According to Rock Hudson biographer Mark Griffin, there was a point in the late 1970s when the beloved movie star was being urged—by Tales of the City writer Armistead Maupin—to come out as gay. As Griffin told NPR in 2018, though, “Rock’s entourage, his advisers, even his companion at the time, Tom Clark…were discouraging this. But I think at one point, Rock may have even seriously entertained the notion of coming out—came close but didn’t quite get there.”

The decision was understandable. Hudson was best known for playing heterosexual romantic leads in an era when states still had anti-sodomy laws, and studios essentially forbid the casting of openly gay actors for major film roles.

But in Ryan Murphy’s new Netflix series Hollywood—a fusion of real-life and fictional figures righting social wrongs in post-World War II Hollywood—the Emmy-winning writer-producer imagines a world in which Hudson, as played by Jake Picking, does come out. “I was just obsessed with the idea of giving Rock Hudson this happy ending,” Murphy told Vanity Fair last month.

The Illinois–raised Hudson, born Roy Scherer, spent his entire life concealing his true identity—first from an abusive stepfather who, according to Griffin, would punish the future Hudson any time he saw the boy engaging in behavior he deemed effeminate. When he got to Hollywood, he underwent an exhaustive makeover by his abusive and predatory agent Henry Willson—who rechristened him “Rock Hudson,” then trained him how to speak with a lower voice and carry himself with more “butch” postures and mannerisms.

Though his homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood, Hudson hid his sexual identity from the rest of America—courtesy of heterosexual romantic photo ops and even a marriage, believed to be choreographed by Willson to his own secretary, Phyllis Gates. Griffin said in his interview with NPR that he was struck by how many times the actor repeated one particularly telling phrase in his interviews over the decades: “I just learned to keep my mouth shut.”

In researching Hudson, Picking was stuck by the profound sadness Hudson must have felt. “What was tragic was the fact that he felt that he had to hide or keep part of himself a secret,” Picking told Vanity Fair. “I read somewhere that a secret isn’t real unless it’s painful to hold onto. And I feel like that’s the weight he was carrying.”

Which is why Murphy decided to liberate Hudson in Hollywood: “I wanted Rock to have that moment where he says to Henry, ‘Fuck you, you’re fired.’ If only that had happened. If only Rock Hudson had felt empowered enough to do that.”

In Murphy’s Hollywood, Hudson doesn’t only tell off Henry Willson (Jim Parsons). He also walks an Academy Award red carpet with his screenwriter boyfriend, Archie (Jeremy Pope), coming out to the nation as gay. Murphy said that the genesis for this revisionist take on history came from wanting to find redemption for Hudson, Hattie McDaniel, and Anna May Wong—Old Hollywood actors whose careers and livelihoods were hampered by a racist, sexist, and homophobic society. “I thought, what if those people won?” he said. “What if we went back and sort of did a revisionist look, and created an alternative universe where you could win by being gay, you could win by being black, you could win by being Asian? All of these people in Hollywood, and particularly at that time who were so marginalized—what if we rewrote their history, and put them in the center of sort of a victor’s tale?”

Murphy can only imagine how different the world would be if Hudson had felt empowered to speak his truth. Growing up in the Midwest, Murphy said, while watching television, he always wondered: “Where are the gay people? Why are no gay people out, being able to be seen, and being rewarded? It’s just a very emotional thing. But if you do it and other people who are like you see it, it is a path forward to them.”

“If Hollywood in the 1940s would have recognized a different group of people than the white, straight, heteronormative people who have always won for so long, I think it would have changed the world,” Murphy continued. “I think it would have created a new world of opportunities, and that world of opportunities and representation would have led to not just a different Hollywood, but a different world…. I think that all of those groups of people that were celebrated in our last episode would have launched a sort of rising up in some weird way.”

Hudson may never have publicly declared his homosexuality, but in 1985, the beloved actor disclosed his AIDS diagnosis—making the pandemic front-page news. His announcement may have been the reason the Reagan administration openly acknowledged the virus, Griffin told NPR, and encouraged Americans to realize that AIDS is a disease, not a moral affliction. Support for Hudson was staggering; the movie star, who expected the public to turn on him, received a flood of some 30,000 supportive letters, according to the biographer. That year, Elizabeth Taylor’s benefit dinner raised more than $1 million for AIDs research. “I am not happy that I am sick,” Hudson wrote a month before his death. “I am not happy that I have AIDS, but if that is helping others, I can, at least, know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.”

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