Scrawny by sex god standards, the Scottish-born star is happy to be desired for his body. In 1999, he told Detour, “The fact that somebody likes me as a sex symbol, it’s good, I think, because I’m not any of those things that normally make for being a sex symbol. It’s quite a good thing for skinny people.”

No prude or shrinking violet, Cumming is happy to strip for his audience’s puerile pleasure. As Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, Alan, a self-described “professional exhibitionist” displayed the family jewels, and won Tony and Drama Desk Awards, in director Sam Mendes’ 1998 reinvented Cabaret on Broadway. This was not your mother’s, “Come hear the music play” Hadassah theater party production. Nor was it Liza’s “Life is a Cabaret, old chum, pastiche.”

Mendes and Cumming’s Kit Kat Club blazed with a sexual fire that would have reduced original Broadway and screen Emcee Joel Grey to a toothy, bug-eyed puddle of rouge. It was a darker, more disturbing vision of pre war Berlin than the show’s original creators would have dared. It dazzled New York, and Gotham rewarded the production with big box office gold and an awards sweep
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Recalling the attention given to his puny pulchritude during his Cabaret days, Cumming told the London Sunday Herald in 2000, “It was so funny to have people talking about your body all the time. Of course, it was wonderful, too, that they were interested in someone like me.”
He was nude again in 1999, on the cover of Out. For the magazine outing, the family gemstones were hidden discreetly. In the motion picture Titus (director Julie Taymor’s adaptation of the Bard’s bawdy, bloody play), he was nude atop screen wife Jessica Lange.

All of this might be considered excessive epidermal exposure for a middle-aged guy who was once described by USA Today as looking like “Pee-wee Herman’s butchier brother.”

How does Alan Cumming get away with outrageousness that would have other bisexual film actors double-bolting their celluloid closets? The actor answers, “I’m the acceptable face of sexual ambiguity. I’m like a naughty schoolboy,” he explains. “I can get away with stuff that’s controversial.”

Personally, the puny star is no fan of buff, muscled men. “It’s awful the way that men’s bodies have become,” he told the London Sunday Herald in a 2000 interview. “Nobody actually looks like that unless they take steroids and go to the gym all the time. I do neither.”

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