Was Perry gay?
I've just seen the movie 'Infamous' which suggests that Perry was gay. Anything to back this up?
shareYou say you saw "Infamous" and all you got was a 'suggestion' that Perry was gay? Over half the film is about the affair between he and Capote. Were you sleeping?
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There was NOTHING in Infamous to suggest that Perry was Gay, It is a known fact that Capote was in love with Perry and thats what Infamous portrayed, Perry did not return that love but needed the friendship Truman offered.So NO Perry was not gay.
"I built the Snape band wagon, your just riding on it" - Trinacle 1/8/2007
"between him and Capote". Sorry.
shareThere was nothing to suggest that Perry was gay. The kissing scene in one of the movies (I think it was Infamous) was fabricated, as far as anyone knows. Capote was infatuated with Perry, but there is nothing to indicate that Perry returned the feeling.
shareread the book In Cold Blood
it suggests alot about Perry being gay, there are probably 3 different guys they pretty much said he was involved with
it is also suggested by some that he was infatuated with Dick thats why he followed him around when they couldve easily seperated and probably not gotten caught
can I get an encore?
I see from this discussion that nobody read the book, the best true crime story ever. So here's the "cliff notes" as far as Perry's background and attitude toward sex is concerned.
Perry Smith was one of four children born to a couple of misfit parents. The mother (Florence) was beautiful and talented in her youth but while the children were still very young, she turned to liquor and men, men, more men, anonymous men. Among Perry's earliest memories are his father coming home and snatching his drunken mother from the arms of some guy she picked up in a bar and beating her half to death, sometimes throwing in some blows on the kids for good measure.
After they broke up, Perry spent some time with his father, some in orphanages, and a good deal with his mother who then lived in a run-down apartment in San Francisco. If she was in bad shape before, she was worse after the separation. Drunk, dirty, sick all the time, and day-in-day-out flopped with out some man she'd picked up for a drink or less. The kids were ignored, rarely fed (except by an occasional "trick" who took pity on them) and lived in filth.
This was young Perry Smith's whole world. And at the center of it was his mother's promiscuity - both when the parents were together and afterward. All the ugly stuff in his life seemed to be brought about in one way or another by the mother's relationships with men.
Kids can react to bad situations differently. In Perry's case, he grew up understandably contemptuous of easy women.
Add Dick Hickock to the mix and you get another side of it. Hickock was always after the young girls. He preferred them in their early teens. And he was relentless in his pursuit of them. It was something that ticked Perry off. In fact, Perry stepped in and prevented Dick from raping Nancy Clutter before she was shot.
As for the three Smith siblings, their lives are hardly surprising. One sister fell to her death from a window ledge or fire escape in San Francisco. I believe it was a suicide. His brother went into the Navy and married a nice girl. But he couldn't deal with marriage. He thought that all women were like his mother and couldn't trust his wife out of his sight. He ended up shooting her to death over an imagined affair and then turning the gun on himself. That leaves one sister. She somehow managed to go straight and live a very normal life - in Colorado, I believe. She was interviewed extensively for the book.
No, Perry wasn't gay. But he had real, big-time hangups about sex. And it's not hard to figure out why.
You write that you can tell from these discussions that nobody read the book, but you are mistaken. I have read the book at least three times (and I certainly agree with you that it was the greatest crime novel ever), and my comments clearly reflect that. Further, your last sentence, "No, Perry wasn't gay. But he had real, big-time hangups about sex. And it's not hard to figure out why" is, in my opinion, absolutely correct.
shareI've searched Perry's genealogy as well on ancestry.com. His mother had divorced his father sometime in the 1930's, they moved to San Francisco and she remarried to some man named Helvey. She was buried in Colma, where most San Franciscan's are, in an unmarked grave forgotten about and died in 1947 only in her early 40's. His father, on the other hand, was a Dutchman born Johan Smit, in rural South Dakota, that changed his name to Tex John Smith. He lived most of his life in anonymity and died in his 90's in 1985 in Utah.
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