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His dad then put him in the trash can. After working for a casting director, he became a manager for actors including Morgan Freeman and Wes Bentley. He attended Lindenwood College in Missouri, before moving to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the film industry. He has been with Fisher for over 11 years now, and they share a great relationship.
He experienced hardships as a gay Black kid growing up in a white neighborhood.
So, when he came out, he did so because of hate.
His father even threatened to kill him if he slept with a man. Simply for being gay.
"You feel like, 'I'm nothing.' It was what my father told me I was, and I knew I had to get out of there."
If you remember the scene in Empire where Lucious throws his son in a trash can, you might be surprised to know that the scene is based on reality. Openly gay since forever, Daniels was in a long-term relationship with casting director Billy Hopkins, with whom he co-adopted Daniels’ niece and nephew.
“And then I’d run home.”
Daniels struggled over the years with both his sexuality — watching lovers die of AIDS in his arms — and with crystal meth abuse.
His father did not understand him at all. He trained his bowel movements to save himself.
Director Lee Daniels discovered his sexuality in an oppressive family home that could have been torn from the script of “Precious” — severely beaten as a child when his Philadelphia policeman dad found him wearing his mother’s shoes.
“When I came out it was because I loathed my dad so much — I couldn’t understand how you could, with an extension cord, beat a 45-pound kid just because he’s aware of his femininity,” he told Out Magazine of his father, who died during a raid in 1975.
“For me it really created a world where I understood ‘Precious,’ where you learn the power of the imagination.
This drove Daniels to seek refuge in alcohol, and later, drugs. Premiering at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize and the Audience Award, the film was heavily promoted by Oprah Winfrey, and nominated for six Oscars including best picture, winning for Mo’Nique‘s performance as Precious’s abusive mother and for Geoffrey Fletcher’s adapted screenplay.
“He shakes, he pushes, he swings,” she told Barbara Walters in an interview while they were still married. Daniels recalled of his conversation with his brother: "He called and said, 'I'm going to be there for a long time; I got this girl pregnant, she doesn't want the kids, and I have a feeling she's going to abandon them.'"
Daniels' transition into Hollywood also wasn't easy.
"I couldn't understand how you could, with an extension cord, beat a 45-pound kid just because he's aware of his femininity," Daniels said of his father's actions. "I have to be really aware of it, and always talking about it — and be truthful about it to the point of ugliness so that it keeps my ass in check."
But the Paperboy director, who lives in New York City, prefers to keep some distance between himself and Hollywood.
His first self-produced project, Monster’s Ball, a torrid drama about an interracial relationship between a white prison guard and the Black wife of a Death Row prisoner, was a surprise success, winning an Oscar for its star Halle Berry. It was only his grandmother who understood him.