Actor Warren Beatty has spoken out about his transgender son Stephen Ira for the first time in a new profile in Vanity Fair.
— Stephen Ira (@supermattachine) July 21, 2016
Stephen Ira came out as transgender in 2009 and gay in 2011. Beatty and Stephen’s mother, actress Annette Bening, were criticized at the time for being silent on the issue publicly.
Beatty praises Stephen in the new VF profile:
“He’s a revolutionary, a genius, and my hero, as are all my children,” Beatty says when asked about Stephen.
With his children growing up and two of them now out of the house, “there’s something about the empty nest that makes you say, ‘Well, maybe I should go out and make a movie.’ It’s like Cocteau said [quoting the French poet Paul Valery], ‘A poem is never finished, it’s only abandoned.’ And that’s the way it is with movies—like children. You continue to work on them, and work on them, but then you have to let them go.”
Stephen is co-editor of Vetch: A Magazine of Trans Poetry & Poetics, and an activist.
