Born On This Day- November 6th... Actor Robert Creel Davis

The husband & I saw the film when we first became a couple, & Brad Davis’s mighty performance as Billy Hayes in Midnight Express had us shaking with anxiety & sexual heat, but I always found Davis to have an underlying sweetness & vulnerability. He was not hard. He had the body of a compulsive athlete, but soul seemed soft, & his emotions accessible. He was a good looking man, he could never play ugly, but he is able to suggest many emotions: rage, helplessness, love, shame, fear. Davis was a fearless of actor. His involvement in gay themed projects was not always a good idea in the late 1970s, it was thought he was wrecking his career, & he never really bounced back from Querelle (love that movie!) & his stage work with gay playwrights. The gay speculation was working against him, despite his spectacular acting. It’s a shame, but so much about Brad Davis is a shame.


 Amid persistent gay rumors, Brad Davis rode drugs & sex to an early death from AIDS complications. Since his excesses killed him, why are we still hooked on his tragic glamour? His best friend, a gay man, insists: "just because Brad had sex with men doesn't mean he was a homosexual." His former colleagues refuse to go on record saying that Davis wasn't straight. His widow Susan Bluestein, in After Midnight: The Life & Death of Brad Davis, admits that he worked in a gay hustler bar & lived with a drag queen before making it big: "I don't know why everyone wants to believe Brad was gay."


I want to believe Davis was gay because of the all gay roles he played during his 20 year career. He had a very sexy vulnerability in his performances. Davis had to handle rumors about his sexuality during his life, & since his death he has become a gay icon whose assisted suicide in 1991 only adds to his tragic memory.


His hard partying, promiscuous image has stayed with him since his death, giving me a small connection with Davis. Susan Bluestein: "Brad was a bad boy for a very long time. He was always partying, always very promiscuous. For a lot of people, that meant he was gay."

His best friend, gay writer Rodger McFarlane: “Davis was the perfect 1970s clone. He was scrumptious. Anyone who ever had a budding gay libido,including me, saw him on the screen & projected all their postadolescent fantasies onto him. Long before we became best friends, I had a huge crush on him." So did I.


In gay role after gay role, Davis teased: The shower scene in a Turkish prison in Midnight Express (1978), & the gay sailor in Querelle (1982), in a tank top & white jeans so tight that the film's legendary gay directo-, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, declared that the trousers "revealed what religion Davis wasn't."  Davis's stage roles were often queer: He starred in Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart & Bent in NYC.

Mc Farlane: "On the stage & screen, Brad said everything gay there was to say at the time. Plus, he was the last example of that decadent free-love era."


Davis can also be held up as an example of the consequences of leading a closeted life. If he was gay, it's possible that Davis's carousing was a means of pushing back against the pressures of the Hollywood closet. Davis literally partied himself to death. Bluestein writes about of her husband's drug abuse, & McFarlane suggests that Davis may have contracted HIV from "passing around needles at A-list parties." Neither makes much of the fact that Davis worked as a prostitute when he first moved to New York in the early 1970s.


In 1991, Davis died of AIDS in Los Angeles; he was described as "the first heterosexual actor to die of AIDS". He kept his condition secret until shortly before his death. His widow continues to campaign against AIDS.