Tab Hunter

Tab Hunter was one of Hollywood's biggest box-office stars of the 1950s, a blue-eyed heartthrob known for Battle Cry (1955), Damn Yankees (1958), and a string of teen-idol hits. He was gay and deeply closeted throughout his stardom -- the studio system constructed fake romances for him and he lived in perpetual fear of exposure. He came out in his autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential (2005), at age 74, and was the subject of a documentary of the same name (2015). He met producer Allan Glaser in 1983; the two were partners for 35 years and married in 2013, remaining together until Hunter's sudden death in 2018. He reflected with candor on the decades of deception required to have a career in that era.