Molly Ringwald Talks Gays and The Facts Of Life

There's a wide-ranging interview with Molly Ringwald in this week's Advocate.  She has a new lifestyle book out this week which she is promoting called "Getting the Pretty Back".  Our little "Sam" has grown up and now has a husband and three kids.  But she talks about many other subjects in the interview, from the Prop 8 video she did to all her gay friends in NYC (including Justin Bond and Julian Fleisher).  


She also talks about the not-so-secret gay characters in the John Hughes oeuvre and how she thinks Hughes was unaware of their sexuality in the same way gays, in the high school years, sometimes can't figure it out themselves. (Uh, yes...that would be me!)  Here's an excerpt:

But sometimes I wonder if John was even aware of that. I don’t know that he was. What made those movies so interesting and so hard for people to replicate is that for some reason John was still somehow emotionally in the mind-set of those teenagers. Usually you can hear when an adult clearly wrote something for a kid character, but John’s movies don’t sound like that because he was still emotionally in that place. So you know how some kids can be gay and not know it? Or maybe they kind of know it but aren’t facing it? I feel like maybe John was writing those characters like that.

She also talks about her brief stint on "The Facts of Life" when she was cast in the pilot only to be replaced by Nancy McKeon for the series.  She's asked what her thoughts were about the whole lesbian subplot on that pilot.  She was all of 13 at the time and doesn't seem to remember too much about it...probably because it was a job that didn't quite pan out.  Which is probably for the best because if she was stuck on "Facts" she never would have been available to become America's Teen Queen.