Although Marlon Brando had 3 wives and at least 2 more long term female partners rumors have persisted that he was Gay or at the very least Bisexual.
Brando has been linked to fellow Hollywood bad boy James Dean. They met in 1949, while Brando was on Broadway starring in “A Streetcar Named Desire” and Dean studied Actor’s Studio. In the Dean bio (James Dean: Tomorrow Never Comes.) a wide-eyed “puppy dog” Dean worshiped Brando and the two participated in fetish sex.
In 2018, music producer Quincy Jones said that Brando and Richard Pryor were lovers.
Then there’s the story about Marlon Brando and life long friend Wally Cox. They seem like an incongruous pair, but the two knew each other since childhood. They were also roommates while struggling actors in New York City.
Brando once told a journalist:
“If Wally had been a woman, I would have married him and we would have lived happily ever after.”
And when Cox died in 1973, Brando rushed to the funeral to convince Cox’s wife to let him scatter the ashes in the Hollywood Hills. Instead, Brando kept Wally’s ashes for another 29 years. Upon Brando’s own death in 2003 the ashes of both life long friends (and lovers?) were mixed together and scattered in Tahiti and Death Valley. Various wives of both deny either were homosexual but their relationship looks to be beyond heterosexual.
(And of course there’s the infamous photo floating around the internet of Brando supposedly performing oral sex on Cox. It’s easy of find.)
And on the subject of sexual identity, Brando said his own biographer in 1976:
“Homosexuality is so much in fashion, it no longer makes news. Like a large number of men, I, too, have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed. I have never paid much attention to what people think about me. But if there is someone who is convinced that Jack Nicholson and I are lovers, may they continue to do so. I find it amusing.”
I know I complained when work was slow about not having anything to do, but now that it’s busy and I have less time for reading non-work related things, I’m finding so many things I want to read. But also I’m finding that all I want to do is nap when I leave the office, so, make of that what you will.
A lot of my time, however, is spent reading about the awfulness of our world lately and I’m not…
Madonna and Dennis Rodman photographed by Melodie McDaniel for Vibe magazine, 1994.
Dennis Rodman:
In April, one of her people called and asked me to come to Miami because Madonna was going to interview me for Vibe, the hip-hop magazine. They told me the magazine had assigned her to do an interview of me, and it was supposed to be the cover story—with photos and the interview—for the June 1994 issue….
I didn’t like her work at all. I didn’t like her music. I told her that too. I thought she was a brilliant entertainer, but her music wasn’t my style. She changed with the album called Bedtime Stories. It was pretty cool, but a lot of people didn’t accept it. After we went through the introductions at her house, she did the interview. She sat there and took notes and everything. She had questions ready, all written down. After we did some of the interview, they started doing the photo shoot and We were gust all over each other. From the first photo we were covering each other. I didn’t care if it was Madonna or not, to me it was just another girl and we were on each other. They ended the photo shoot before we got too carried away. We ended up going out to the gay bar—that was an experience….
Eventually we went back to her house. I got in the house and headed for the spare bedroom. I was all set to just go in there and crash, but Bryne was already asleep in there. Before I could ask where I should go, Madonna looked at me all sexy and said, “YOU’RE STAYING WITH ME, IN MY ROOM.” There was no doubt that she wasn’t going to let me go in the other room, whether Bryne was in there or not. Then she shut the door and told her manager, “He’ll be with me.” So I laid my head where all the other mongrels had. First thing you know—boom!—we’re messing around. We sort of picked up where we left off during the photo shoot, except this time there was nobody watching….
As it turned out, the Vibe magazine story was real, but it never appeared in the magazine. I found out later they didn’t like the way it turned out, so they scrapped it.
Madonna and Dennis Rodman photographed by Melodie McDaniel for Vibe magazine in 1994. The magazine’s founder, Quincy Jones, prevented their cover story from being published.
Dennis Rodman:
Our relationship had better luck than that article. We got to know each other and we found out we had a lot in common. Our philosophies on life were pretty much the same. We thought a lot alike, and we both have the same knowledge about how stupid life is on this marble we live on. We are two people who do whatever we want in life and get away with it…. Athletes and entertainers aren’t all that different. We came at things from the same angle. She knows she’s not going to be a sex goddess her whole life, and I know I’m not going to be a superstar athlete much longer either. You can’t hold on forever, and both of us understood that. We weren’t living in a fantasy world, making ourselves believe we’d have everything we have now for the rest of our lives. We both wanted to experience as much as we could while we still had it going for us, though.
A video of legendary musician and producer Quincy Jones’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I thought I’d share this little gem of a video I just came across. How I did not see this earlier I do not know, but I know that I am ashamed of calling myself a fan of music for not doing so.
This is a video of legendary musician and produced Quincy…
Celebrating Legendary Jazz Vocalist Sarah Vaughan for #JazzAppreciationMonth (LISTEN)
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson) In continued celebration of #JazzAppreciationMonth, today we drop in on virtuoso vocalist Sarah Vaughan, who hailed from Newark, New Jersey, and was dubbed “Sassy” for her salty conversation and “The Divine One” for the heavenly and serene singing feats she accomplished with her three octave range. To read about Vaughan, read on. To hear about her,…
