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"Alec Baldwin has announced that he is retiring from public life after being portrayed as a &amp;quot;homophobic bigot&amp;quot; by the media. In an explosive and wide-ranging 5,000 word essay published in New York magazine, the actor denounced coverage of an altercation with a journalist last year during which he was accused of using a gay slur.  &amp;quot;I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m doing Rock of Ages one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that... I&amp;#039;m officiating at a gay friend&amp;#039;s wedding. I&amp;#039;m not a homophobic person at all. But this is how the world now sees me. I haven&amp;#039;t changed, but public life has.&amp;quot; Baldwin disputed using the term &amp;quot;f*ggot&amp;quot;, and called Harvey Levin of TMZ - the outlet that published video of the run-in - a &amp;quot;cretinous barnacle on the press&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Do you honestly believe I would give someone like TMZ&amp;#039;s Harvey Levin, of all people, another club to beat me with?&amp;quot; he asked. &amp;quot;That muffled sound on the video... you don&amp;#039;t know [what it is], and I don&amp;#039;t know, but Levin knows, and he tells the world that it&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;f*ggot.&amp;quot; The 55-year-old brought up another incident where he called a Daily Mail reporter a &amp;quot;toxic little queen&amp;quot; for claiming that his wife Hilaria had been tweeting during James Gandolfini&amp;#039;s funeral. The publication apologised for the story after blaming a &amp;quot;baffling defect in the Twitter platform&amp;quot; affecting time stamps. &amp;quot;They say this is what comes with stardom - I don&amp;#039;t agree with you,&amp;quot; Baldwin said. &amp;quot;A journalist isn&amp;#039;t supposed to write a lie about you. If he was in New York, I might have had the impulse to beat the s**t out of the guy.  &amp;quot;At the time, I didn&amp;#039;t view &amp;#039;toxic little queen&amp;#039; as a homophobic statement. I didn&amp;#039;t realize how those words could give offense, and I&amp;#039;m sorry for that.&amp;quot;  Baldwin went on to claim that after these incidents he was fired from NBC &amp;quot;all of a sudden, out of nowhere&amp;quot; under the instruction of his colleague Rachel Maddow, who &amp;quot;viewed [him] as equivalent to Mel Gibson&amp;quot;. He also said that being painted a homophobe resulted in him losing contracts, being treated frostily by the theatre community, getting attacked by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper &amp;quot;and others in the Gay Department of Justice&amp;quot;, giving up on his dream of running for office and consider leaving New York for a location where &amp;quot;your interaction with the public is minimal&amp;quot;. He claimed this was in spite of him making effort to discuss &amp;quot;words and their power&amp;quot; with members of the LGBT community, including a &amp;quot;F-to-M tranny&amp;quot;. &amp;quot;Now I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I used to engage with the media knowing that some of it would be adversarial, but now it&amp;#039;s superfluous at best and toxic at its worst.  &amp;quot;People suspect that whatever good you do, you are faking. You&amp;#039;re that guy. You&amp;#039;re that guy that says this. There is a core of outlets that are pushing these stories out...[cluttering] the blogosphere with &amp;#039;Alec Baldwin, he&amp;#039;s the Devil, he&amp;#039;s Fidel Baldwin&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; He continued: &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s good-bye to public life in the way that you try to communicate with an audience playfully like we&amp;#039;re friends, beyond the work you are actually paid for. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s a way I could have done things differently. I know that. If I offended anyone along the way, I do apologize. But the solution for me now is: I&amp;#039;ve lived this for 30 years, I&amp;#039;m done with it. Baldwin even said that he now sympathises with former sparring partner Shia LaBeouf, who made a similar declaration about retiring from public life following his plagiarism row.  Speaking about working with LaBeouf on Broadway play Orphans before the Nymphomaniac star&amp;#039;s firing - which he claims he tried to prevent - Baldwin said: &amp;quot;Getting back on stage seemed like a good idea... then Shia LaBeouf showed up.  &amp;quot;He seemed like a lot of young actors today - scattered, as he was coming from making six movies in a row or whatever. There was friction between us from the beginning. LaBeouf seems to carry with him, to put it mildly, a jailhouse mentality wherever he goes.  &amp;quot;Shia LaBeouf went to a film screening recently and he wore a bag over his head and the bag says &amp;#039;I am not famous anymore&amp;#039;. And there was truly a part of me that felt sorry for him, oddly enough.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.digitalspy.com/showbiz/news/a553305/alec-baldwin-retires-from-public-life-over-homophobia-row-im-done/>