Hollywood’s addiction to gay for pay
What’s all this talk about straight actors playing gay roles?
Twitter is ablaze with criticism over James Corden’s pin drop depiction of a gay man working on broadway, leaning into effeminate mannerisms as he tries to portray what he thinks a gay in the theatre might act like, and there-in lies the problem.
Society it seems is more comfortable with gay history *as portrayed by straight men.
There’s nothing new about straight, often white, men playing gay on screen for a bid at awards, and a sizable paycheck. It’s Hollywoods gay for pay addiction.
Timothée Chalamet’s portrayal of gay adolescent romance, Jake Gyllenhaal and the late Heath Ledger’s depiction of a gay western love story, Eddie Redmayne taking centre stage as one of the first trans women to undergo sexual reassignment surgery, and Jared Leto’s impression of a trans woman struggling with addiction, the list goes on.
“But isn’t it an actors job to play characters outside themselves?”
Perhaps, but the answer becomes more complicated when history and Hollywood get into bed with each other.
While an actor’s job is to play another person, it does not acknowledge how gay history has been told.
Until very recently, most of the LGBTQ+ community’s history was an oral one. It was passed from person to person under hushed voices and in private moments for fear of their family finding out, the shame from their community, or the very real threat of being arrested and bashed. The violence that stems from that for a queer person is still real to this day.
Queer people have for the first time, been able to step out into the light and share their unique stories. But as one hand writes down queer history, the other sits ready to turn that into a script and twist it ready for the screen. It’s shaping the record of queer history in real time.
It would seem absurd to see a white man play the story of Harriet Tubman, a black woman smuggling black slaves across the country towards freedom. Or imagine a Gentile Anne Frank? So why are we so comfortable with a straight white man accepting the check for the history of a trans woman, or a straight man playing the life of a gay man?
The answer to those questions is yet another step into Dante’s inferno
“I’m gay, but I’m not one of those kind of gays”- is a wound gay culture carries around. It was given to us from a society that made gay people believe that they had to yield to a heteronormative framework. They had had to be ‘normal’ to warrant holding space: to even exist. After all, what’s more palatably ‘masc for masc’ than a gay man who can shed his homosexuality as soon as the director yells, “cut”?
Gay history has already been told by straight white men. Psychiatrists who classed homosexuality as a mental disorder. Priests declaring us a sin. Even the 45th president removing all mention of the LGBTQ+ from all official government websites.
Our stories are delicate, nuanced and deserve more respect than being held in the hands of a stranger to our struggle. They are not for someone to erase when they no longer make them a profit.
Jeremy Moineau She/Hers
