"You can't run away from yourself." Anthony Perkins is a gay man who was convinced that he was heterosexual

In the era of golden Hollywood, where the facades of ideal masculinity were guarded more strictly than state secrets, Anthony Perkins became a symbol of hidden struggle. Tall, thin, with a piercing gaze and a nervous smile, he conquered the screens in the 1950s as a new matine idol - the heir to James Dean. But behind the scenes, his life was full of shadows: Perkins was gay in a world where the word could destroy a career. He hated his orientation, tried to "cure" and eventually created a family to hide from himself. This is the story of a tragedy typical of that era.

From his youth, Perkins was aware of his homosexuality and suffered from it. After his father's death at the age of five, he grew up surrounded by women, which, in his own words, increased the internal conflict. In college, he was even associated with the expulsion of a group of gay students. Until the end of his 30s, his sexual experience was exclusively with men. Among his partners are legends of Hollywood and the art world: actor Tab Hunter (a passionate romance in the late 1950s, with secret meetings and double dates for cover), the great ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (an intense but brief romance in the 1960s, when Nureyev had already become a sensation in the West after fleeing the USSR; their relationship was full of passion and typical of both secretiveness), dancer Grover Dale (a long relationship in the 1960s), composer Stephen Sondheim and others.

Paramount, which signed him, saw him as "the last matina idol" and actively fought the "problem". His superiors forced him to end his affairs (including with Hunter) and undergo conversion therapy. Perkins hated his orientation, considered it a "disease". In the 1970s, he turned to the psychoanalyst Mildred Newman, who argued that homosexuality could be "cured." The therapy even included electroshock, a brutal method later denounced by Perkins' friends, including Sondheim, as "unethical and dangerous." He had his first sex with a woman only at the age of 39 - with actress Victoria Principal on the set.

At the age of 41, in 1973, Perkins unexpectedly married photographer Berry Berenson, 16 years younger than him. She has been in love with him since childhood in films and actively sought a relationship. The marriage shocked his friends: many knew about his homosexuality and saw it as an attempt to create a "normal" façade. Berenson later admitted that she was naïve and did not understand the subtext, although Perkins told her about the past. The couple had two sons - Oz (director of "Longlegs") and Elvis (musician). According to the memoirs of relatives, Perkins was a loving father and husband, but the topic of his orientation remained taboo in the family.

His son Oz later said that his father was "gay or bisexual" who lived a double life in an era when it was impossible to openly. Conversion therapy did not change the essence - it only added pain. Perkins died in 1992 from complications of AIDS without ever coming out of the closet in public. His story is a mirror of the cruelty of Hollywood in the 1950s and 1970s, where talented people broke down under the pressure of "normality."

As they say, you can't run away from yourself.