"As part of an extended podcast recently, I suggested that if closeted people were instead open about their sexuality they wouldn’t abuse others."

"That, of course, is wrong. My intention was to encourage the LGBT audience I was addressing to be proud and open about their sexuality. In doing so, my point was clumsily expressed. I would never, ever trivialize or condone abuse of any kind. I deeply regret my careless remarks and apologize unreservedly for any distress I caused."

Said Ian McKellen, backing off after criticism for observing that actor Kevin Spacey and director Bryan Singer "were in the closet" and "If they had been able to be open about themselves and their desires, they wouldn’t have started abusing people in the way they’ve been accused."

"It was a never-ending supply of cute young men..."

Said Bret Tyer Skopek, quoted in "Sex, Drugs, Glamour, Emptiness: Bryan Singer’s Teen Ex-Lover Bares All About Life In Director’s Orbit."

In Skopek’s telling, Singer dangled the lure of a minor role in an X-Men movie, but the promised audition never happened. Disillusioned and exhausted by Singer’s sexual demands over the course of their year-long relationship, the young man eventually moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to live with his father....

It should be noted that the "teen" was 18. Was he not free to make his own choices about what kind of relationships to have? Even if he is, that doesn't absolve the older man of responsibility for predatory behavior and lies, and the young man is also free to tell his story and to frame the older man in whatever negative light fits within the bounds of libel law and whatever nondisclosure agreements the old man may have used to try to protect himself.

“In Hollywood, the question you get asked a million times is, ‘What wouldn’t you do to succeed?’ And your hunger is part of the deal with the devil,” [London-based director Duncan Roy said] in an interview with Deadline. “The horrible thing is that there’s an unwritten rule, an unspoken agreement, between anybody who arrives. Every single high school king and queen that arrives in L.A. knows what to expect. You do anything to get on because the riches, when they’re delivered to you, are profound.”

Everyone knows what to expect? Teens arriving from the hinterlands — they all already know everything? And they all have already decided to do anything. That's a convenient thing for the director to believe, but I don't believe he really believes it. I'm surprised — whether he believes it or not — that he's naive enough to say it. But that shows how out-of-touch people inside the movie business are.* He doesn't see how we the public will feel about assertions like that, and he doesn't know how young people really feel or — if his statement is somehow true about young people and I'm wrong — have any empathy for the human beings who are making poor decisions about what to do with their beautiful young bodies.

Here's the photograph young Bret Tyler Skopek took of himself with Bryan Singer:

That's the face of a boy-man whose conscious thought may well have been I'm so lucky to have this high-level access, but it's easy to see that even then — even while he still had access — he was silently crying.**
____________________

* And yet so many of us go to the movies and consume their vision of what human beings are really like. We let these false images shape our psychology and our culture.

** You can see why this boy will be replaced by a new boy from the "never-ending supply of cute young men." He's worn out and drained. The old man needs a new mirror. He looks too ugly reflected in this boy's face.