Gay, Emmy-winning director to gay actors: stay in the closet

[romantico]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 7:55am

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 gay 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."


http://www.pamshouseblend.com/diary/12012/gay-emmywinning-director-to-gay-actors-stay-in-the-closet

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 9:46am

I read this on Michangelo Signorelle's site the other day. I agree that the argument is regressive.

I mean, I guess if you're drop dead gorgeous and certain to be on a leading man track it could be problematic, but for scores of long-working character actors, there's virtually no issue at all.

[doodlenyc]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 10:08am

Kirby Dick is straight, no?

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 10:18am

Yes.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 11:37am

What a stupid thing to tell people. I wish I had something more eloquent to combat his "argument" but he doesn't have one.

[fflagg]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 1:18pm

As a business decision it makes perfect sense. In Hollywood you are product not a person. If you come out you are going to be stuck doing LOGO crap, indie films, or a lisping sidekick on one episode of a sitcom.

Neil Patrick Harris is a nice guy and good actor who is not the lead on a second-level sitcom. He is not an A-level star like Tom Cruise. Therefore Harris really has nothing to lose assuming he has a good bank balance. Furthermore he is not a flaming queen like Sean Hayes and can therefore "play" straight.

This is not a perfect world. The closet existed in 1959, 2009, and will exist in 2059. Tell it to Jodie Foster, Kevin Spacey, and others. Too bad they have no courage to TRY and tackle the closet.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 2:21pm

The closet existed in 1959, 2009, and will exist in 2059.

Actually, I disagree. The closet is much smaller in 2009 than it was in 1959, by virtue of the fact that NPH and other television actors can come out and still play straight characters.

The next barrier will be romantic leads, and that will change when the next generation of female viewers is able to accept an actor they know to be gay playing a romantic scene with a woman.

The final closet will be actors in action/adventure stories that are geared toward a male audience. On that I agree that the closet could still be around in 2059.

But to say that the 2009 closet is the same as the 1959 closet is obviously wrong.

[romantico]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 2:22pm

Now comes Damage Control.

http://blogs.laweekly.com/ladaily/queer-town/todd-holland-gay-actors-closet-1/index.php

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 2:38pm

Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey are clearly not from the same generation as Neil Patrick Harris and TR Knight, for example.
To tell actors to stay in the closet means to enforce the closet and hence make it bigger. To cement the closet is to keep the continuing oppression we, gay people, are subjected to on a day to day basis. It sounds to me like this is someone who has completely given up and has no desire to allow the gay men and women in Hollywood (from any generation) to have the chance to be free.
Part of the reason why this man's statement is so absurd (as well as fflag's statement) is the willful overlook of huge celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O'Donnell. In the meantime, Neil Patrick Harris keeps getting Emmy nominations for playing a womanizer on a critically-acclaimed prime time comedy. Huh. Yes, he definitely should have stayed in the closet.
I repeat, what a stupid thing to say.

[DayDreamer]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 2:59pm

... and Rosa Parks should have done as she was told ... and the drag queens at Stonewall should have gone peacefully ...

[Phyllis Rogers Stone]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 3:01pm

Depends on who you ask.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 3:03pm

Don't forget the Sweater Boys at Stonewall--it wasn't just drag queens!

===

The Stonewall Inn attracted an eclectic crowd, from teenage college students like Morty Manford to conservatively dressed young men who stopped in with their dates after the theater or opera. "It was a different mind-set then," recalled Dawn Hampton. "On weekends, men dressed up. A lot of them were dating and they would dress in coat and tie."

There was also a sprinkling of young radicals, people like Ronnie Di Brienza, a twenty-six-year old long-haired musician who didn't consider himself gay or straight. "I must consider myself a freak."

The Stonewall Inn was not a generally welcoming place for drag queens, although as Martin Duberman notes, "...a few favored full-time transvestites, like Tiffany, Spanola Jerry, a hairdresser from Sheepshead Bay, and Tammy Novak... were allowed to enter Stonewall in drag..."

