“I was over at Quincy Jones’s house, and I’m asking Quincy, ‘I’m hearing rumours that Marvin was gay’ and I’m like, ‘Was he gay?’ And Quincy’s like, ‘Yes,'” he recalled (via Rolling Stone). In Howard’s telling, he backed out of the project because “They would’ve wanted to do that, and I wouldn’t have been able to do that.” When it comes to kissing on screen, he explained, “I don’t fake it.” (Never mind that acting is definitionally faking it.) Kissing a man “would fuck me. I would cut my lips off. If I kissed some man, I would cut my lips off.”
Howard asserted that “it does not make me homophobic to not want to kiss a man,” which is fair enough; it’s the cutting-my-lips-off bit that’s homophobic. He argued that “I can’t play that character 100 percent” because “I can’t surrender myself to a place that I don’t understand,” which makes it sound like he’s not a very good actor. “I’ve lost businesses because I don’t bend over in that way,” Howard claims. “I don’t compromise. I don’t play gay roles. I don’t kiss a man. I don’t do that shit because the man card means everything.”
Nobody has to kiss anybody they don’t want to, but the belief that kissing a man would make someone less of a man is, again, homophobic. And perhaps that stubbornness has lost Terrence Howard jobs, or perhaps it was any number of his other quirks or controversies, ranging from inventing a new math where one times one doesn’t equal one to multiple allegations of domestic violence, some of which he has confirmed. Howard’s Empire boss Lee Daniels defended him over the abuse allegations of his past. (Daniels compared Howard to Sean Penn, which prompted Penn to sue and ultimately forced Daniels to issue a public apology.) Howard played a violent homophobe on Empire, the character’s abuse of his son modeled on Daniels’ own childhood.
Elsewhere on the podcast, Howard shared that he was a supporter of President Donald Trump until his administration carried out mass deportations. Howard has also teased starting his own podcast on which he will supposedly speak truth to the powers that be in Hollywood; he told TMZ it will be a “studio’s nightmare and every actor’s wet dream.”
