationship in Out, I felt like I was honoring her memory in some way simply by admitting its existence.
“Do you know what’s funny? Sometimes I’ll see photographs of myself in the early days of The X-Files and I think that my attitude towards the whole thing was very similar to Kristen Stewart’s,”
“There’s a very similar look in my eye; slightly defiant, slightly bored. All I ever got was: ‘Smile! Smile!’ when I didn’t want to smile. And I really wish that somebody at that time had told me: ‘You know that it’s OK to be who you really are’.”
knitting in the dark 