James Franco Is Exploring Sexuality and He's OK if You Think He's Gay

James Franco is having fun exploring sexuality on screen, with two recent films — Kink and Interior. Leather Bar — and he tells MTV News' Jocelyn Vena that he's fine if that makes viewers think he's gay. 

The handsome hunk told Vena that gay rumors about him started a long time ago: "In high school these girls got mad at me and so they spread this rumor that I was having a gay relationship with one of my closest friends. And they even made up a little dance they would do in the girl's locker room about me being gay. I still don't know what the dance was."

And not much has changed. "It wasn't like it was anything new," he told Vena, talking about recent speculation about his sexual orientation. "And in fact, it wasn't something that frightened me, like if people think that, it's fine. I really don't care."

The actor-director is at Sundance Film Festival to promote the two films, Kink, a documentary that explores BDSM porn, and the much ballyhood Interior. Leather Bar, a modernization of the 1980 classic, Cruising. Franco told Vena that it was hard to put certain kinds of sex in film. "Now, I could sort of understand that if it wasn't so easy to put other kinds of things in film, like violence. Obviously, there's some weird standard here that is just illogical. Sex and sexuality are such big parts of our lives — the ways that we define ourselves, the ways that we interact with each other. Everyone thinks about it. Everyone knows about it. Even if you insist on living an incredibly chaste life and you're chaste in your thoughts, that's a conscious and concerted effort to keep sex from your thoughts. So you're still engaging with sex even if it's in a negative capacity. ... It's a huge part of our lives. It's part of being human."