There’s never been a better time to be gay in Hollywood. “Moonlight” won Best Picture the same year Kristen Stewart told millions of people on “Saturday Night Live” that she’s “like, so gay dude.” Now in its 10th season, “RuPaul’s Drag Race” boasts two Emmy nominations and ever-increasing ratings. The “Roseanne” reboot has a gender-nonconforming child, and “Love, Simon,” the first major studio film about a gay teenager, is playing in 2,402 theaters nationwide. It seems everywhere you look, progress is slowly doing its thing.
So why are so many actors still in the closet?
This week delivered a stark reminder of the real state of affairs, when James Ivory gave a no-holds-barred interview in The Guardian lamenting the lack of full-frontal male nudity in “Call Me By Your Name,” the gay awards film of last year, which earned the Hollywood legend his first Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. The same story also noted how Ivory kept his 44-year romantic relationship with producing partner Ismail Merchant a secret — albeit an open one.
Surely such secrecy is a thing of the past, right? In a post-Call Me By Your Name” world (which is also a post-“Carol” and post-“Moonlight” world), why would anyone feel pressure to hide their sexuality in order to get work in Hollywood?
Well.
“A lot of people advise you not to do it. They tell you flat out — ‘Don’t do it,’” said “Westworld” actress Evan Rachel Wood, who came out publicly as bisexual in 2011. “They don’t want you to be less desirable to men. Because that sells tickets and that helps your career.”
“Star Trek” actor John Cho is straight, but played Billy Eichner’s boyfriend in “Difficult People,” as well as the latest iteration of Sulu in “Star Trek,” who is revealed as gay in the third installment. In an interview, Cho told IndieWire that he knows of one actor who “is not particularly in the closet, if you get my drift,” but is not out in the press. “I think he doesn’t want to … talk about that for 80 percent of each interview,” said Cho. “It’s natural, the attention, but I think this person would rather talk about the film. And heterosexual actors are afforded a much greater degree of privacy.”
A top-level talent manager who spoke on condition of anonymity put it in blunter terms. “It’s all about perception. They want to believe that the lead guy is fucking the lead woman,” he said. “If a studio is backing a film with a ton of money … they want everyone who is buying tickets to believe that that’s in fact the case. Sadly, if we know that in real life the lead guy is screwing around with another guy, the fear is that it may hurt ticket sales.”
The same logic does not apply to straight actors, like “Call Me by Your Name” stars Armie Hammer and Timothee Chalamet, for whom playing gay (albeit in a prestigious film) actually bolstered their careers. Loose-lipped though he was, Ivory did not elaborate on the reason “Call Me by Your Name” skimped on the skimpiness, other than to call “bullshit” on the assertion by director Luca Guadagnino that it was a “conscious aesthetic decision.”
But plenty of actors cut to the chase. “You see a lot of heterosexual actors playing queer characters on screen, but you don’t see that many queer actors playing straight people on screen,” said Lola Kirke, whose new movie, “Gemini,” has both explicit queer themes and nuanced undertones. The contemporary noir casts Kirke as an unwitting Philip Marlowe on the run after the death of her employer and friend, a prominent actress played by Zoë Kravitz, who must hide her sexuality from the paparazzi.