Humphrey Bogart is what happens when you take a man’s idea of a manly man and man him up a thousand times more, to create the manliest thing that ever lived. While things have changed in this century, back when Bogie was big, a key part of being such a man-splosion of testosterone was never, ever feeling anything remotely like attraction toward the other manly men. And here the legendary actor ran into his biggest problem. He wasn’t completely sure he was straight. So he did what any man with an early 20th-century view on the subject would do. He bedded over a thousand women in a desperate attempt to prove to himself that he was straight (via The Telegraph).
The claims come from the book Humphrey Bogart: The Making of a Legend, and rely on private conversations Bogie had about struggling with his sexuality to the point of considering suicide. From a modern perspective, this can be difficult to wrap your head around. Plenty of people today embrace everything from loving both genders to trying anything they come across to being just vaguely curious. But in Bogie’s time, admitting to yourself that you’d ever even glanced at another guy was enough to trigger an avalanche of guilt worthy of its own disaster movie.
Hence his successful attempt to out-Casanova Casanova. For Bogie, taking those legions of women to bed was the only cure he knew for his bi-curious feelings. If only the poor guy had been born a century later.
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