The Price of Success

July 13, 2009

At Outfest on Sunday afternoon, three-time Emmy winning and openly gay director Todd Holland told a small audience that he advises young, gay male actors to "stay in the closet." The remark came during a panel at the Directors Guild of America titled, "Taking It to the Streets: LGBT Directors Get Political." Outfest, which pushes the slogan "protecting our past, showcasing our present, nurturing our future," is one of the premiere gay and lesbian film festivals in the United States.

Holland, who was talking as one of the featured panelists, and who once worked as a director on the critically acclaimed HBO sit-com The Larry Sanders Show, explained that it's a necessary career choice if a gay actor wants to succeed in Hollywood.

Fellow panelist and filmmaker Kirby Dick, director of Outrage, a 2009 documentary about gay politicians who stay in the closet to further their political careers, told Holland: "I know where you're coming from, but it's a regressive argument."

Holland, who was legally married before Proposition 8 was passed by California voters in November, responded that he was just being realistic, but Dick, who is heterosexual, believed that if "an A-list actor came out, it would have more impact on the culture than an A-list politician."

No one talked about the personal repercussions of a gay actor succeeding in Hollywood by lying about his sexual orientation to the general public.

Holland's comments underscore a decades old problem in Hollywood, where gay and straight studio executives, agents, and other major players often advise up-and-coming gay, male actors to live in the closet. Rarely, though, has someone like Holland been so public with that advice.

Besides Holland and Dick, "Taking It to the Streets" featured filmmakers Jamie Babbit, Katherine Brooks, Frieda Lee Mock and Charles Herman-Wurmfield, and was billed as a discussion about how gay and lesbian filmmakers "are taking a more active role in creating social and political change."

One audience member, openly gay filmmaker Matthew Mishory, later told Queer Town that Holland's mind set is pervasive throughout the entertainment business.

"This stuff doesn't just extend to actors," says Mishory. "We've been told, as gay filmmakers, not tell queer stories or else we'll get pigeonholed."

Mishory has just finished a film about legendary gay director Derek Jarman called Delphinium. Through that work, Mishory has come to believe that "the promise of the New Queer Cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has not necessarily been delivered."

Before the panelists started their discussion, blogger and lesbian filmmaker J.D. Disalvatore warned Outfest crowds on her blog, The Smoking Cocktail, that several of the filmmakers "were not particularly political, so looking forward to seeing what they pull out of their asses for this one."

A few hours later, the 47-year-old Todd Holland publicly shared his "advice," with young, gay and lesbian filmmakers sitting in the audience. One person who heard the remark, and didn't want to be identified, told Queer Town, "What kind of message is that for an older gay filmmaker to send to young gay filmmakers? It's the kind of thing that will keep people in the closet."

Source: Queer Town: Emmy-winning Director Todd Holland to Young, Gay Actors: 'Stay in the Closet', LA Weekly

'Brothers'

Screen captures from 'Brothers'
Directed by Jim Sheridan.
With Jake Gyllenhaal, Natalie Portman, Tobey Maguire.

Source: 'Brothers' trailer, ET Online

I Dish, Therefore I Am

On March 10, 2005, gossip columnist Ted Casablanca ran an item online under the heading "One Adorable Blind Vice".

The story was similar to numerous blind items Casablanca has run since bringing his column, "The Awful Truth," to E! Online in 1996. He relates a potentially scandalous story, usually with the kinds of revelations a major media gossip columnist would avoid, but disguises the object of his gossip behind a fanciful name like Morgan Mayhem, Furrowed Frank or Toothy Tile.

The ongoing saga of Toothy Tile says a good deal about Internet gossip, its place within the gay community and its function as a moral compass. It also points to some interesting intersections of gossip and gendered performance.

Hollywood gossip, of course, was around long before the Internet. Usually dated from the start of Louella Parsons' syndicated column in 1925, the field has traditionally been female-dominated, with Parsons and her chief rival, Hedda Hopper, engaged in an often-uneasy power struggle with the movie industry. The film studios used them to promote their films and personalities but also dreaded the effect of a personal attack or untimely revelation. One unwritten rule, however, was that the most damaging items — criminal arrests, long-term affairs and homosexuality — were not for publication in any but the least reputable venues. Parsons, Hopper and most of Hollywood may have known that Ramon Novarro was gay, but they weren't about to publish the fact. And if a writer broke the rules — as Bill Robinson did when he wrote about Spencer Tracy's drinking problems and his relationship with Katharine Hepburn in a 1962 issue of Look — the offender was cut off from industry sources.

Even with the decline of the studio system, some restrictions still hold. Unless a star's drug use is impossible for the media to ignore, it's kept out of the gossip columns. And "outing" is still considered off-limits, at least to columnists working in the major media.

For the gay on-line community, gossip serves a variety of purposes. If nothing else, it provides its readers with a sense of titillation as they vicariously enjoy celebrities' lives, even when the object of interest is masked behind the veil of the blind item. Like many on-line discussion boards, gay gossip sites provide their geographically dispersed users with a sense of community.

