Spacey’s poor attempt at misdirection
It’s clear Kevin Spacey doesn’t have the same public-relations savvy as President Frank Underwood, the character he plays in the Netflix drama House of Cards. Heads would roll in Underwood’s fictional White House if any PR flack penned a statement as ham-handed, misguided and downright offensive as the one Spacey released in the wake of allegations he made sexual advances on an underage boy in 1986.
Last weeky, the website BuzzFeed News published an interview with actor Anthony Rapp in which he accuses Spacey of sexual misconduct 30 years ago, when Rapp was 14 years old.
Spacey’s response ¬ swift and unequivocal ¬ was to come out of the closet.
The 58-year-old Oscar winner prefaced the surprising-only-toGreat Aunt Alice admission of his sexuality with an apology for the “deeply inappropriate drunken behaviour” he claims not to remember, but immediately followed it up by declaring: “I now choose to live life as a gay man.”
Spacey’s sexuality was somewhat of an open secret in Hollywood ¬ he poked fun at the rumours himself when he hosted the Tony Awards earlier this year ¬ so his confession can be seen only as a deeply inappropriate case of wishful misdirection.
However, rather than a graceful sleight of hand directing our eyes elsewhere, Spacey’s statement is instead a clumsy and wrong-headed conflation of homosexuality with pedophilia.
The idea that gay men are child predators is already one of the most pernicious and vile myths fuelling homophobia; for Spacey to imply that his tawdry assault on a teenager is in any way connected with his being gay (or his longtime closed-mouthedness about being gay) is profoundly harmful.
The issue at hand is not Rapp’s gender, but his age at the time and his clear unwillingness to be mauled by a drunken man 12 years his senior.
If the actor had been hoping to find support in the loving bosom of the gay community, he was swiftly shown the error of his ways. Twitter was ablaze with outrage immediately.
“Kevin Spacey really tried to throw the entire LGBT community under a bus and call it solidarity in an effort to mask his personal failings,” wrote civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson.
Spacey’s “Hail Mary” admission is particularly distasteful owing to his longtime insistence ¬ despite persistent gossip and magazine articles hinting he was gay ¬ that his privacy was paramount and that his sexuality was nobody’s business.
This is absolutely true, but his abandonment of his principles as soon as they became inconvenient makes his motives suspect.
Much as in the case of Harvey Weinstein, Rapp’s allegations seem to have opened a floodgate, triggering a host of others to come forward with stories of inappropriate conduct by the film star over the years.
But 30 years ago, remember, the power Spacey had over Rapp wasn’t the power of a superstar or a megaproducer over a wannabe actor. It wasn’t economic or emotional power.
It was the power of a grown man over a frightened boy, and to try to deflect from that horrifying fact is the worst kind of craven self-interest.