Attention, hotels…if you’ve got a “Sir Ian McKellen” on your list of incoming guests, you should probably remove the Bible from the bedside table drawer in his room and read this recent Q&A with Details magazine (quoted on PopEater):

“The openly gay ‘Lord of the Rings’ star admits to a habit of tearing out the Bible passage that condemns homosexuality — (“Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” – Leviticus 18:22) — every time he finds one in his hotel room.[…] “I’m not proudly defacing the book,” he asserts, “but it’s a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible.
McKellen says his actions have inspired others to do the same. “I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom.”
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McKellen, who remained closeted for much of his career, also speaks candidly of the scars he suffered of having to hide who he was in order to succeed in his chosen field. “Acting was a means to publicly display my emotions in a way that was illegal for me to do as a private person. […] It was horrible living this secret life. You could feel a little bit what it was like to be a Jew in central Europe during a certain period. It was horrible.”
In the X-Men movies, McKellen played Magneto, whose backstory including discovering his mutation as a Jewish child in a Nazi concentration camp and surviving the Holocaust; although his role is primarily that of villain, Magneto’s actions “are driven by the purpose of protecting the mutant race from suffering a similar fate.”
(Hat tip to Smoking Lizard Soapbox, who penned this “Open Letter to Sir Ian McKellen,” wherein he disagreed with McKellen’s choice, noting, among other points that hotels “provide both Bibles and porn because they don’t get to judge their guests.”)