Special Guest Blogger: Sal Mineo

Think of the movie 'Rebel Without A Cause' and you will come up with James Dean, Natalie Woods and that other guy, well i was that other guy and all three of us died young, Dean in a car accident, Woods falling off a yacht and me at the hands of a delivery person in a messed up mugging.
Rather appropriately, both my parents were coffin makers but they encouraged me to go to dancing and acting school at a very young age which made me a target of the local toughs but after a fight at school involving the leader of one the local gangs, they recruited me to join them in wreaking havoc on the streets of New York.
Weirdly this led to my acting career after one fight landed me in court, where i received an ultimatum of either juvenile detention time or enrolling in an acting school.
I got a job as an extra in The King and I on Broadway with Yul Brynner and worked my way up to one of the starring roles which got me noticed by movie directors and after a few bit parts, and with a nod towards my troubled youth, i was asked to try out for 'Plato' in the Rebel film.
Suddenly, i had a bigger profile than ever before but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing because i was openly bisexual and Bible hugging America really didn't like that as they had a strange perverted obsession with other men's sex lives back then and the Plato character quickly became known as gay and in love with James Dean’s character, in real life i adored Dean but i will never know if he felt the same because he lost his life in a car crash just weeks before the film hit theaters.
Between movies i had a short-lived second gig as a pop singer, releasing several songs and even an album and became engaged to actress Jill Haworth but that ended with a bang when she caught me in bed with another man but i had my fair share of high-profile romantic partners of both sexes.
After my self imposed acting hiatus, i was just starting to revive my career in the mid-1970s and got a role in a comedy play and moved to Los Angeles and on my way home from a rehearsal, i bumped into a delivery driver who decided to mug me and in the struggle i got stabbed through the heart.
It was put down as a result of me being gay but that's America for you, a ridiculous place where they are more comfortable seeing two men holding guns, than holding hands.