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KEVIN BACON
project. And as a result, I’m often disappointed,
you know? People don’t like it. It doesn’t per-
form at the box o∞ce. It gets canceled after one
season. It gets canceled after three seasons.
The numbers drop o≠. The reviews are bad,
all these things that can happen. If you look at
my career, it’s amazing, honestly, that anybody
gives me a gig anymore, because I’ve had a lot
of failures. I mean, I’ve had a few successful
things, but I’ve had way more flops.”
This sort of self-e≠acement gives short
shrift to the huge hits that he’s starred in—
Mystic River, A Few Good Men, Apollo 13—but
it’s true that many projects haven’t gone as
Bacon would have liked. Yet even on the films
that flop (Cop Car, anyone?), Bacon brings an
essential, almost ine≠able Baconness to the
screen. It’s a quality that, if one was pressed
to define it, might be regarded as a mix of rug-
gedness, hardness, sensitivity, and gee-golly
Bacon has similarly high regard for City
on a Hill, the new men-with-badges project
that, despite the stereotypically masculine
characteristics, is replete with strong female
roles. He says that he thought it was import-
ant that the women characters on the show
were as meaty as his own: “It’s not a day and
age when we need to be just having macho
kind of shit going on.” He asked for there to be
women in the writers room, and he insisted
that the show bring Sedgwick in as director.
“I don’t really like being directed by anybody,”
he says, “but I love being directed by her. She’s
so enthusiastic. She’s got such a great visual
sense.” (He then talked for 20 minutes about
Sedgwick’s talent. Kevin Bacon, it should be
noted, really loves his wife.)
As we finished our martinis, Bacon told me
just how excited he is about the opportunities
that abound right now for actors. “I went kick-
ing and screaming into television,” he says.
“There was a time in my life where if an agent of
mine had mentioned a TV series, I would have
fired them. I guarantee it.” But now it’s where
the exciting work is, and so he’s gravitated to
it. He realizes he is at a point in his life where
most people slow down, “spend time fishing or
whatever.” But he’s not ready to go there yet.
“I’m not going to pass judgment on myself of
whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” he
says. “But I’m still, like, pedal to the metal.”rachel syme is a writer and cultural
critic in New York City.blondness that is all his own. And it’s the thing
that makes us want to watch him do just about
anything: travel to the moon, make mysteri-
ous land art in Marfa, or investigate brutal
murders in Boston.
The Baconness has somehow seemed to
grow more apparent—or more appreciated—
recently. In Amazon Studios’ I Love Dick,
he starred in the titular role, as an eccen-
tric visual artist who becomes an object of
erotic fascination, a man to salivate over. His
character, a hypermasculine sculptor who
swaggers around town in tight Wranglers,
was Bacon at his most captivating: surly,
gru≠, but with an irresistible twinkle in his
blue eyes. Bacon loved that project, and he
thought it could go places, but it lasted only
a season.
It’s perhaps part of his charm that he pays
no mind to the things he can’t control—to
things like one’s indescribable onscreen
essence. He regards himself as a jobber, a yeo-
man of the trade, who has managed against
the odds to simply keep a career simmering
on low boil for as long as he has. He plugs
along. A steady worker toiling in a fickle field.
Sometimes the projects hit, sometimes they
don’t. Plenty of times, he thinks they really
should have. For instance, he recently tried to
adapt Tremors, his comedy thriller about giant
alien worms in the desert, as a television series
for Starz with the producer Jason Blum. “It
was great. Trust me,” he says, “it was fucking
awesome.” But the network passed.THE END OF STRAIGHT
front: partners, albeit with his hands around
my throat—than like anal punishment, pinned
facedown by the back of my fragile little neck
for being a boy.
I tried introducing that with dozens of
alternate transitions. None of them felt less
jarring. That’s how it felt to me, too, the first
time it happened, like that: Fast. Shocking.
Di≠erent from the pressing fingers that made
me feel good—that’s right—and maybe loved
but also so, so awful. Would it have been easier
if I had preceded it with a strict, foreshadow-
ing rebuttal?
The figure, for the record, adamantly denies
he did any of this.
For decades, I could not begin to con-
sider that I was trans, because I didn’t want
to die. (Under his weight, all those times,
I’d internally begged: Please don’t kill me.)
At the same time, the pain of being closeted
and trans absolutely made me want to die.
myself that being a survivor was in fact a fine
reason to be trans, too, if that turned out to
be my reason.
Any reason, including no reason, is a good
reason. For either. Both. If I wasn’t born all
these things and still chose them, what would
that make me but brave?
As it happens, the figure had explicitly
named my transness as a cause for violence
(Do you know what happens to little boys?).
So I did what he said. And once out of his
incessant grasp, I continued to ease and dis-
arm and un-threaten and de-escalate men
by passing as the kind of gal they liked, hun-
dreds of thousands of times. I let people see
what they wanted, for fear, for love. I couldn’t
discern when I had sex because I wanted to
from when I had sex because I needed to feel
like I mattered, or because I wanted someone
to hold me—he did. He did—like everything
was okay, and I couldn’t imagine another way
of getting anyone to do it. Rape hadn’t made
me queer. It had kept me living, cis and scared
and su≠ering, straighter.
As my chest surgery healed and my tes-
tosterone levels rose, I began to feel, finally,
like a real person. For the first time in my
life. After a lifetime of feeling like a facsimile.
There were consequences to suddenly being,
feeling, human; shortly after I increased my
shot, I had to call a suicide hotline, also for
the first time in my life. “Before I transitioned,
I felt like I was watching life on a screen,” said
the trans person who answered the phone
(Transmasculine, my entire system sighed(Under his weight, I’d also internally begged:
Just kill me.) My dysphoria had been leaking
out for years, quite unsubtly for the past 10.
I’d stu≠ed it in the containers holding the rest
of my suppressions: so much sexual torture.
The older, fatter man with the dog whom the
figure took me to (the figure, for the record
again, says none of this ever happened),
who was really nice to his dog but insulted me
while he forced his erection into my mouth.
A dad at a sleepover who sensed compromised
prey and carried me into an empty room,
telling me he loved me afterward. When
I started really remembering, in my 30s,
what I forced myself to forget, it was quite
unwelcome. Nobody sold the story that I was
fine—perfectly fine—harder than I did.
Nobody had more to lose from the truth.
When I saw hints of my history, I shut them
down, until exactly one—the precise shape of
the sleepover-dad’s dick—got through in an
ayahuasca ceremony, commencing years of
sober, if initially confusing, recall I’d desper-
ately avoided. But I had to remember before
I could face it.
And also this: the gut-churning homopho-
bic terror (well, and hate-crime terror) that
rape had made me a faggot. I’d identified as
bisexual since I was 12, but even my suppos-
edly female partners had been practically—or
actually—boys. The night I woke up in a panic
over being male but didn’t ferociously fight it
was made possible by 18 wrenching months
(well, and a lifetime) of accepting that I might
be gay; that night, I was finally able to tell