Gay Actors

I keep running into all the flap about the piece by Ramin Setoodeh saying that gay actors can't be believable in straight roles.  So I read his piece.  Then I read this piece with Marc Peyser of Newsweek, Dustin Lance Black, and Jarrett Barrios of GLAAD.  I read Kristin Chenoweth's rebuttal.  Then I read Aaron Sorkin's piece on the controversy.

OK -- for starters, Setoodeh's article is this mushy mish-mash (and try saying that five times real fast) that seems to be about nothing so much as Setoodeh.  He targets Sean Hayes in particular, noting that he just couldn't "believe" him in a straight role.  Apparently, everyone else in the audience could.  I think Setoodeh gives himself away with this:

For all the beefy bravado that Rock Hudson projects on-screen, Pillow Talk dissolves into a farce when you know the likes of his true bedmates. (Just rewatch the scene where he's wading around in a bubble bath by himself.)

I'm taking that as pure Setoodeh, and not saying much about Rock Hudson, particularly since from all reports, Hudson was a total top, and could be a fairly rough one.   Setoodeh's thrust seems to be that if an audience knows an actor is gay, they're not going to believe him in a "straight" role.  I wonder how that logic extends to all the straight actors who have played "gay" roles -- did Setoodeh believe them?

Sorkin comes up with the core:

An actor, no matter which sex they're attracted to, can't "play" gay or "play" straight. Gay and straight aren't actable things. You can act effeminate and you can act macho (though macho usually ends up reading as gay), but an actor can't play gay or straight anymore than they can play Catholic. The most disturbing thing to me about this episode is that the theater critic for Newsweek didn't know that. Of COURSE gay actors can play straight characters -- it's impossible to believe that Mr. Setoodeh would prefer if Ian McKellen would stop doing King Lear.

One of the first things I had beaten into my head as an acting student (yes, I was once an acting student) is that you play a person.  It's a person that you create from the clues given you by the playwright, but it's a person.

I suspect that Setoodeh is among the few who is going to let his knowledge of an actor's personal life color his perception of the actor's performance.  Aside from that, I don't see much in his essay that makes much sense.  It's basically garbage.

(Note:  to borrow a leaf from Setoodeh's own book, read this article by Brett Berk at Vanity Fair:  apparently, Setoodeh doesn't like it if anyone comes across as "too gay," whether they do or not.)

'Nuff said?