For decades, the gay love affair between heartthrobs Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins was one of Hollywood’s best and simultaneously worst kept secrets.
Their romance was officially confirmed by Hunter in his 2005 bestselling memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.
Now, it’s being made into a movie.
Related: EXCLUSIVE CLIP: Tab Hunter Was So Cute It Was “Like A Flying Saucer Landed”
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Tab & Tony is being produced by Zachary Quinto and J.J. Abrams. Doug Wright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Tony-winning play I Am My Own Wife, has been tapped to pen the screenplay.
Allan Glaser, Hunter’s longterm partner and producer of the 2015 documentary Tab Hunter Confidential, will also help produce the biopic.
The movie was only just announced and Twitter is already making casting suggestions:
Thinking about this Tab Hunter and Anthony Perkins movie, all I can see is Billy Magnussen and Andrew Garfield pic.twitter.com/Iars4z4bgc
— Erik Anderson (@awards_watch) June 7, 2018
Perkins, who is best remembered for his role in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, died from AIDS-related pneumonia in 1992.
Hunter, who turns 87 next month, is known for his films Damn Yankees! and Battle Cry and for making a late career comeback in the ’80s with John Waters’ Polyester.
A release date for Tab & Tony has not yet been announced.
Related: Movie Heartthrob Tab Hunter Remembers His Closeted Years And Fear Of Being Outed
Mandrake
Both of these men would have been every gay man’s dream had their relationship existed today, and not back in the 50’s during the infamous McCarthy hearings and when that gossip mag rag, “Confidential” that ruined so many careers was in publication. They would have been fantastic models for young gays worried about their sexuality.
I had read that “Confidential” had the goods on Rock Hudson at the time, but the studios negotiated keeping him secret by letting them expose the scoop on Tab Hunter caught in a raid at a gay party.
kevininbuffalo
“Tab Hunter Confidential” is currently running on Netflixs, it’s a great documentary.
ptb2016
Yes, great film dishing the dirt on Hollywood prejudices, sexual misconduct, and hypocrisy. But watching it I kept thinking how good Tab Hunter still looks. Must be bone structure, but an incredibly good looking man, not something you can say about many of his age!
Kangol
I have to say, I’m surprised James Franco hasn’t already gotten to this. He could throw in a few more famous Hollywood DL gays of that era, like Rock Hudson, James Dean, Roddy McDowell, and have quite a film. My favorite Tab Hunter performance remains his outrageous turn in John Waters’ wild 1981 film Polyester. That film, which originally included scratch cards for an “Odorama” experience, manages to send up the suburbs, social and class pretentiousness, abortion, heterosexual mores and adultery, fetishism, abortion, religious fanaticism, and alcohol addiction in a way that few films can match, and it’s laugh out loud hilarious too.
Coruna2018
Hi, Mandrake!
True enough about the conspiracy to throw gay shade on Tab Hunter AND George Nader by Confidential Magazine in order for Universal-International (the studio that had Rock Hudson and George Nader under contract) to keep Rock Hudson “under wraps” and continue his career. As part of the conspiracy, Confidential also revealed another heartthrob’s (Rory Calhoun) conviction for theft before he went into acting. Calhoun provides another look at male sexuality among actors and how that was handled in the entertainment industry of the time (1950’s). Although married three times and a womanizer with many beautiful actresses, there continues to exist persistent suspicion among many fans and film historians of Calhoun indulging in gay affairs with men. Although there has not been any substantiation of it, Calhoun enjoyed an especially close relationship with fellow actor Guy Madison (another heartthrob) that was rumored by some associates in the film industry as being a romantic relationship. I bring this up only to highlight the lengths to which actors, even today, subject themselves to having personae created for them by the entertainment industry and becoming enslaved to them, for fear of having their careers ruined, whether the actor is straight, bisexual, gay or not. An actor’s sexuality seems to pay the biggest price for career success in the entertainment industry. It is tragic that such still happens.
Mandrake
Hi, Coruna!
