Was brad davis gay

"Somehow we managed to weather that storm," she says.

Ms. His biggest success was in 1978 with the lead role in Midnight Express (1978) where he played Billy Hayes, a young American imprisoned in Turkey for drug smuggling. "It wasn't about being sick. Brad Davis became a star when he landed the lead in Alan Parker's 1978 hit "Midnight Express."

Brad Davis was an overnight sensation.

Just ask anyone. Brad was HIV-positive, probably the result of intravenous drug use.

"That was a blow beyond compare," Ms. Bluestein Davis says. For Ms. Bluestein Davis, it has been an emotional five-year journey.

The couple met in New York in 1970. There would be no insurance forms. He took it. By the early 1970s Davis was acting in off-Broadway plays while studying acting at the Academy of Dramatic Arts.

A young gay man could easily fall in love with that face in that role, then think it's all right to emulate Davis's off-screen lifestyle."

Bluestein Davis is appalled that the excesses that led to her husband's death should ever be glamorized. And his widow--who in her March 1997 memoir of the late actor, After Midnight: The Life and Death of Brad Davis, admits that he worked in a gay hustler bar and lived with a drag queen before making it big--says, "I don't know why everyone wants to believe Brad was gay."

Perhaps we want to believe Davis was one of us because of the many gay roles he played during his nearly 20-year career.

Long before we became best friends, I had a huge crush on him."

So did most of the rest of us. "Kids are better assisted by heroes--actors and other high-profile people--who are more honest about who they are," he says. His career was DOA.

People asked Ms. Bluestein Davis why she stayed with someone so obviously hellbent on destruction.

I thought, How much more can my life be compromised? Or maybe it was the sexed-up vulnerability he expressed in so many of his performances. "Brad was a bad boy for a very long time," admits his widow, Susan Bluestein Davis, speaking to The Advocate in an exclusive interview.

Or maybe it's the stories that have surfaced since his death about his six-year battle with AIDS, an ordeal he kept secret and with which many gay men can identify.