So how’s the run going? I was sitting in a Starbucks yesterday in the theatre district and three teenage boys from Kentucky were up here for spring break, boys who came to New York to see theatre on spring break instead of ogling girls in Daytona Beach. They were swooning over you.
That’s sweet. But the audiences here compared to London audiences are very warm to start with. There’s an enthusiasm. When you’re European and you came here back in the 1970s, that’s what you came for—this amazing American enthusiasm. I’ve gotten in touch with that a bit again doing this play. In London, the audience is like a bunch of old sluts who can never cum. They’re mean and dare you to entertain them.

So you’re homesick.
In fact, I am at the moment. Very. But not for the English audience.

What draws you to Coward? Where do you rank him as a writer? Below Shakespeare and above you?
He’s a great writer while being a funny little one also. I say funny little one because of his obsession with class and the class he came from. For example, in Blithe Spirit the class he paints is this weird, wonky kind of circus-mirror class that doesn’t exist but is his version of a something of a something and none of it quite makes sense. But at the same time there is a Chekhovian side of Coward waiting to be mined. There’s something lyrical and rather touching at how his characters use manners to mask a sort of sadness, and yet he is quite savage about relationships.

One of the things you’ve had to say over and over again is that you’re gay. And yet when those teenagers from Kentucky were talking about you, that’s one of the things they were so appreciative about. You're their role model.
God, I hope not. I don’t think kids should have role models. They’re disastrous. My own role models were stars who were tortured and downed barbiturates on film sets and I thought that was just the coolest thing. Montgomery Clift and people like that, but having role models is terrible.

When you came out of the closet did it upset your rather upper-class family back in Britain? I know your great uncle Donald Duart Maclean was part of the Cambridge Five and was a double agent for the Soviets. He was even made a brevet colonel in the KGB. Which was more upsetting to your parents, having a Soviet spy in the family or an avowed homosexual?
Oh, an avowed homosexual. They would have much preferred I be a double agent. But they are quite old now, and age has a way of knocking down a lot of things that mattered before. They are very sweet, my parents, but very sad in one sense, as they don't have grandchildren.

But being gay doesn’t preclude one from having children. You could adopt or go the surrogacy route that so many gay men are using these days.
I think this surrogacy thing is crap. It is utterly hideous. I think it’s egocentric and vain. And these endless IVF treatments people go through. I mean, if you are meant to have babies then great. But this whole idea of two gay guys filling a cocktail shaker with their sperm and impregnating some grim lesbian and then it gets cut out is just really weird. If I did have the impulse to be a parent, I would adopt—or foster. But this whole thing of forcing the idea of parenthood on us gay men is so bogus. Marriage? Babies? Please. I want to be illegal. I want to live outside the mainstream.

You’re so old-fashioned.
Or am I slightly ahead of the curve? It has to change. These awful middle-class queens—which is what the gay movement has become—are so tiresome. It’s all Abercrombie & Fitch and strollers. Everybody has the right to do what they want to do, but still...

It’s good to know you’re not judgmental. Do you regret having come out as a gay man? Does it anger you that a lot of actors who are gay have chosen not to come out and have better careers to show for it?
No. What I find I regret—what pisses me off—is this complicity among everyone else against a queen even though they don’t even know it. Even people who consider themselves thoughtful. So what people say about me is, “Isn’t it amazing that you didn’t really try very hard in your career? Your career is so up and down.” But the reason my career is so up and down is that I get very little opportunity. There is just very little opportunity for a fag. That’s the reality. There isn’t. But I have no regrets for being out. None. It’s not like I’m missing out on that much. Being an actor in Hollywood is not that great a job anymore. It’s become the sluttiest job on the planet. It’s not remotely serious. We're not talking about Hollywood in the 1970s anymore. I'm not that upset not to be in Ocean's 15 or whatever.

Gavin Creel, who is so remarkable as the lead in the revival of Hair—he plays Claude—just gave an interview and came out. He said that if it hurts his career so be it, that he’d rather have a life than a career.
I’d definitely rather have a life, too. He’s right. I find it’s made me much more interesting because it’s forced me to find alternative means of employment. It forced me to become a writer. It forced me to live in France. It forced me to work in Italy. It forced me to go to Russia. It forced me to write my own script about Oscar Wilde I hope to get made one day.

You’re even on the masthead of Vanity Fair as a contributing editor.
I know. Who does one have to fuck to get OFF that masthead? He's such a weird character, their Editor Graydon Carter. He's certainly not the buffoon he looks like. He is an amazing fuck. And you can quote me on this.

Irreverence is certainly one of your calling cards. Is it why Channel Four in England hired you to host a series of travel documentaries. You’ve done shows about the explorer Sir Richard Burton and another two retracing Lord Byron’s journeys in Albania and Greece. Did you swim the Hellespont—or the Dardanelles, as it’s called today—like Byron did?
I attempted to swim it, yes. But we were forced to stop because of the tankers. Channel Four wanted a bit of sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll in the documentaries and it was difficult to incorporate that in a travel documentary. Sir Richard Burton’s life was all about sexuality in Africa so that sort of fit. And then I thought that Byron had a bit of all that in his day.

Did you identify with his lover Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”?
A bit, yes. But then we looked at his life in Greece and Albania where he was as serious a revolutionary as Che Guevara or Bolivar.