Is richard hatch gay

He was openly gay, unapologetically—and often hilariously—cantankerous, and boasted a giddily mischievous mastery of reality TV gameplay long before there was a model to follow. When The Advocate interviewed Richard Hatch for an October cover story, the gay, 6-foot-4 Rhode Island native had just won the wildly popular premiere season of Survivor, a. Richard of Season 1 was able to play and win, but he’s been only one of two gay contestants to do so in the show’s 40 seasons.

Despite the disparity in winners, plenty of awesome (and not so awesome) queer contestants have blessed our TV screens over the last 20 years. Richard was 39 when he won Survivor. He took the opportunity in the series to come out as gay to the world as well as to people who knew him but didn’t know his sexual preference.

He won it all and took home the $1 million prize after a Tribal Council vote. Actor Richard Hatch was not gay, however, his namesake Richard Hatch from the Survivor reality series who he was always confused with is gay. Richard Hatch once spoke to the media about his name sharing with the Survivor star saying;. Free to compete on the fourth edition of Celebrity Apprentice , the Survivor winner talks prison sex and the ongoing legal troubles that threaten his alliance with the gay tribe.

More than 10 years later, the snakelike strategist is equally famous for getting bitten by the IRS for tax evasion, a conviction that landed him in prison for nearly four years. Richard Hatch: Well, you know, that whole prison thing can get in the way. But when you last spoke to us, you still had very little sense of what your Survivor win meant to the gay audience.

How has your relationship to the gay community evolved over the past decade? As time unfolded, I started to recognize what my being on the show and being openly gay meant to people, because they started expressing it to me more and more. To this day, people still write to me to talk about their experience of seeing somebody not afraid to be who they are.

I think so, yes. I did make a beeline to her. But the strategy part of the game was very similar to Survivor for me in that I needed information before I could fully strategize. NeNe Leakes is already making headlines for her antagonistic behavior on the show. Are you a Real Housewives of Atlanta fan? Oh, sure. When I meet famous people, very rarely are they who I think people might imagine them to be, but NeNe is.

We actually got along well. Some people were just wonderful to be around. Irrationality is very difficult for me, so maybe you can make some speculation there.

Did you encounter homophobia from any of the contestants? Did you get the sense that is gay-friendly? I had a great sense of that from before, encountering him a number of times in a number of situations. Were you worried that he might judge you on your personal legal issues instead of the competition at hand? Oh, absolutely. I move forward, and hopefully someday people will understand.

It was a disappointment. Even with some time having passed since your May release, you stand by your previous statements that antigay discrimination played a major part in your conviction? Though most of your sentence was served at the Federal Correctional Institution in West Virginia, which is a minimum-security facility, the first six months of your sentence were served in a maximum-security facility.

In the Federal Correctional Institution, where I spend three years, there were 1, guys, one of whom was an in-process transsexual who was in there for prostitution. Her breasts had already grown in, so she ended up being removed from the prison after being raped.

Richard believes that being openly gay

Were you able to connect with other gay people in prison? There were even some gay people on staff. Were gay staffers generally friendlier or more lenient? Like with anything, it ran the spectrum. Just look at our politicians.