Thomas Jane Used to be a Gay Prostitute

Thomas Jane plays a male prostitute in his HBO series Hung and it turns out he’s perfect for the role because he can draw from personal experience. Speaking to the L.A. Times, Jane clears up any notion that he’s anti-gay by explaining his comment that the last season of the show would be when he ended up with a penis in his mouth.

You’ve gotten a lot of grief in the gay media.

I think they took my comment that it would be the last year of the show when I ended up with a [penis] in my mouth, think they took that comment to be anti-gay. And then I got a chance to explain myself a little further, and I think people respected the explanation that I gave. And then I had to get up and pee during the Herve Leger [fashion] show, and everybody flipped out about that. That became a separate issue.

Oh and how he blew dudes. In a van. Down by the river. No, just kidding. In not so many words, he said he blew dudes for a sandwich.

Well, here’s your chance.

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. 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?

Do you feel that experience had any cost or was it just doing what you had to do?

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.

So then it was productive for you in terms of self-knowledge?

Yeah, absolutely. It blew the doors off of my conventional upbringing and thinking and opened up possibilities for me that were akin to World War III. And then you actually have a choice, and I chose to be a heterosexual guy because that’s what my DNA dictates and my nurture dictates that I am.

Then is that a choice?

I don’t know. I think up to a point it’s a choice. But I’ll tell you what — it’s not a choice until you’re open enough to experience both male and female sexuality. Until you’ve tasted the food, you don’t know whether you’ll like it or not, as my mom always said. LA Times

You know what they say. When life gives you lemons, blow a guy in his car in the back alley to get a sandwich to squeeze lemon juice on. People say that, right?