We have a new Twitter-fueled uproar today. Why is bad-boy novelist Bret Easton Ellis claiming TV actor Matt Bomer is "too gay" to play a straight role in a movie of Fifty Shades of Grey?
There is no movie, or at least not yet. It's not yet even a glimmer in Hollywood's addled brain, let alone cast, but fans of the hot-hot-hot novels of sadomasochistic sex are busy casting the major characters anyway, especially on Twitter. Bomer, the hot-hot-hot star of USA Network's White Collar who also had a role in this year's Magic Mike, is being mentioned to play the novels' soft-porn protagonist Christian Grey.
No way, tweeted Ellis, 48, the author and screenwriter of American Psycho and other books, who may or may not be gay himself but surely is the brattiest of the literary Brat Pack. He has nothing against gays or Bomer, Ellis says, but Christian Grey has to be into women or the story won't work. Which is what he said in a Twitter rant this week.
"He's NOT right for Christian G," he tweeted Wednesday. "Okay I'll say it. Matt Bomer isn't right for Christian Grey because he is openly gay...He's not CG. Never...I am NOT discriminating Matt Bomer because of his sexuality. Fifty Shades of Grey demands an actor that is genuinely into women. Get it?!?"
Cue the ensuing flow of push-back and atta boy tweets.
And, mind you, the fact that Ellis didn't get the job to adapt the story for the big screen has nothing to do with what E!Online called "Fifty Shades of Bitter." On that point, Ellis tweeted earlier, "It's a very major disappointment to announce that I've somehow been taken off the list of possible screenwriters for Fifty Shades of Grey..."
Bomer, 32, who recently came out, plays a sexy straight guy in his TV show and so far has managed to be persuasive despite going home every night to his male partner and their children. Ellis, in another tweet, said he thinks Bomer comes off as "totally gay" in White Collar.
By the way, Ellis himself has long been coy in multiple interviews over the years about defining his own sexuality. For artistic reasons, he has said, he doesn't want to say because "if people knew that I was straight, they'd read (his books) in a different way. If they knew I was gay, Psycho would be read as a different book."
