The ageless Robert Redford, a heartthrob and LGBTQ+ ally all his life, began his career with a queer role

Robert Redford was 89 years old, but if I’m honest, I never thought of him as old. Not once, even when I read about him in recent years and saw his picture, usually at the opening of the Sundance Film Festival he founded.

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To me, and I suspect to many gay men of my generation, he was eternally golden. Someone like Redford never really gets “old.”

The blond hair, the chiseled chin, the kind of hypnotic blue eyes that were always mesmerizing. Back in the day, I usually described Redford like this: “It was as if God paused for a moment before he created Redford and said, ‘How can I outdo myself with this guy?’”

I don’t think there’s anyone above a certain age who didn’t carry some kind of crush on Robert Redford, no matter who they were. He was impossibly handsome, yet he never seemed untouchable. I don’t think I’m the only one who felt that way.

There was a softness to him, a gentleness that stood out in an era of swaggering, gruff movie stars like Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, and Charlton Heston, who seemed too harsh. At least to me. Redford could play a cowboy or an outlaw with all the virility in the world, but he always gave off this aura of kindness. It was masculinity without cruelty. He might have shot some guns and beat up people, but he didn’t exude fear.

That might explain why, at 29, he was cast in Inside Daisy Clover as Wade Lewis, a character with clear gay undertones. Redford himself said Wade was “mysterious, charming, attractive to both sexes.”

You could take that exact description and apply it to Redford himself. For a young gay man watching back then, that was a revelation, and a big risk for a young straight actor. It was highly provocative for the mid-1960s, to say the least. For that role, he won the Golden Globe new star of the year award.

Actors Robert Redford and Natalie Wood during filming of 'Inside Daisy Clover', 1965Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Of course, his career exploded after that, proving that he could take on a diverse set of characters. He starred in classics like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Candidate, and most poignantly, with The Way We Were, a movie with a gay backstory.

Redford portrayed Hubbell Gardiner, a character whose gentile background and romantic involvement with Katie (Barbara Streisand) underscores a contrast with the screenwriter Arthur Laurents’s own life and desires.

Though Laurents long maintained that Katie was inspired by a college acquaintance, he later revealed she was “mainly me,” suggesting that his attractions and identity subtly shaped the love triangle that Redford’s character inhabits.

For a time, Redford was everywhere and larger than life. For many, he’ll always be remembered alongside Paul Newman, but for me, it was always The Natural where I most remember and appreciate Redford.

As a lifelong baseball fan, I’ve watched that film more times than I can count. Roy Hobbs, stepping up to the plate with the game on the line, shattering the lights with one perfect swing. It was mythical. It’s every boy’s dream come true. Even today, when phenoms like Shohei Ohtani or Aaron Judge spring up, the comparison isn’t so much to Babe Ruth or Mickey Mantle, it’s to Roy Hobbs.

And yet to me, his greatest gift wasn’t just in front of the camera. When Redford directed Ordinary People, he created a film that I return to again and again. It is a delicate, devastating, and honest look at mental illness. Donald Sutherland, Timothy Hutton, and Mary Tyler Moore gave the performances of their lives, and it was Redford who brought that out of them.

As someone who has struggled with mental illness and lived through suicide attempts, I can say Ordinary People gets it right. It understands how the pain doesn’t just stay locked inside one person, it seeps into the family and friends of the person affected. Redford didn’t exploit that pain. He gave it dignity, and he gave it truth.

Every time I watch that film, I think that Redford had to know someone very close to him who suffered from the fallout of suicide and depression.

That dignity and truth carried into the rest of his life. He stood up for LGBTQ+ equality when so many others stayed quiet. He spoke out for marriage rights back in 2013, lending his name and his voice to our fight.

And as someone who worked for the United Nations and climate change for a time, Redford poured his soul into climate activism decades before it became fashionable. He didn’t just make movies, he tried to make the world a better place.

Including Sundance, which is his great gift to independent film. The festival wasn’t about flashy and splashy cinema, at least when Redford birthed it.. It was about giving new voices a chance, about opening the door for people who had never been invited in.

But what I’ll carry with me is the way he made me feel. Yes, I can remember being astonished at how utterly handsome he was. I know I’m not alone. There are gay men everywhere today, hearing the news of his death and feeling that same tingle, and now sharing an ache that he died.

He may not have belonged to us in the literal sense, but he gave us a vision of masculinity that included beauty, softness, and possibility.

Robert Redford lived nearly 90 years. He changed movies, he arguably changed lives, and I think he changed the way we saw men. But I’ll always remember him the way he was burned into my mind decades ago, the Greek god of a man with that understated yet radiant smile, forever youthful, forever handsome, and forever sincere.

God may have taken a little extra time in creating him. And I am so grateful that he did.

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