I Hate When This Happens

I prefer to know as little as possible about actors/musicians/performers whose work I admire. There's this risk lurking in the background that learning something awful about them will then make the movie/album/routine somewhat diminished, that it will no longer bring me joy. I'm not talking about your run-of-the-mill human foible type of thing, I'm talking about serious failure here. Case in point would be Kevin Spacey, who was outed in more ways than one this last week. He appears in two of my most favorite movies, Rocket Gibraltar and American Beauty. He is such a terrific actor! But I know my awareness that he has been accused by two young men, who were minors at the time, of being accosted by Spacey, will diminish my future enjoyment of these films. I know, it's a small price to pay. Anyone who has experienced sexual assault deserves to be heard and believed and their perpetrators should be punished. To add insult as well as injury to the victims, Spacey made a rather late-to-the-table and unsurprising announcement that he's gay while issuing a lackluster apology for his drunken behavior. This casts aspersions on the whole gay community. One of the earliest and still lingering stereotypes of gay men is that they are all child molesters even though it has been repeatedly proven to be false. It looks like Spacey is going to have a difficult time finding work since the allegations surfaced, though, and that seems fair to me. Netflix has suspended production on the current season of their series House of Cards, and will not release the film Gore that he produced and starred in. Shame on you, Kevin Spacey, on so many levels.