Hung star Thomas Jane got us all talking back in October when he told the LA Times that he used to exchange sexual favors with men for food. His comments were pretty explicit and it doesn’t sound like they were taken out of context. It’s possible he was misquoted, but he never corrected the paper at the time. He said:

“Hey, you grow up as an artist in a big city, as James Dean said, you’re going to have one arm tied behind your back if you don’t accept people’s sexual flavors. You know, when I was a kid out here in L.A., I was homeless, I didn’t have any money and I was living in my car. I was 18. I wasn’t averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich. Know what I mean?”

“You’re a lot more open to experimentation as a young man. And for me, being a young artist and broke in Los Angeles, I was exploring my sexual identity. And probably because of my middle-class, white blue-collar upbringing, I would have never had the opportunity to confront some of my own fears and prejudices had I not been hungry enough to be forced to challenge myself in that way… It blew the doors off of my conventional upbringing and thinking and opened up possibilities for me that were akin to World War III. And then you actually have a choice, and I chose to be a heterosexual guy because that’s what my DNA dictates and my nurture dictates that I am.”

[LA Times via Celebitchy]

So he had homosexual experiences because he was hungry and needed food, and he admitted as much. That’s pretty much prostitution. Only now he’s trying to say that’s not exactly what he meant and that he was never a hustler, he just plays one on cable. Jane did a long interview with The Fix, an addiction site, about his relationship with addiction and how it plays into his role in the film I Melt With You, about a group of former college buddies who get together once a year for a lost weekend. I’ll just quote the pertinent parts here, but the rest of the interview is well worth reading. The guy is really out there, he’s interesting and smart and has a lot to say.

I read the LA Times story where you talked about “exploring your sexual identity” and how you weren’t “averse to going down to Santa Monica Boulevard and letting a guy buy me a sandwich” when you were broke and living in your car. Were you a gay prostitute, the way all those stories said you were?
No, I never said that. But I do work with the prostitute kids now. [for charity]

So you were misquoted?
Yeah, definitely. In the interviews that I did, I never said I was a prostitute. I was talking about my [early] time in Hollywood: I said that I’d had a sexually adventurous time and I was trying to relate that to how I play a prostitute on TV—trying to relate my experience to my character’s experience—and well, people heard what they wanted to hear. Things fly around.

You didn’t try to correct them? That’s a pretty big misconception to have out there.
I didn’t even know this was out there until people told me. I suppose “sexually adventurous youth” wasn’t as much of a headline grabber.

[From The Fix via The Advocate]

Jane said earlier in the interview that he never really reads the news or watches CNN and just relies on the Google News headlines and friends to tell him what’s going on. (Really.) It didn’t sound pretentious, like when Madonna sneered on Oprah that she never pays attention to the news, and it was more peculiar than anything. He also revealed that he’s been sober for two years after going through some tough times and getting a DUI. As for why he didn’t bother to correct the record until now, I bet he just didn’t give a sh*t and waited for someone to ask him about it. Plus the assumptions probably weren’t so far off the mark. He did say it.

Spoilers for past episodes of Hung
Sadly, Jane’s show “Hung” has been canceled by HBO after its third season and there are no more episodes in the can waiting to air. (That we know of.) It really picked up steam this season, and I was hoping to see how Ray’s relationship with his ex wife, Jessica (played by Anne Heche), would develop after she realized he was a prostitute. The scene where they danced at the wedding after she figured out his profession and confronted him with the news was poignant and well done. Plus Jason’s fiancee Sandee just shot Lenore! I assumed she missed, but I wouldn’t mind if that bitch of a character got killed off. We’ll never know now. Why do all the best shows end up cancelled after less than a handful of seasons?

Jane is shown barefoot at the Grove on 9/22/11. Other photos are from 12/8, 11/7, and 10/19. He’s an odd duck. Credit: WENN