After gaining the ire of some in the homosexual community after he mocked the idea of his male prostitute character servicing both men and women in the HBO show Hung, Thomas Jane told the LA Times that he actually dabbled in sexual experimentation when he was a struggling actor in Los Angeles.
"Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you're going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don't accept people's sexual flavors," The actor told the website. "You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn't have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn't averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?"
Actors usually ramble on about how hard they had it early on, but typically those stories don't include anything worse than working as a waiter or waitress for a couple of years. Jane's honesty should be commended, despite his unsettling food metaphor. After he was asked what those types of living conditions cost him in the long run, Jane seemed to look back on those experiences fondly.
"You're a lot more open to experimentation as a young man. And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way."
Later in the interview, Jane says he now chooses to be heterosexual because that's what is in his DNA, but claims, "Until you've tasted the food, you don't know whether you'll like it or not, as my mom always said."
Again with the food. We're starting to wonder what was in those dinners that Jane's mother was making him as a kid.
[via LA Times]
