I’ve been getting annoyed, these last couple weeks, by a thought that keeps recurring to me. I used to love the television show Will & Grace when it was on. I didn’t actually watch it all that often because it was on at inconvenient times in the UK but I’d watch it online and stuff. It has fantastic writing and it looks like the characters (and actors) have a lot of fun which gives it an unusual energy. But what’s been annoying me is how they take the issue of being gay and play with it as though it’s something to giggle at but never really focus on. This was evidenced to me a couple of days ago by a bloopers video I saw online. They use the gay line at every turn they can but the show and the actors are never honest about it. There are innumerable kisses between Karen and Jack, between Will and Grace and between Grace and Karen. Because straight or lesbian is ‘A OK’ on US television. But boy on boy action, not a chance. It’s a gay show and yet there is only one kiss in the clip show of guys kissing. Can mainstream audiences only accept gay shows if it’s laughing at the gays and not really with them?
Of course there’s the issue of actors themselves being out. How gay is Jack? So Gay. But Sean Hayes, rigidly in the closet. No utterance of his heterosexuality is uttered. He just doesn’t talk about it. Randy Harrison, one of the most high profile gays actors on television with his starring role in the US version of the British show Queer As Folk, hardly talks about it.
Nobody, not one single person is going to get over the idea of being typecast as gay if those who play gay don’t talk about it. When T.R. Knight from Grey’s Anatomy goes on ‘Ellen’, as he did two days ago, and can hardly articulate his position, never actually saying ‘I’m gay’ and refering to the ‘faggot’ name-calling he was subject to by a fellow cast member as ‘that hateful word’ (after his initial mumbling of the term), gays get weaker. Lots of peole heralded Knight for coming out publicly. He didn’t come out, he was kicked and pushed out by media reporting of the bust up on-set between two other actors that led to his being called the term. He may be articulate and kind and a thoroughly nice man, but he betrays himself by not having the courage to be open in the first place. It may be hard to be gay in the media but it can’t be hard to be gay in Hollywood. Give me a break, the place is full of gays. It’s clearly not being gay that’s the problem, but being publicly gay in Hollywood medialand.
So the US entertainment industry is using gay as a plot device but when it comes to actors actually being gay, that’s a no no. Apparently gay doesn’t sell in the magazines like a nice airbrushed People magazine headshot will do of a straight actor. No, wait. People magazine. Isn’t that the one that hosted Lance Bass’s coming out, and TR Knight’s and numerous others? Now you look at UK television and there are shows like Torchwood that has a bi/gay/straight/who-knows-what main character played by an actor who ‘married’ his male partner not long ago. If British shows can stop pretending, can’t they do the same stateside? And gay-vague isn’t good enough. It’s like the sidekick of Clair Bennet (the cheerleader) in the show Heroes. Gay. He’s gay. But they won’t say it, apart from when some kids in the high school corridors call it out as an insult. Because that’s what it’s seen as, and that’s what it’ll stay until entertainment considers it no longer a taboo topic. Let modern day people like Cole Porter stop hiding under the carpet and come out. Can’t Hollywood stop playing at gay? It’s not a fun game anymore.
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