Um…Rock Hudson?

Hooray for Kristin Chenoweth.

In the opinion piece that’s infuriated Chenoweth, Newsweek’s Ramin Setoodeh seems to be arguing two separate points but treating them as if they’re one and the same.

The first is that gay actors just aren’t talented enough to play characters who like girls.

The second is that no actor, gay or straight, can make an audience forget who and what he really is, which is an argument that all actors should always play themselves because that’s all they can play, an argument against the entire career of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

It’s true, though.  Some gay actors cannot play straight characters convincingly…because they can’t play any characters convincingly.  The trouble isn’t that they’re gay actors.  The trouble is that they’re bad actors.

Sean Hayes isn’t a bad actor.  If he’s not doing a good job in Promises, Promises, my bet is that it’s because he hasn’t figured out how to play that character not that he can’t play straight.

I’d think the problem any actor would have would that part is not how to play him straight but how not to play him as Jack Lemmon.

It’s also true that some gay very talented gay actors will never be able to play romantic leads, for the same reason a lot of straight actors will never play romantic leads.  They don’t fit the parts.

Another true thing is that actors who’ve had some degree of fame or notoriety carry that with them onstage and on onscreen but their challenge is to make audiences forget who they are in real life and accept them as this character.  The better the actor and the better the character the quicker this can happen.  But audiences can’t help seeing both the actor and the character they’re playing and sometimes circumstances are such that no matter how good a job the actor’s doing the audience can’t forget what they just read in People Magazine or saw on TV last night.  If Sean Hayes had starred in a production of Promises, Promises while Will & Grace was at its peak, he might have had no hope of making the audience accept him as a leading man, straight or gay. They’d have seen him as Just Jack! no matter what.

Maybe.

Audiences like to be fooled too.  Being aware of the differences between the character and what they know about the actor can be part of the fun.  Watching an actor know for being a saint in real life or for usually playing heroes take on the role of a villain is pleasure for audiences that has often worked to the actor’s benefit, excusing an actually weak performance or saving or expanding a career.

You can probably come up with a dozen examples.  The reason I can’t come up with an example of a out and proud gay actor wowing audiences with a performance as a romantic leading man that made Clark Gable look like a stammering schoolboy is Hollywood’s longstanding prejudice against casting gay men as romantic leads.  I can think of examples of possibly gay men who had to pretend to be straight offscreen in order to pretend to be straight on screen and getting away with it for their whole careers.

Rumors abound about the likes of Cary Grant, Tyrone Power, and lately even Spencer Tracey.  But forget the gossip.  There’s one leading man we know for sure was gay and you would think a quick consideration of his career would have caused Setoodeh to spike his article before he got past his first graph.

But Setoodeh’s ahead of me.

For all the beefy bravado that Rock Hudson projects on-screen, Pillow Talk dissolves into a farce when you know the likes of his true bedmates.

I suppose it is farcical, if you ignore why we know Hudson was gay and how the man died.  But I think most fans got over the irony by 1987 and those movies he made with Doris Day, not to mention McMillan and Wife, still work as comedies about a romantic and sexual attraction between a man and a woman and in the two decades since Hudson died I don’t think there’s evidence that they’re only remembered as gay camp cult films.

Actually, the other irony, that it was Hudson who was gay not Tony Randall, adds a nice fillip to the enjoyment, but again along the same lines as knowing that the actor playing the villain spends his off time working at hospitals in Bolivia.

You would think the corollary to Setoodeh’s argument would be that straight actors can’t play gay characters, which would be news to Philip Seymour Hoffman, Sean Penn, Daniel Day-Lewis, Colin Firth, and Sean Hayes’ co-star on Will & Grace, Eric McCormack, not to mention Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, as well as the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who nominated Hoffman, Penn, Firth, and Ledger for Oscars for their portrayals of gay men.

Setoodeh does mention Ledger and Gyllenhaal but only to state that it’s ok for straight actors to play gay without saying why it’s ok for them.

The implication is that it’s ok because audiences know the truth.  What Setoodeh’s actually trying to say---I think---is not that gay actors can’t play straight characters because they can’t really act straight, although he does seem to think that it is the case that they can’t.  The slightest trace of queerness will show up on everybody’s gaydar the way the minutest radioactive isotope will set off alarms all over the spaceship in a bad sci-fi movie and the performance will ring false.  It’s that audiences are still too unaccepting of gayness.

