Do we like Kevin Bacon?
Our score: 9 out of 10. Years of backing drag, anti-conversion-therapy work and a charity he founded, with no harmful words or court trouble found.
Bacon came up in a very liberal household. He told the Daily Beast his mother took him to civil rights and anti-Vietnam War rallies as a boy. Animal House gave him no overnight stardom: he kept waiting tables on the Upper West Side for at least a year afterwards, which he calls a great lesson.
The harm check comes back about as clean as they come. In 2023 he cheered a drag show on Instagram with the line “Drag is an art and drag is a right,” and condemned the anti-drag bills then moving through US legislatures. He was on the receiving end of backlash for it, which says more about the backlashers than him.
In 2022 he fronted a fundraiser for Born Perfect, the National Center for Lesbian Rights program fighting conversion therapy. He told People: “People need to be left alone to be who they are.” That's money and a public profile spent on a cause with no obvious upside for him.
On race, he told Jimmy Fallon in 2020 that old white guys like him should “just shut up and listen” after George Floyd's death. He also said he doesn't have a full understanding of the lives of people different from him. That's a refreshingly low-ego take, and a fake 2017 post claiming he praised Trump was debunked by FactCheck.org and PolitiFact, so ignore that one.
The good stuff is real. He launched SixDegrees.org in 2007, turning the Kevin Bacon trivia game into a charity site that raised over $70,000 in its first week or so. He said then he felt he hadn't given enough back. More recently the Beansday stunt ties into animals, the planet and people's health.
The gaps: I found no court outcomes or credible misconduct allegations against him, and no climate statements beyond the bean campaign. He also lost a big chunk of savings in Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, telling Esquire he's now “more careful, but not jaded.” That's a victim story, not a stain.