One element unifying gossip communities is a shared sense of morality. Gay gossip unites the gay and lesbian community by establishing behavioral norms for that community, creating insiders aware of those norms and outsiders unaware of or opposed to them.

In the case of Toothy Tile, the nature of those norms depends on whether one is inside or outside the gay community. Within the world of heteronormativity, Toothy Tile is at fault both for being gay and, more important, for wishing to make a public proclamation of that fact.

Despite the social changes of the past 50 years, the entertainment industry appears to be dealing with sexual orientation by the same standards in operation when Universal Pictures forced Rock Hudson to take a wife to forestall suspicions of homosexuality. The current attitude is described quite simply in one publicity-shy, or rather gay-publicity shy actor's legal complaint against a porn star who had claimed a relationship with him: "While plaintiff believes in the rights of others to follow their own sexual preference, vast numbers of the public throughout the world do not share his view and, believing that he had a homosexual affair and did so during his marriage, they will be less inclined to patronize [his] films, particularly since he tends to play parts calling for heterosexual romance and action adventure. " No doubt, these are the same audiences who would expect the actor to know how to pilot a jet fighter in real life.

Who, then, is thought to be the perpetually closeted Toothy Tile? Consensus gives the honor to Jake Gyllenhaal.

So, what team is Jake playing for? How many beards do you see in this picture? And...well, do I really have to say anything.

Source: I Dish, Therefore I Am: Performing Toothy Tile and Ted Casablanca by Frank Miller, Georgia State University

Bearding isn't Cool

Adam Lambert on making his sexuality public:

There are so many old-fashioned ways of looking at things, and if we want to be a progressive society, we have to start thinking in a different way. There's the old industry idea that you should just make sexuality a non-issue, just say your private life's your private life, and not talk about it. But that's bullshit, because private lives don't exist anymore for celebrities: they just don't.

I don't want to be looking over my shoulder all the time, thinking I have to hide, being scared of being found out, putting on a front, having a beard, going down the red carpet with some chick who is posing as my girlfriend.

That's not cool, that's not being a rock star. I can't do that.

Source: Adam Lambert in His Own Words: Sexuality, Kris Allen and Life After Idol, Rolling Stone

Friends and Allies

Kris Allen on his frustration with Christians who wouldn't accept Adam Lambert:

"There [were all these rumors] about how all the conservative, Christian people that would vote for me hate Adam and never want him to win because of who he is. Oh, it was so frustrating — really bad, because we are really good friends. Why can't everyone get along? It never made any sense for me to judge anyone, who they are. It frustrates me that people can't get along with people because of their differences. And I'll tell you what, especially Christians.

Christians have a hard time accepting people like Adam — liberal, from L.A., looks different, maybe acts a certain way. He's a great, great guy. They don't even give him a chance. And it's frustrating because I come from that. A lot of my friends are not that way, which I appreciate, but a lot of people in Arkansas or in the South or wherever are that way. We really hope that our relationship can be an inspiration to people. I could go on about that forever."

Source: Entertainment Weekly

Playing gay, being gay

24 November 2005

This well might be the Year of the Gay at the Oscars. Not the year of the gay actor - heavens forbid - but the year when actors are rewarded for playing gay parts. Philip Seymour Hoffman has produced what is said to be a virtuoso account of Truman Capote's mincing style in Capote. Felicity Huffman, the put-upon one in Desperate Housewives, has been persuaded to play a male-to-female transvestite in Transamerica. And Annie Proulx's great short story, Brokeback Mountain, about an extended and tragic love affair between two cowboys, has been filmed by Ang Lee with Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in the leads.

Oscars surely await some of these. There are half a dozen other big name actors playing gay roles this season, and it's evidently now a safe career move. It's worth noting, however, that none of these actors themselves is gay, and indeed most of them have been at some pains to distance themselves from any such suggestion. Michelle Williams, the mother of Ledger's child, appears in Brokeback Mountain as his character's betrayed wife. That, one must assume, could only happen when there was no possibility whatever of it being, for instance, a sardonic joke on a real-life gay affair. The casting of Williams is a spectacular example of the sexual alibi; for anyone who cares to wonder, we are reassured that this could only be a piece of "let's pretend", and the actor's real interests are nervously displayed on screen.

As if that wasn't enough, the actors in these films are always at pains to stress the incredible trauma involved in having to pretend to kiss a person of the same sex in front of cameras. To be fair, this is always a subject that unhealthily obsesses interviewers, but actors' responses are often highly amusing. Jake Gyllenhaal has said: "Heath and I were both saying, 'Let's get the love scenes over as fast as we can - all right, cool. Let's get to the important stuff.'"

We are left in no doubt at all. The actors in these films are so extraordinarily heterosexual that playing gay presents them with incredible challenges. Personally, I've spent a day down a working coal mine, and think that, as jobs go, being asked to snog Heath Ledger is not among the world's more demanding professional tasks.