So his argument becomes that gay actors should closet themselves and closet themselves deeply if they want to play romantic leading men.

And it follows from that that directors should never attempt to cast gay actors as romantic leading men if they want their productions to be successful.

What would NPH say?

Probably, “Have you watched my show, dude?”

Photo above from Vanity Fair.  Goes with this short article by Burt Bachrach.

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Comments

[Beel]

The argument you're critiquing is so utterly stupid it gives me grave concerns for the Republic. Why not go the full mile--my mother was always certain that to be an actor was to be gay, and in other ways fucked up as well. It was a profession to be avoided like the plague, along with being a musician (if you were a musican you were a drunk and a dope fiend, not to mention a failure). Anyways--a male actor was a man without a center. A female actor was a wanton slut of course. And you know how they did plays in Shakespeare's day. Not to mention even Shakespeare's name!

[SimplerDave]

Or, as Dan Savage puts it:

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2010/05/11/cheyenne-jackson

(Contains strong language of a sexual nature, but you knew that before you clicked the link)

[velvet goldmine]

David Hyde Pierce....as long as we're playing.

Self-hating anythings are tiresome, as if they never grew out of mocking their own kind just to drive Mommy and Daddy crazy. Ann Coulter, Michael Steele and in this case Sedootah.

BUT. What's insane is calling for a boycott of Newsweek, as the creator of Glee is doing. The public dialogue is great, but he shouldn't be treated as a pariah for acknowledging that we're all infants when it comes to processing art vs. life?

What ever happened to someone raising a semi-valid point (After all, Sean Hayes is not a comic genius, and he may have only two speeds--Serious Actor and Just Jack) and tossing out the political football that the way our culture relentlessly hounds our better-known actors makes it is tragically hard for us to separate their lives from their roles? Or at least creates a subtext that informs the viewing?

We can cite Rock Hudson and Monty Clift all day long, but the reality is we never saw them caught in their love nests, never saw them talk matter-of-factly about their same-sex spouses, never saw them evolve from the closet to cozy out-and-proud domestic bliss, the way we have Ellen, Rosie and Wanda.

Right now we seem to be in what I hope is a transition period in which public figures can be fairly open about their orientation (women more than men) without being driven out of their chosen fields (Hollywood more than Washington), but yet still feel the reverberations in the form of not always getting the wide range of roles they might have gotten if they'd stayed closeted. I don't know if Ellen WANTS to do another Mr. Right, for example, but I don't think she's going to get the chance any time soon.

[Susie]

"What ever happened to someone raising a semi-valid point (After all, Sean Hayes is not a comic genius, and he may have only two speeds--Serious Actor and Just Jack) and tossing out the political football that the way our culture relentlessly hounds our better-known actors makes it is tragically hard for us to separate their lives from their roles? Or at least creates a subtext that informs the viewing?"

I agree. Setoodeh could have put his case with more nuance, but it is true that the fantasies of the mass audience plays a powerful role in the success of movie stars, especially those whose popularity is based all or in part on sex appeal. In Hayes' case, it may be just a fact that he has become typed and will have work to do trying to escape the typecasting. Or he may not have enough variety to escape it.

One reason John Gielgud never tried for a major career in movies was because he feared he would come across on camera as too effeminate, although he was safely closeted at the time. (He may not have been wrong in his own case.) Onstage he was a famous matinee idol, with women screaming in the stalls, but even in the theater he stayed mainly with classical roles where love and sex were handled in more stylized ways. Eventually he did play a straight man in a contemporary context successfully on film, in "Providence," late in his career.

"Right now we seem to be in what I hope is a transition period in which public figures can be fairly open about their orientation (women mroe than men) without being driven out of their chosen fields..."

Lesbianism has always been less toxic as an issue. This is nice for gay women in a way, allowing them to fly under the radar in a way that gay men can't, but I suspect it is connected with the traditional inferior position of women - it matters less what they do with each other.

[Valiant]

"It’s also true that some gay very talented gay actors will never be able to play romantic leads, for the same reason a lot of straight actors will never play romantic leads. They don’t fit the parts."

Yes, but to suggest that the reason for their unfitness has nothing to do with their sexuality is disingenuous.