Will Smith Gay? Reports Of A Secret Relationship With Longtime Friend Revives Decade-Old Rumors About Actor’s Sexual Orientation

Is Will Smith really gay?

That is the claim from a controversial new report circulating online, and for anyone following the career of the 47-year-old actor, it’s becoming something a familiar trope. Smith has faced rumors that he’s secretly gay for more than a decade, with many of those reports focusing on his longtime friend, Duane Martin.

It was Martin at the center of the report circulating this week. A story from Radar Online claims that Smith and his wife gave some financial assistance to Duane Martin and his wife, Tisha Campbell-Martin, who are in the process of filing for Chapter 7 bankruptcy.

A trustee had filed paperwork ordering that Martin turn over a laptop, which the trustee believes may have evidence that Martin was not being honest about his assets. From there, Radar Online made the leap that the laptop contained evidence of a secret gay relationship between Will Smith and Duane Martin.

“The laptop also contains … personal photos… which are confidential, privileged, and unrelated to any legitimate interest… confidential communications with other public figures regarding private, non-financial matters.

“They said they feared ‘the risk of disclosing private information not pertinent to the instant case [that is] highly sought after by tabloid publications’!”

This is far from the first time that tabloid reports have claimed that Will Smith is gay. As the Radar Online report noted, the two took a vacation together without their wives in 2011, sparking rumors at the time that Will and Duane could be in a relationship.

https://twitter.com/JadaSmithNews/status/768925676007063552

Some of the allegations have been particularly salacious. In October, 2008, Queerty published a rumor about Will Smith hiding the fact that he is gay.

“We’ve been hearing for years that the super star and his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, both go for the same-sex. It came as no surprise, then, to hear that Smith, who’s been palling around with Tom Cruise and his anti-gay Scientologists, has spent some time with male prostitutes in the past.”

Even some Hollywood insiders have made allegations about Will Smith’s sexual orientation. In a message posted to Facebook earlier this year, actress Alexis Arquette claimed that both Will and Jada Pinkett-Smith are secretly gay.

“When Jada comes out as gay and her beard husband admits his first marriage ended when she walked in to him…servicing his Sugar Daddy Benny Medina…then I will listen to them,” she wrote, via The Daily Mail.

The rumors that Will Smith is gay have a number of common themes, including a lack of any actual evidence to back them up. Because of this, they have been often met with anger from fans of the actor, as well as gay rights advocates who see the stories as an attempt to smear Smith by portraying him as gay.

Radar is trying to out Will Smith, and it's homophobic and stupid https://t.co/Yx5Ynm0L9F pic.twitter.com/HdS6G9pXOI

— Wicked (@wkdonline) August 23, 2016

The latest report from Radar Online has stirred an exceptional amount of anger online, not only for its flimsy connection to facts, but for the idea of outing a celebrity without their consent. The blog LGBTQ Nation took issue with the tabloid website’s report, with a headline claiming it was trying to out Will Smith in the “most offensive way possible.”

Even if the allegations were true, the idea that it would be a bombshell that could destroy Smith’s career was tinged in homophobia, the blog noted. It also connected the Will Smith gay rumors to a recent report that attempted to out gay Olympic athletes by reporting on results from a dating app in the Rio Olympic village.

“Don’t get us wrong, we’ve poked plenty of fun at those Will Smith gay rumors in the past, but we never once tried to shame him for it by suggesting homosexuality is somehow ‘humiliating,’ ‘scandalous,’ or ‘explosive.’ In the wake of the whole Nico-Hines-Daily-Beast-Olympic-Grindr-outing fiasco, one would hope bloggers and journalists, even those at RadarOnline, might try to exercise just a little more thought when writing about this stuff.”

For his part, Will Smith has not given credibility to the rumors that he is secretly gay by responding to the unfounded reports.

[Photo by Joel Ryan/AP Images]