Jared Leto and his brother Shannon cover the new issue of FourTwoNine Magazine, which I have never seen nor heard of, but here you are. I’m really not into either brother, but I do prefer Jared to Shannon. Shannon has the eyes of a creepster. I was going to ignore this, but I read some quotes from the interview and Jared’s post-Oscar holiday from criticism is short-lived.
Jared Leto is once again proving how friggin’ cool he is. In the new issue of FourTwoNine magazine, the Dallas Buyers Club Oscar winner says he doesn’t mind if you called him “queer.”
When the mag’s editor-in-chief Kevin Sessums mentions that some of his “straight friends have begun to define themselves as queer without it being a sexual term but a cultural one,” he goes on to ask Leto and his brother Shannon Leto if they’d be “averse” to having the same label.
“I wouldn’t care,” Shannon said. Jared added, “I don’t think we’d care at all. We certainly identify with people who are different.”
That differentness is one of the reasons the Leto brothers’ band, 30 Seconds to Mars, has attracted such a large LGBT fan base.
“I got a note from a kid yesterday,” Jared said. “We were signing a thousand CDs after a show. If you looked at him, he looked like any young kid maybe in twelfth grade or eleventh grade who’d be on the baseball team or something. A nice looking kid. He handed me a note and it said, ‘I just want to say thanks so much for the music. It’s helped me in many ways–especially with coming out this year to my family.’”
And to think the Letos were born in the not-always LGBT-friendly south.
“We escaped early on,” Jared said. “It’s very oppressive.” He further explained, “We would go back for the summers and stay with our grandmother, though. So the culture was always there that we returned to. We moved around every couple of years growing up. Way up to north Massachusetts. Everywhere. But no matter where we were it was a very creative environment around artists. That is obviously an important reason that Shannon and I are pursuing the path that we are now.”
Is the South oppressive? I’ve lived in the South for most of my life, and I’ve become increasingly sensitive to the prevalent anti-Southern bias exhibited by so many Hollywood-types (even those who were born in the South). The question I tend to ask is this: is the South any more or less oppressive than other parts of the country? And I really don’t think so. There are bigots in Manhattan. There are gay-bashers in Los Angeles. There are corrupt cops in every city. There will always be some neighbor or some crazy family member who has some asinine conspiracy theory about the government, no matter where you live.
I’m also including some photos of Jared at Coachella this weekend. He doesn’t look as douchebaggy as some of the dudes there, but then again… Jared is 43 years old. Maybe he’s too old for this crap?
Photos courtesy of Fame/Flynet.