Danny Pintauro - Bay Area Reporter 8/31/2000

All grown up?

Once a child star Danny Pintauro stars in The Velocity of Gary

A lot of the folks out there in TV land apparently knew that Danny Pintauro was gay long before he did.

Pintauro, who played Judith Light's rambunctious son on the long-running sitcom Who's the Boss? didn't figure out for himself until he got to Stanford University. Even he now looks at reruns with a knowing eye.

"I look back at the show and think, 'My God, what a faggot,' and people say that to me all the time," the 24-year-old actor said. "There are a lot of older gay men who say, 'My gaydar went off as soon as I saw you.' I used to take big offense to the idea that people thought I was gay on the show, because I was totally unconcious of it."

But once he got to Stanford University, the pieces began to fit, and he came out on campus without reservation. Before long, the National Enquirer came a-calling. "I was totally expecting to be outed in some magazine sooner or later," he said. "The more surprising part was that they still cared."

Since graduating in 1998, Pintauro has focused on edgy theater, playing Oscar Wilde's lover in Gross Indecencies in North Carolina, a hormonally raging teenage son of a pornographer in Paula Vogel's Hot 'n' Throbbing in Washington, DC, and a gay hustler in The Velocity of Gary (Not His Real Name) in New York.

Pintauro is repeating his performance in The Velocity of Gary at New Conservatory Theater Center, where a four-week run opens Sept.6. James Still's one-man play centers on a young naive gay hustler trying to make it on the mean streets of Manhattan. As his seedy adventures are replayed, his hopes for a different kind of life are also conveyed. The production comes with a warning of "male nudity and explicit language."

The TV trained actor was drawn to the play by the challenges it provided. "As an actor, I'm all about challenges right now," Pintauro said, "and this has provided me with God knows how many of them."

The experience for audiences is "just riveting," he continued. "It's this guy who you don't feel you can relate to at first because he's hard-edged and lives on the street, but his stories are fascinating, and as the piece goes on, you're able to relate to him more and more. You realize that despite the kind of life he's lived, he's able to walk away with this amazing sense of hope."

Hard proof

When he teamed with director Mark Canninstraro on The Velocity of Gary, they hoped that a private performance for friends and potential presenters would lead to an offer. "But it didn't work," he said, "and we just decided to do it ourselves."

They staged the piece at The Duplex, a Manhattan cabaret with tiny tables and a two-drink minimum. "It's definitely going to be taken a lot more seriously in a theater," Pintauro said, "and Im really looking forward to that."

Actually, Pintauro had no plans to do Gary again. "I was happy how it went in New York, and was willing to leave it at that," Pinaturo said. "But Mark, the director, wanted to do it again, and every now and then he'd come to me and say, 'Oh, this theater is interested.' But [New Conservatory] was the only one that really drew my attention, partly because I have so much family who live in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and finally everybody, including my parents, can call come to see it."

When Pintauro was born on 6th January 1976 in Milltown, NJ, he was declared the town's Bicentennial Baby, and his birth certificate was placed in a time capsule. "My friends scream and yell at me when I say, 'I was a star the day I was born,'" he said, "They just go, 'Oh, shut up.'"

But before he had turned three, his mother has sent his picture in to a modeling agency, and a career was born. First came appearances in advertisements, catalogs, and commercials, and then a five-year on on As the World Turns and a big-screen appearance in the mad-dog thriller Cujo. And then in 1982, at age 8, he began his run as Jonathan Bower, son of a single career mom (Judith Light) who hires a male housekeeper (Tony Danza.) The show lasted for eight seasons.

"I was a normal kid who just got lucky," Pintauro said. "My success as an actor and as a celebrity is basically me riding on the coat-tails of a successful TV sitcom. I never really had any intention of maintaining the huge celebrity, so when the show ended, I just went back to the normal life I should have been living had I not landed this great and successful part."

During his high school years, he was happily dating girls and had even become engaged to one of his girlfriends when he began Stanford. "I'd been fooling around with guys early in my life," he said, "but I didn't associate that with anything but the kind of friendship I had with these two people. It wasn't until my sophomore year that I started meeting some people who I realized did think the same way that I hadn't realized I had been thinking."

Pintauro soon broke the news to his parents, who said they had had no idea but eventually came to terms with it. His former TV family offered support when the National Enquirer story broke. Judith Light, active in many pro-gay causes, took the news with a welcoming awareness. Tony Danza had his own way of dealing with it.

"He's been as supportive as an Italian father figure can be," Pinaturo said. "He reacted just like my father, which was very creepy, actually."

Though he's not convinced he really wants to be an actor -- teaching drama to high school students is a new passion -- he knows that having come out will affect his career.

"I couldn't play Romeo or the head quarterback whether I was gay or not, so I'm sort of not missing out," he said. "But yes, it will affect my career. I can't play a leading man, but I don't want to play a leading man."

As for any leading men in his life, Pintauro is between boyfriends. "My love life is currently very messy," he said. "My love life is always dramatic."

One of the outcomes of his TV years is a maturity that he finds puts him on another level than other young men his own age. "I've discovered that I definitely have to date older men," he said, "but then again, there are some 27-year-olds who are very childish."

So, the definition of "older men" is 27? "I haven't been very interested in the over 30s," Pintauro said. "I'm not looking for a daddy type."

In some ways, Pintauro is looking for part of a lost childhood. "I've been acting since I was 2, and I was never given the opportunity to decide to do something else," he said. "A normal kid has all these options in front of him. 'I want to be a fireman,' you know. Finally, I'm doing the I-want-to-be-a-fireman research I should have done as a child."

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