Yes, that’s all intriguing info which I’d also read, but I was always a little skeptical about it because I read it in “Pink Triangle,” a major Hollywood gossip book by Darwin Porter and Danforth Prince.
ptb2016
Odd isn’t it that it is perfectly acceptable for an actor to play a sadistic serial killer without much comment, but not to play a gay character. Friend of mine, an Irish actor in a soap on Irish tv, had his character come out in the soap as gay. Day after it was transmitted he told me he was walking down the street with his long term girlfriend when people started shouting abuse at him, and one actually came up and spat at him!
Hannibal Lecter never had to put up with that!
crowebobby
I think Andrew Garfield will make a great Anthony Perkins. Tab Hunter for those of us old enough to actually remember him is much harder to cast. Not because there are no actors as handsome, but because he was such absolute archetype: boyish beyond boyish and blond beyond blond. When I hear his name all I remember is his looks, nothing else.
tham
Sounds like this could be interesting.
James Hart
1) Will the film address the fact thew Tony Perkins was always unhappy about his homosexuality and sought psychiatric treatment all of his life to combat this?
2) Will it include Tab Hunter’s revelation that he, too, is uncomfortable with his homosexuality due to his Roman Catholic faith?
DCguy
3) Why or why not is that something you want or don’t want in the movie?
4) will the film address the rampant bigotry and hatred in society at the time that would cause people to have to hide their homosexuality?
Al
Why do you call it a gay love affair? Two men aren’t going to have a straight love affair. It was a love affair and the use of the adjective gay has a whiff of the gutter press and it’s backward looking.
Iowa Rex
You bring up a very good point. It’s bad enough when the “straight media” use such formations (“gay marriage” vis a vis “marriage”) but for the gay media to follow suit is inexcusable. You’re right—-it is regressive. Do better Queerty!
oaksong
Do y’all know Scotty and the Hidden Secrets of Hollywood is coming out (oops) in July?
Mandrake
Indeed I do, and am looking forward to seeing it! I’m sure it’ll be playing somewhere in the Boston area despite it likely having a limited showing. Scotty Bowers saw it all! His biography, “Full Service” is an amazing read, and I highly recommend it. I also recommend “Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins” by Charles Winecoff. It details their relationship in rather graphic detail.
Billy Budd
It is a pity that Perkins specialized in playing creepy characters during his entire career.
Mandrake
He had quite a varied movie and stage career before “Psycho” though.
Glenn Roe
I first saw Anthony Perkins in Friendly Persuasion with Dorothy Malone and Gary Cooper. I was hugely impressed, with him.
Then, I saw him with Paul Ford and Shirley Booth
in The Matchmaker, which went on to be re-made as, Hello Dolly.
Later still, he was the lead in Green Mansions with Audrey Hepborn.
This were all movies without the ‘horror’ themes of the Psycho series.
I read the Tab Hunter autobiography which is pretty fantastic detail about a time and people that few of us ever got to meet, but which a lot of us loved through and were curious about, while going through, getting on with, our own lives.
Mandrake
I wonder if their relationship had been more current, say 40 years later when being gay was more accepted, if they’d stayed together without fear of their careers being destroyed. Perkins might not have contracted HIV, and they’d have been married today. Of course, Perkins’ two fine sons would not have been born, and Allan Glaser would not have been in a 30 year relationship with Hunter either.
The times and life spans in which we live have such a driving force in who we become and the tracks we take. We can only hope to make the best of it.
winemaker
I recall Tab Hunter having a show in the early 1960’s called, appropriately ‘The tab Hunter Show’. I don’t recall much about it but i remember it was on Sunday nights around 9:00 PM past my bedtime then. It’s hard to believe he’ll be 87 in July, wow he’s in great shape. Goes to show you taking care of yourself, eating right ,pays great dividends in the long run. Gay men sometimes think you just dry up at 50 and you just disappear or something, at least that treat older guys, at least the single ones. Somehow when gay men who’re single turn 50 it seems the community dismisses them as non entities, not worth getting to know and treated rudely by many younger guys, sad to say!
Caligari
If he were younger, they could also cast Peter Sarsgaard as Stephen Sondheim.
SPEEDOSWIMMER
Anthony and Tab = a COUPLE of hunks. Stixc me in the middle of that MENwich!
DELICIOUS moistness…