The nightly crowd at the Stonewall Inn did include, however, quite a few men that Dick Leitsch described as the "fluffy sweater" type. "It wasn't drag queens. They were sissies, young effeminate guys, giggle girls." Leitsch, who was then executive director of the Mattachine Society, a gay rights group founded in 1950, said you rarely saw people in full drag because "in those days you got busted for dressing up unless you were on your way to or from a licensed masquerade ball."

Sylvia Rivera recalled that if you were a drag queen, you could get into the Stonewall if they knew you, but he favored the Washington Square Bar at Third Street and Broadway. When he dressed up, Sylvia liked to pretend that he was a white woman. "I always like to say that, but really I'm Puerto Rican and Venezuelan."

If men dressed as women were an uncommon sight, real women at the Stonewall Inn were rarer still. More often than not, when Dawn Hampton worked at the Stonewall, she was the only woman there, yet felt fully accepted. "A lot of the kids called me 'Mommie.'"
Stonewall Revisited

Updated On: 7/15/09 at 03:03 PM

[dramamama611]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 3:14pm

I think he was strictly talking career wise. He certainly may mean to say: don't make your job future any more difficult than it needs to be. Heck, even our own Gavin said it was a concern. While we cannot PROVE it, if either NPH or Knight had come out before they "made it big" who knows if their careers would have been the same?

We can HOPE, but it is doubtful. Is it better now than 50 years ago? Of course it is. Is it as good as it can be 50 yearrs from now? I hope not.

[Pgenre]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 8:27pm

NPH is the exception, not the rule. Holland's opinion has merit.

Welcome to LaLaLand.

P

[PalJoey]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 8:40pm

Yes, he is an exception.

Exceptional people can change the world.

[broadwaytourist]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 9:00pm

Crazy talent no longer accepts boundaries. I really believe Cheyenne Jackson and Gavin Creel are only one role away from being the break throughs in television and films. But if all directors and casting directors and agents are still wanting to control their products, for after all isn't the closet just someone else's control of the hidden soul, then we as the consumers of the product are all the poorer.

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 9:08pm

Very well said as usual, PJ.

[Bway2010]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 9:23pm

I wonder what stars regret coming out though? NPH certainly has bucked the trend but there still seems to be bias everywhere in Hollywood.

[FindingNamo]

Posted: 7/15/09 at 9:56pm

The schism between real acting, which only happens in live theatre, and the smoke and mirrors created with camera work and editing for TV and movies, is only going to deepen.

Theatre, which is already perceived as -- and largely derided for -- being "gay" will continue to be the refuge for artists and will provide them a modicum of freedom to be who they are and to develop the skills of their craft.

It's a classic situation mirrored in many employment arenas, not just by the meat in the entertainment industrial complex. For example, I made a choice very early on that I was going to be out in every aspect of my life. I have a friend who was very closeted in his career (even went so far as putting an ad in the paper 20 years ago for a very femme lipstick lesbian career woman to accompany him to business affairs so they could pose as each other's partners) for decades. Currently, he has a LOT more money than I do. He travels and gets to "be gay" when he is far from home, he has a nice partner who has to disappear and hide any trace of his existence if my friend's colleagues go to their house. Whenever my friend is in town, he is metaphorically always looking over his shoulder. But when he's away, he is "free."

Me? I barely have a pot to piss in but I am literally free. Those two things are absolutely connected. You know what Kristofferson wrote about freedom being nothing left to lose.

Frankly, I don't give a sh*t about movie and TV stars. I'm not impressed by somebody's skills unless I've seen them with my own two eyes in the same room with the performer.

It's a shame and all that, but if you make the decision to hide, you have to live with it. And probably very comfortably.

Updated On: 7/15/09 at 09:56 PM

[TulitaPepsi]

Posted: 7/16/09 at 9:01am

The next barrier will be romantic leads, and that will change when the next generation of female viewers is able to accept an actor they know to be gay playing a romantic scene with a woman.

What is interesting is that straight women love the depiction of gay sex in films and TV. Most of the writers of gay "celebrity slash fiction" are women - one of them made a romantic (and hot) video for YouTube of Chris Meloni - Lee Tergensen's clinches from OZ. Still, both actors are straight.