Out actor Daniel Franzese on Monday
came to the defense of former child star Danny Pintauro.
In an interview with Oprah Winfrey,
Pintauro, who came out in 1997 after the National Enquirer
threatened to reveal his sexuality, announced that he's been living
with HIV for 12 years. The one-time Who's the Boss? star
blamed a crystal meth addiction at the time for “taking away his
inhibitions.”
Franzese, who plays an HIV-positive
character on HBO's Looking, said that Pintauro's message got
“derailed” in an interview with The View.
“His interviewers on The View
– fellow child stars Raven Symone and Candace Cameron – ask him
some personal questions that he's not prepared to answer and all
involved stumbled over some incorrect terminology when discussing
HIV,” Franzese
wrote. “Many watching the interview feel Danny was shamed by
his interviewers.”
“First people jump on The View
hosts for shaming Danny, then some LGBT thought leaders direct their
feelings of anger and disappointment at Danny himself. My beef is
that these leaders write about ending stigma, but instead of writing
a private note to Danny offering to advise him, they instead
criticize him publicly. Why would anyone with HIV want to come out
publicly if that is the consequence?”
Franzese linked his column to a
widely-publicized Huffington Post story titled The
Problematic Case of Danny Pintauro, in which Ken Schneck, PhD
criticized Pintauro for stating in an US Weekly interview that
he contracted HIV through oral sex and calling the lifestyle of the
man from whom he contracted HIV “really irresponsible”
“By going out of his way to link his
HIV transmission to oral sex, Pintauro has muddied the overall issue
of how we talk about HIV/AIDS via a more palatable transmission
method,” Schneck
wrote. “It would have been one thing if he was suddenly
putting himself forward as the poster-child for the dangers of oral
sex, which aren't currently part of the health class curriculum.
Instead, he did the opposite, minimizing this detail with the horrid
summary statement of "it's that easy." It only served to
add insult to injury that he then went on in the interview to cast
the man who gave him HIV in such a shameful light.”
Franzese said that Pintauro should be
commended for “committing himself to being a beacon of light in the
dark world of meth use.”
“I urge us all to think before we
criticize someone who has good intentions and who gives a voice to an
underrepresented community,” Franzese wrote.