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.”
