FIRST LOOK: DANIEL RADCLIFFE AS GAY POET

Pictures of Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe in the role of American gay poet Allen Ginsberg for a new movie have appeared online.

The pictures show the actor with curly hair and a tweed jacket on the set of the film, Kill Your Darlings.

Radcliffe (22) stars as a young Ginsberg in the film, in which a murder at Columbia University in 1944 draws together some of the great poets of the ‘beat generation’ including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

Ginsberg, who died in 1997, is best known for his controversial epic 1955 poem Howl which describes both heterosexual and homosexual sex. He was vehemently opposed to militarism, materialism and sexual repression and was in a forty-year relationship with fellow poet Peter Orlovsky.

Radcliffe has been a long-time supporter of LGBT equality, especially of The Trevor Project; a leading organisation providing crisis intervention and suicide prevention services for LGBT youth in the U.S.

Kill Your Darling is expected to be released sometime next year.