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(Tyson later admitted to hitting Givens during a 2009 talk […]
After his dad's death, however, Daniels' life didn't get much easier. "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."
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.
"And that's how it began for me."
During their one-year marriage in 1988, the former sitcom star alleged she was physically attacked — and even raped — by her then-husband, boxing champion Mike Tyson. 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.
"In my head, he was coming back to kill me," Daniels confessed to THR. He was old enough to know he was gay. Though a box office success, the film was widely criticised for its crude racial stereotyping and accused of being “poverty porn”.
The Precious director started dating stylist Jahil Fisher.
"In L.A. they make you feel insecure, like you're always looking at the stars and you feel like you're not one of them," he said. He told the magazine that when Halle Berry called him after she won the Oscar in 2002 for his “Monster Ball,” he was “strung out, methed out of his mind” at Los Angeles’ Chateau Marmont.
“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,” he said.
esacks@nydailynews.com
American filmmaker Lee Daniels was BOTD in 1959.
And so did Laurie Ingram, his girlfriend at the time. He has been with Fisher for over 11 years now, and they share a great relationship. He returned to cinema in 2021 with The United States vs Billie Holiday, focusing on Holiday’s civil rights activism and persecution by the American government, earning an Oscar nomination for its star Audra Day.
His horror film Deliverance, starring Mo’Nique, was released in 2024. He also produced The Woodsman, starring Kevin Bacon as a pedophile attempting to reconstruct his life after a long prison sentence, and the poorly reviewed interracial love story Shadowboxer. 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.
At one point in time, Daniels was so scared of his father, he got a girlfriend to keep him at bay — even if he was already dead. 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.
(Tyson later admitted to hitting Givens during a 2009 talk […]
"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 said.
But, even though his dad did not understand him being gay, the director understood his father's rationale in hindsight.
His dad then put him in the trash can.