Going for the Gold

The Oscars are Sunday and curiously few of my gay friends are mentioning any parties for the night. I thought we were supposed to flock to the TV like texting teens do to American Idol.

Anyway, I could end up watching Sean Penn stroll to the podium to take the Academy Award as Best Actor for Milk. I would be pleased as I thought he did a phenomenal job and it would be kind of a rebuke to a post-Prop. 8 country. A Penn victory would also make me wonder how far we’ve really come in the LGBT community as a whole.

Sounds strange but give me a minute. Penn would be the latest line of straight actors getting Oscar gold for playing gay. Think about Tom Hanks in Philadelphia, Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, and Charlize Theron in Monster, for example. And remember Sunday’s lock for a win – the dearly departed Heath Ledger aka “The Joker”, who was Oscar-nominated for his turn as a closeted cowboy in Brokeback Mountain.

I don’t want to take anything away from these great performances, but they reveal a double standard that plays into how we’re still viewed in society. Straights playing gay even now are lauded for being “brave” and “daring.” Wow, look at how they fiercely portray a gay man or lesbian, risking their image and the rumors that are sure to circulate.

What the hell? They are just playing other human beings. Hollywood is quantifying their celluloid leap as controversial and giving them unbridled praise because, in part, they are playing “the other.” That’s what we still are in many minds, even in Hollywood, even in 2009.

Why is it that few out gay actors are given gay roles in major movies? Is it a fear of typecasting on the actors’ part? Will the audience assume a gay man playing a gay role is not acting? And will Hollywood not cast openly gay actors in straight roles because they assume the audience will never believe them in those roles? Hardly seems fair it never goes the other way around.

When we see major gay portrayals on screen, it’s largely as the comic relief and/or the trusted fag hag to Julia Roberts, Reese Witherspoon, Anne Hathaway, etc. Those roles are broad and non-threatening. They don’t penetrate the surface and get under the skin of movie goers. They don’t illuminate the gay experience so much as pick a few superficial traits to flaunt. So we can be Jack on Will and Grace, but not Harvey Milk. We can’t tell our own stories in the studio films.

Are we still in a space to where an entertainer who comes out has to worry about his or her career? It seems so. Think about major figures whose sexual orientation has long been questioned: Anderson Cooper, Kenny Chesney, Tom Cruise, Kevin Spacey, and the list goes on.

As Hollywood (and other big media) embraces gay portrayals, why do some of its native gay sons still feel the need to stay in the closet? In my above list, I’d bet my life at least two of them are 100% gay, and I’m sure there are many others.

I hear people sympathize with celebrities with double lives because they still think coming out is a career killer. Is that just paranoia or are we just feeding off the vibes we get from larger society, many of whose members still experience a discomfort of gayness? Will we be in 2039 and having gay actors still afraid to come out and having plum gay parts going to straight actors who can make it clear that it’s just a role and they’re not really…you know? Will we still be imagining ourselves as a more tolerant society despite evidence to the contrary?

I just read that Jim Carrey will star in a new movie called I Love You, Phillip Morris and play a gay character, based on a real-life conman who falls in love with his cellmate in prison. The movie played at Sundance and already it’s getting raves, and some are praising Carrey “for daring” to play gay.

Carrey doesn’t help matters as he freely admitted it was “scary” to have to kiss his co-star Ewan McGregor. (But darnit, someone has to do it!) This feeds into the ass-backward Hollywood double-standard of praising our stories (portrayed by straights) while tacitly following the common thinking of being gay as “shocking” or some other life form altogether.

By the way, isn’t it funny that no one ever asked Anthony Hopkins if playing a cannibal in Silence of the Lambs would ruin his career? Well, I guess it’s just a role, right?