Zachary Quinto
WORDS BY TIM TEEMAN
To mark World AIDS Day 2015, ZACHARY QUINTO talks exclusively to Attitude about gay life, love and being the worlds highest profile out actor.
PHOTOGRAPHY BY VICTORIA WILL
FASHION AND CREATIVE DIRECTION BY JOSEPH KOCHARIAN
The eyebrows have been shaved to severe, angular Spock-ness. When Zachary Quinto and I met, on a sultry, overcast summer afternoon in the garden of a New York hotel, he was filming the latest Star Trek movie, Star Trek Beyond.
He has since completed that, posting an Instagram picture on the last day of filming captioned “maybe the last time, maybe not”.
‘HAVE AS MUCH SEX AS YOU WANT, AND ANY WAY YOU WANT TO HAVE IT, AS LONG AS YOU’RE ACCOUNTABLE TO THE PERSON YOU’RE ENGAGING WITH. I DON’T THINK, FRANKLY, THAT’S A CONTROVERSIAL THING TO SAY’
Having first found fame in the TV series Heroes, Quinto’s role as Spock has bought him to a huge, sci-fi loving global audience. He has also appeared in movies including Margin Call, and the gay-themed I Am Michael opposite James Franco.
When we met, Quinto looked as handsome as every picture you may have seen of him: tall, broad and muscular.
You will also see on Quinto’s Instagram account gorgeous pictures of himself and his partner Miles McMillan, on lovely holidays, sometimes in swimming trunks, always having fun. The tabloids regularly feature them looking adorable walking their dogs in New York.
Quinto, 38, who grew up in Pennsylvania, is one of the most famous out gay actors in the world; and one of the most eloquent and opinionated – as the controversy stirred by his saying there was a “complacency” among gay men around HIV in an interview with Out magazine last year revealed.
Quinto told Out: “I think there’s a tremendous sense of complacency in the LGBT community. AIDS has lost the edge of horror it possessed when it swept through the world in the 80s. Today’s generation sees it more as something to live with and something to be much less fearful of. And that comes with a sense of, dare I say, laziness.”
On the availability of PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis, the new drug course available in the US to prevent HIV transmission, currently being campaigned for in the UK) and drugs like Truvada, Quinto said: “We need to be really vigilant and open about the fact that these drugs are not to be taken to increase our ability to have recreational sex. There’s an incredible underlying irresponsibility to that way of thinking… and we don’t yet know enough about this vein of medication to see where it’ll take us down the line.”
For these reasonable, insightful comments, Quinto was accused of slut-shaming. Quinto came out in 2011, spurred to do so by the suicide of 14-year-old gay teenager Jamey Rodemeyer. He has used his fame to speak out and campaign, and in October received the Champion Award from the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network. Next, he will appear as gay journalist Glenn Greenwald in Oliver Stone’s explosive Snowden and then in an off-Broadway family drama, the MCC’s Smokefall at New York’s Lucille Lortel Theatre, in February.
How do you feel about the controversy over your HIV/PrEP comments?