Although Franco's performance is already drawing Oscar buzz, some are surprised that, for his next role, he's chosen to play gay poet Allen Ginsberg in the movie "Howl."

New York Daily News writes:

Franco, who came to fame in the "Spider-Man" movies, has dated actress Marla Sokoloff. But since they parted, his private life has become a matter of keen speculation, especially among his gay fans. Some wicked rumors have percolated on the Web.

But at a time when Hollywood still seems to like its heroic gay characters played by straight men, Franco isn't bothered by perceptions.

Back-to-back gay roles "don't make any difference to me," he told us at Monday's Cinema Society screening of "Milk." "Ginsberg has been one of my heroes, and this movie" - about the 1957 obscenity trial over Ginsberg's most famous poem - "is just so important."

Never mind that Franco doesn't look much like the tubby, balding, bearded Ginsberg of the hippie era.

"I'm playing him when he was in his late 20s, just after he went to Columbia," said Franco, who happens to be a student at the same university. (The girls moon over him in Butler Library.) "We work with the old pictures. He has hair, he doesn't have a beard and he's not huge."

Meanwhile, Franco doesn't think much of the move to boycott Robert Redford's Sundance Film Festival in Utah to punish Utah's Mormon Church for helping finance California's Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage. "Sundance has no connection to the Mormon Church that I know of," he said.

"Milk" director Gus Van Sant agreed. "I don't think I endorse it," he said of the boycott. "So everything in Utah is just, like, off-limits?"

Josh Brolin, who plays Milk's murderer, Dan White, offered that the one good thing about Proposition 8's passage was that "it's got people fired up. So I'm almost glad about that."

Last update: 01-29-2009 14:30

Posted by Roger Howell, on 11-22-2008 16:33, 1. Kudos to Franco I would like to say thank you to Mr. Franco for taking time to broaden his movie career by playing a gay man. We know he's straight but he played his part in Milk with sincerity. I don't think there are many straight actors I would want as the GLBT communities ally.   » Report this comment to administrator