But Hollywood, evidently, agrees with the actors. When you look at recent Oscars, the tendency is fairly clear. Tom Hanks - famously uxorious - won for playing a gay man in Philadelphia. Hilary Swank's burlesque turn as a transsexual teen in Boys Don't Cry followed, and then Charlize Theron won for the fat, ugly, lesbian serial killer in Monster. Of course, as is customary, some of the Oscar-winning credit goes to the make-up artist here - golly, look at Charlize, she's made herself all ugly - but most of it is surely down to the incredible fact that an artist was prepared to demean herself enough to play a lesbian.

When you look at the history of Oscar-winning performances, Hollywood's new enthusiasm for embracing minorities seems less than profound. Notoriously, the easiest way to win an Oscar is to play somebody bravely fighting against a physical condition or a mental handicap. The easiest route of all, in fact, is to play a gifted artist suddenly struck down by disability - the early years of the Academy awards are littered with long-forgotten tales of deaf sopranos and ballerinas with gout. As the "Kate Winslet" character in Ricky Gervais's series Extras scabrously observed, "Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot? Oscar. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man? Oscar. Seriously, you are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental."

The way Hollywood is rushing to reward heterosexual actors playing gay roles does not, really, reflect very well on its engagement. It is just too much like its fairly disgraceful engagement with mental and physical disability, and too much like rewarding a variety turn. Hollywood, so admiring of an actor's ability to project a sexuality not his own in these cases, has never been in a hurry to reward those far more common examples of gay actors convincingly playing heterosexual roles. In most cases, that involves rather more than the requirement of kissing this year's starlet in front of the cameras - a requirement no less or more demanding for a gay actor than Mr Gyllenhaal being asked to kiss Mr Ledger, surely. It may involve an actor's whole life.

One of the very striking things about this whole curious fashion is that not one of the actors involved is gay themselves. Moreover, it seems fairly likely, in view of the tone of the attendant publicity, that a studio just wouldn't cast a gay actor in one of these roles. It is quite impossible to imagine Heat magazine asking a gay actor how they enjoyed kissing their straight co-star, or indeed, their gay co-star. It would raise questions of enthusiasm which the world of publicity is not quite ready for and we can only, it seems, watch such kisses with the assurance, as swift as can be arranged, that nobody involved could possibly have derived pleasure from it.

But there's another, rather bigger reason why the studios wouldn't cast a gay actor in such a role. In America, evidently, there aren't any gay actors. One may grow rather satirical on the subject, but the truth is that whereas in every other country in the world it is widely accepted that theatre and film offer a congenial and sympathetic area in which gay men and women can work, this is simply not true in America. There are no gay actors - or at least, there weren't until Nathan Lane, to everyone's utter incredulity, came out. Of course, there were gay actors in America's past - James Dean, Cary Grant, Dirk Bogarde, Rock Hudson, Danny Kaye. Plenty of them, in fact. But, for whatever reason, there's hardly a single gay actor of recognisable stature working in Hollywood. An incredible fact.

Sooner or later, one of those non-existent gay actors will take a role as a gay character, and tell us all subsequently how difficult they found kissing their co-star, to general derisive hilarity. In fact, it's not hard to think of a recent film where exactly that situation arose, starring one of those gentlemen with a boyfriend on the payroll and a lady hired for the purpose of premieres. But Hollywood will only seem truly tolerant when it allows gay actors to play gay roles, kissing included, and no whining about it in the publicity afterwards. Until then there's - how should one put it - a slight air of Al Jolson about the whole business.

Source: Gay for today by Philip Hensher, The Guardian

This Is a Question of Fairness

It is by no means a fast and easy path, but the cause of same-sex marriage is moving forward — proof that justice can triumph over wedge politics and prejudice. It happened this week in Maine and New Hampshire, where both states’ legislatures voted to legalize same-sex marriage and promptly put the final say to their governors.

In New Hampshire, Gov. John Lynch — who previously defined marriage as strictly between a man and a woman — promised his “best decision” after consulting lawmakers and constituents. Mr. Lynch would be wise also to consult his neighbor in Maine, Gov. John Baldacci, who signed his state’s same-sex marriage bill. He previously had opposed the idea, with the familiar hedge of supporting the half-step of civil unions.

Mr. Baldacci described his change of heart — and what we hope is the changing sentiment of many other American politicians. “I have come to believe that this is a question of fairness and of equal protection under the law, and that a civil union is not equal to civil marriage,” he said. Precisely.

Maine was the fifth state to legalize same-sex marriage. We urge Mr. Lynch to make New Hampshire the sixth. Similar proposals are pending in other states, with a major debate expected in the New York Legislature.

This week, the City Council of the District of Columbia took a preliminary step, voting 12 to 1, to recognize marriages between gay people certified in other states. A fuller debate is anticipated on a proposal to legalize same-sex unions. Unfortunately, there already are calls for Congress to once more tread on home rule and block this progress in the nation’s capital.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is right to caution against such grandstanding. Governor Baldacci heard the people speak. Congress should listen.

Source: The New York Times, 'This Is a Question of Fairness'