The article, Hunter felt, insinuated he’d been party to a “gay orgy”, a rumor that might have torpedoed his career given the contemporaneous moral panic around homosexuality and the “lavender scare” that led to mass firings. But not before an article in Confidential, the bimonthly gossip rag from which Hunter’s memoir borrows its name, reported on the then 24-year-old’s involvement in an arrest at a “limp-wristed pajama party” where other gay males were in attendance.
Ultimately, Hunter would end up with producer Allan Glaser, his partner of 36 years. The gossip columns of the day, penned by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, “made subtle references” to his sexuality, as Hunter wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, “wondering when I was going to settle down with a nice girl and then, after the studio began pairing me with my dear friend Natalie Wood on faux-dates, asking if I was ‘the sort of guy’ she wanted to end up with”. Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter pose with trophies at the Audience Awards in Los Angeles on 6 December 1955.
