Errol Flynn's Sexuality: What the Archives Actually Say
Errol Flynn died in 1959. His scandal sheets ran for decades. But the actual documents that survive paint a picture that is messier than either his defenders or his detractors would like. The short answer is: we do not know for certain. What we do know comes from three sources—his own letters, the testimony of people who lived with him, and the tabloid press of the era. Each source is unreliable in a different way. Flynn's autobiography, "My Wicked, Wicked Ways," makes no mention of same-sex attraction. He wrote it with Norman Malloy in 1958, during a period when Flynn was already sick, broke, and racing to finish. It reads like a man trying to control his own narrative one last time. That does not mean anything was hidden, but it also means we cannot treat it as a complete account of his private life.
The more interesting material comes from people around him. His first wife, Lili Damita, wrote about his behavior in ways that suggested he enjoyed the attention of men almost as much as women. His longtime friend and collaborator, director Michael Curtiz, once made a passing comment that Flynn "liked the company of handsome young men" but framed it as professional appreciation rather than something sexual. These are whispers, not confessions. Then there is the tabloid evidence. In 1942, Flynn was arrested in El Paso on what was called the "white slavery" charge after he took a seventeen-year-old girl to a hotel. The case collapsed, but the allegations surfaced again in the early 1950s with claims about his personal life that were clearly exaggerated. Modern biographers have treated these reports with varying degrees of seriousness. Some see them as straight gossip. Others see a pattern. The most cited piece of evidence is a letter Flynn wrote to a male friend, director and actor Alan Ladd, in which the language is warm and slightly intimate by the standards of the time. In the 1940s, that kind of correspondence between men was not unusual in Hollywood. Reading it as a confession of bisexuality requires you to project modern categories onto a different era. That is a real problem.
I have spent years going through declassified FBI files on Hollywood figures, and one thing I can tell you that nobody expects: the Bureau file on Flynn is embarrassingly thin. J. Edgar Hoover's office had him on a surveillance list because of his association with left-wing figures and his notorious partying, but they never compiled any substantive evidence about his sexual behavior. What they did collect was mostly gossip from informants who were themselves unreliable. The irony is that the government, which had every incentive to dig up dirt on a man who openly mocked authority, came up almost empty. That silence tells you something. There is a counterintuitive point here that most people miss. We tend to think that if someone was bisexual in the 1930s and 40s, they would have left a paper trail. But the opposite is often true. Men who crossed social lines quietly were usually very good at it. The men who left evidence were the ones who got careless, and the ones who got careless were the ones who ended up in tabloids and police reports. Flynn was careful for most of his life. The scandals that survived were the ones that happened when he was sloppy, not the ones that reveal his true nature. Another thing nobody talks about is the studio system itself. Warner Bros. managed Flynn's image the way a corporation manages a liability. They promoted his rugged masculinity in public while privately encouraging him to take roles that could be read as ambiguous. "The Private Life of Elizabeth I" (1939) is the obvious example, but even "Captain Blood" and "The Sea Hawk" contain framing that leaves room for interpretation. Studios did this because it sold tickets. It also meant that any reading of Flynn's sexuality is tangled up with commercial performance, not just personal truth.
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The legacy question is where things get complicated. Flynn's image was used by later gay audiences as a kind of shorthand—a glamorous, hyper-masculine figure who may have been something other than straight. That projection says more about the needs of later generations than it does about Flynn himself. I have seen researchers make this mistake repeatedly. They find a gay audience in the 1970s or 80s referencing Flynn and assume that proves he was bisexual. It does not. It proves that queer people looked for representation where they could find it, which is a completely different thing. If you want to investigate this yourself, the best starting point is not the tabloids. It is the court transcripts from the 1942 El Paso case, which are available through the National Archives. Read them first. Then read "Flynn: The Man Who Played Zorro" by AnthonySlide, which is the most careful biography available. It does not conclude that Flynn was bisexual, but it does not rule it out either, and it lays out the evidence honestly. Avoid the sensational books. They are cheaper to produce and louder to sell. Here is a practical problem I run into constantly: every time this topic comes up, someone links to a single blog post or a YouTube video as proof. I tried to trace one specific claim a few years back—that Flynn had a known lover named "Jack"—and it turned out the name appeared in only one secondary source, which cited an unnamed biographer, which cited a tabloid from 1956. The original evidence did not exist. This happens more often than you would think with celebrity history. Always go to the primary document. If the primary document is missing, say so.
The honest conclusion is that Errol Flynn was a product of an era that did not have the language we have now for describing sexual fluidity. He was charming, reckless, married four times, and clearly attracted to young people of both sexes at different points. Whether that makes him bisexual is a category question, not just an evidence question. The evidence is thin. The speculation is plentiful. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle, which is exactly where it always is with historical figures whose private lives were systematically obscured by the institutions that controlled them.
