I just realized where Tommy Kirk was from
He was the whiny smart kid Ernst from the Disney Classic, the swiss family robinson.
Something tells me he should have stuck with the disney movies...
He couldn't. Disney dropped him when they found out he was gay.
shareIt had less to do with being gay, and more to do with boning a 15-year-old boy. Kirk was 23 at the time, and the kid's mom complained to Walt.
Even if he were straight, that's sleazy as all hell, and should have been fired either way.
How about the truth. Not your salacious lies to paint someone as a pedo AND it was almost 100% because of gay and the arrest.
In 1963 the bubble completely burst when the Disney factory found out 21-year-old Tommy was gay. He was also arrested on Christmas Eve in 1964 when a party he was attending was raided and busted for marijuana use. Although charges were dropped, it was too late
and per tommy
The story goes that Disney personally fired Kirk after Kirk’s “backstreet affair” with “a younger actor” became the talk of the studio. “Disney was a family film studio and I was supposed to be their young, leading man. After they found out I was involved with someone, that was the end of Disney.” The year was 1964, and Kirk’s career was effectively over.
AND
Tommy found very mild restitution aftersigning with AIP (American International Pictures) and appearing in such popular teen-oriented flicks as Pajama Party (1964), co-starring fellow Disney cohort Annette Funicello, and The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini (1966). He also began appearing on the musical stage as Harold Hill in "The Music Man," Riff in "West Side Story" and as the lead in "Tovarich." He also was lent out to do a lead in the mediocre cult sci-fi Embassy Picture Village of the Giants (1965). After leaving AIP, things got progressively worse for Tommy with a lead role in Trans American Film's It's a Bikini World (1967) -- by this time, beach party films were no longer trendy. Bargain basement fare such as Unkissed Bride (1966)_ (aka Mother Goose a Go-Go), UA's Track of Thunder (1967), Catalina Caper (1967) Mars Needs Women (1967), in which he played a Martian, and Psycho à Go-Go (1967) (aka Psycho a Go-Go) pretty much spelled as a leading man. Practically blacklisted by an industry that deemed "outed" gay actors "box office poison," he returned to the musical theatre in his home state of Kentucky with such shows as "Anything Goes" (as Moonface Martin), "Hello, Dolly!" (as Horace Vandergelder), "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
"Salacious lies?" I'm so impressed.
How's this, then?
"In 1993, Tommy did a now famous interview with Richard Valley for Scarlet Street magazine, in which he discussed his lifestyle, past substance abuse, and the circumstances of his dismissal from Disney. Tom, at age 23, was carrying on an affair with a fifteen-year-old boy he had picked up from a public pool. The boy's mother went to Walt Disney to complain, and Walt decided Tommy had become a liability. His contract was dropped, though the studio did allow him to come back for a Merlin Jones sequel, The Monkey's Uncle (1965), which coincidently was Annette's last Disney film as well.
A headline-making drug bust at a Hollywood party SOON AFTER (emph.) resulted in Tommy's name appearing in print, and killed his chance for a good role in a John Wayne movie. Tom slipped into a career depression, making progressively worse movies, starting with Village of the Giants (1965). The only consolation was, as Tommy later explained, that he was so stoned during the making of these flicks that he doesn't really remember much about them. "
http://www.originalmmc.com/tomkirk.html