Rumors about Perkins's sexuality had persisted since the beginning of his career, when he made his Broadway debut in Tea and Sympathy playing a gay character. Posthumous biographer Charles Winecoff linked him with a mass expulsion of gay men at Rollins College in Florida, where he was an undergraduate, claiming a large group of his friends had been arrested on charges of homosexuality but that Perkins's links to the theatre professor saved him from dismissal. However, there is no evidence of this besides the interviews Winecoff conducted with Rollins alumni.
