Ghost screenwriter comes out as gay at 81 – and says his wife has known for 50 years
US Screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin has opened up for the first time about being gay. (Pablo Cuadra/Getty Images)
US screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin, best-known for penning hit 1990 film Ghost, has come out publicly as “fully gay” at the age of 81 – and says his wife has known about his sexuality throughout their 54-year marriage.
The writer opened up about his sexuality publicly for the first time in his memoir, It’s Only a Movie, and has told The Guardian: “I’ve never not been gay. I am fully gay and I always knew it.”
Rubin has been married to Blanche since 1970 and together they have two boys, Joshua and Ari. Blanche has known about his sexuality for more than 50 years, while his wider family found out more recently.
The couple had “a good sex life” and even “a conjoined relationship with a guy I liked in our ashram”, the Oscar-winner added.
“I don’t like that I was closeted for so long,” Rubin continued, “but it would just have confused people. Why spill the beans [now]? I didn’t want to leave this world with any secrets.”
Despite telling with his wife shortly after they met that he was gay, Rubin kept his sexuality mostly “internalised” because at the time he didn’t know how to announce it.
“I had to step out of the mainstream of life and look at it from a different angle. Finding yourself on the fringe of human experience is a gift rather than a torment. A movie like Ghost reached hundreds of millions of people, and it’s my little hidden lifestyle that gave me a voice to speak to them.”
The writer is aware of Ghost’s queer audience and highlighted a couple of scenes that kept their attention, the first being where Sam’s (Patrick Swayze), spectral body inhabits fake medium Oda Mae Brown, played by Whoopi Goldberg, allowing the murdered financier a moment of physical contact with his living girlfriend Molly (Demi Moore).
“What I tried to emphasise was that even though it was Oda Mae’s hands, it felt like Sam,” Rubin said. “I didn’t think of it as lesbianism, but I knew there would be people who would go: ‘Hmm’.”
And the moment where Sam says “ditto” to Molly declaring “I love you”, was how he responded to a college girlfriend when he felt unable to be honest about his sexuality.
‘Male beauty for me is overwhelmingly powerful’
But now Rubin is “happily gay” and enjoying embracing his sexuality in his later years.
“I’ll tell you something you’ll find out: when you hit your eighties and think your libido is gone, it comes flying back. So big. Male beauty for me is overwhelmingly powerful.
“Just seeing someone in the supermarket, I feel this explosive joy.”
In March, details of the latest UK tour of Ghost the Musical were announced. The film was the highest-grossing movie of 1990.
