Like all very eligible Hollywood bachelors, George Clooney has gay rumours swirl around him – and in a new interview he addresses them head-on.

“I think it’s funny, but the last thing you’ll ever see me do is jump up and down, saying, ‘These are lies!’,” the mild-mannered 50-year-old tells The Advocate. “That would be unfair and unkind to my good friends in the gay community.

“I’m not going to let anyone make it seem like being gay is a bad thing,” he adds. “My private life is private, and I’m very happy in it. Who does it hurt if someone thinks I’m gay?

“I’ll be long dead and there will still be people who say I was gay. I don’t give a shit.”

Clooney is hitting the stage in LA this week in a new production about the legal struggle for marriage equality in the state. The play 8 is named after the Proposition 8 law reform designed to ban same-sex marriage in California, looks at the fraught legal trial over the legislation.

Clooney himself is a supporter of marriage equality. “One day the marriage equality fight will look as archaic as George Wallace standing on the University of Alabama steps keeping James Hood from attending college because he was black,” he reasons. “People will be embarrassed to have been on the wrong side.

“So it’s encouraging to know that this too will seem like such a silly argument to our next generation. There are even a lot of young conservatives today for whom marriage equality isn’t an issue. It always takes government an extra generation to catch up to the people.

“Every time we’ve stood against equality, we’ve been on the wrong side of history… It’s the same kind of argument they made when they didn’t want blacks to serve in the military, or when they didn’t want blacks to marry whites.”