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

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.

Yes.

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.

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Now comes Damage Control.

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

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

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

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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

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

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

Welcome to LaLaLand.

P

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.

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

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.

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