This Star of a Million Kinky Swashbuckling Dramas Had Some Big Gay Secrets

If you’ve ever been a fan of some of those big-budget swashbuckling epics, you’ve probably chanced to come across an actor as agile as he was beautiful, a fan of tight pants and secret identities. I’m of course referring to Tyrone Power, a leading man of Hollywood’s golden age who, apparently, swung both ways.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 𝑻𝒚𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝑷𝒐𝒘𝒆𝒓 (@tyrone.power.in.color)

While Power kept his proclivity for trade a secret during his lifetime, a few men came forward after the star’s death in 1958 to set the record straight.

When Tyrone Power first started making films in 1936, Hollywood had only started cracking down on the code a few years before, in 1934. Up until that point, you could see queer actors onscreen in leading roles, like William Haines, or watch drag artists like Julian Eltinge light up the screen. You could even find open reference onscreen to the “pansy craze” of the late 20s and early 30s, in which queer characters were both mocked and celebrated for the campy fun they brought to so many comedies.

Related:

An Appreciation of Robert Conrad’s Legendary Butt

Robert Conrad’s butt was the stuff of legend.

By 1934, however, that golden age was over: actors who wanted to succeed in Hollywood needed to play it straight if they wanted to get ahead, even if their natural proclivities were far from strictly heterosexual. Power’s early roles cast him as beautiful fops, usually showing him as the twink-ish love interest for an older woman. As he started to make a name for himself, however, the tables turned. He threw away his dinner jacket and donned tight pants and a mask to play the masked Spanish crusader himself in 1940’s The Mark of Zorro.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Valerie Pineau-Valencienne (@valeriepeve_)

The plot—in which the slightly femme, milquetoast son of a Spanish magistrate must return home and take on a secret, butch persona—played to Power’s strengths. As the foppish wastrel Don Diego Vega, Power was convincingly few, spouting monologues about his love of perfumes and fine silks. But as Zorro, he quickened the pace of audience members thirsty to see a hot dude in tight pants and thigh-high boots. He could do it all, and his turn as Zorro only solidified his sex symbol status in Hollywood.

But even kinkier films were to come. In 1941, he picked up where another possibly-bisexual sex icon left off: in Blood and Sand, a remake of the Rudolph Valentino silent film, Power played a bullfighter torn between a masochistic obsession with a temptress (Rita Hayworth) and his sweet but sexually bland betrothed (Linda Darnell.) It was another role that showed off Power’s duality, another character with a secret inner life that must be hidden by external bluster.

Throughout the 40s, audiences kept going to Power movies—including the brilliant noir Nightmare Alley and the truly kinky The Black Swan—to see a hot dude in tight pants get tied up and tortured.

I mean, sure, there were other reasons. But that seems like the main one: in almost all of his film roles throughout that decade, Power played a man of action, tortured by internal pain. He brought the main character of Somerset Maugham’s quizzical religious saga “The Razor’s Edge” to life in the film of the same name, and swashbuckled his way through 1949’s Prince of Foxes, a Borgia drama.

But what we he doing behind the scenes? According to biographer Hector Arce, getting busy with boys.

“I know he went with a few gay guys,” Power’s friend Chuck Walters told Arce in the 1970s. “What happened, I don’t know. I think that’s what kept him under wraps. It’s an extra burden. You want the fame and fortune and you have this awful load to carry.” 

Another ex-hustler spoke out after Kenneth Anger’s “Hollywood Babylon” alleged that Power’s kink was coprophagia. Setting the record straight, he explained that “Ty was never out in what he wanted to do. If there’s such a thing as normal gay sex, that’s what he was interested in.”

Perhaps Power wasn’t as kinky as was once thought, but it’s pretty clear that he got around. Longtime sex worker to the stars Smitty Hanson described Power as “a homosexual who found himself married with girls from time to time.” Power’s final marriage may, in fact, have been an open one.

In William Mann’s “Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood,” there’s even more evidence that Power enjoyed the company of young men. Cesar Romero, who others romantically linked to Power in the early 30s, said that Power “loved the ladies,” but it didn’t stop Romero from procuring the occasional trick for him. According to Romero, Power preferred “middle-class boys” over “street kids,” feeling they were less likely to cause a “scandal.”

As for other, longer-term romances, there was a tryst with a set designer, and a fling with Dick Ellis, an actor with whom Power had “romantic moments” in the dressing room.

Whether or not Power was open with himself about his sexuality, one thing is clear: the man was hot. He could pull off an earring, a tiny mustache, and whatever you’d call this look. And for these things alone, he remains a gay icon in my book.