Over the summer—before his Oscar campaign, before the Harvey Weinstein allegations, and before Franco’s Time’s Up pin prompted women to come forward with their stories of Franco’s sexual misconduct—James Franco did a cover story with Out Magazine. The tone between Franco and the renowned queer writer Edmund White is one of warm camaraderie as they discuss sex in the 1970s, porn, and Franco’s new therapeutic approach to what was once a work-obsessed life. Looking back at the article after the allegations against Franco have gone public, the exchange is weighted with hypocrisy. For over a decade, while James Franco was indulging dubious sexual impulses in his private and artistic lives, he was publicly courting the gay press with teases about his queerness.
In a report with the LA Times, five women came forward to discuss James Franco’s history of sexual harassment. One of the women is Violet Paley, a former girlfriend of Franco’s whose tweets about him went viral after the Golden Globes. She accused Franco of coercing her to perform a blow job at the start of what became a consensual relationship. In the Times report, she elaborated that their relationship began after she sought Franco’s advice on scriptwriting.
Franco began a series of public stunts that attempted to evolve his queer performances into queer performance art.
The rest of the recent allegations come from women who worked with Franco as students or as performers on his short films. The Times piece exposes a pattern of behavior in which Franco abuses his clout in the industry to allegedly coerce younger, less powerful women to perform sexually explicit material. The report recalls an off-the-rails and thoroughly heterosexual version of Franco’s 2013 film Interior. Leather Bar, in which Franco enlisted queer filmmaker Travis Mathews to help him shoot an unsimulated gay orgy. In that movie, Mathews exemplifies the responsible approach to filming sex, by communicating clearly and early to his performers what the expectations will be on set.
By contrast, the report describing Franco’s unsupervised conduct as a director includes an incident in which Franco came to set with the expectation that the aspiring performers he hired through his acting school will take their tops off without advance warning, without legal reassurance, and without additional payment.”His former student, Sarah Tither-Kaplan, describes watching Franco remove the plastic lining protecting women’s vaginas during a scene of simulated oral sex in an upcoming project of his, The Long Home. Tither-Kaplan also describes being told that the nude scenes she performed for a Franco project would be uploaded onto Franco’s Studio 4 Vimeo page, eventually making their way to porn aggregation sites—all without her consent.
Some of the details in the Times report are shockingly simple for their blunt stupidity. James Franco taught a class called “Sex Scene,” and the students who took the class were called “Sex Sceners.” James Franco sent mass emails to former students looking for women to play sex workers—roles he called “hookers and prostitutes.”
By vocally trumpeting their queerness, both Franco and Hopkins were able to divert attention away from behavior behind closed doors that was anything but enlightened.
The portrait that comes together in the Times report is of a man fascinated by sex who has been given the power to creatively explore it, but who doesn’t possess enough insight to wield that power responsibly. For queer readers, this image might seem familiar, and not just because we actually saw Interior. Leather Bar.
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