- demanding that queer actors come out of the closet before playing queer roles is monstrous
- queer celebrities have the right to make their queerness as private or as public as they choose, and neither choice is morally incorrect
- i do not want to live in a world where marginalized creators are only allowed to create art about their own marginalized identities
Focus more on out actors and creators being able to get roles and create content. Many times, they get passed off for opportunities because of their sexuality.
OP, this implies that it’s only closeted queer actors taking roles as queer characters, when in practice it’s cishets taking queer roles to show their “depth”, while queer actors don’t get to play anything besides queer if they get jobs at all….
actually, queer actors have been working in the film industry in large, virtually dominant numbers, since the dawn of the industry, rendering los angeles a rare haven for gay people from the early 20th century onward. in the post-WWII years, in fact, so many gay men moved to los angeles in search of film stardom that the los angeles police department was actually able to recruit unemployed gay actors to serve as “bait” in undercover vice squad operations and entrap other gay men. but despite the enormous numbers of queer people working in film, a number of extenuating cultural factors always required them to remain closeted.
in 1934, the motion picture production code (a.k.a. the hays code) banned all onscreen depictions of homosexuality, and in the 1950s, the spread of mccarthyism to hollywood forced queer actors even further into the closet, lest they be outed as “subversives” and blacklisted. studios were well aware that they were working with gay actors, and they took great pains to protect their gay stars from being outed, often going so far as to pay off police, hire heterosexual women to accompany gay male stars to public events, and even force gay stars into staged heterosexual marriages. queer actors got plenty of jobs, so long as they remained closeted. this is why you’ve heard of katharine hepburn, james dean, marlon brando, marilyn monroe, greta garbo, and marlene dietrich, but you didn’t know they were queer.
it’s ahistorical, if not nonsensical, to argue that queer actors have been forced to choose between queer roles and unemployment. in fact, they’ve been forced to choose between closeting and unemployment. it’s only in the past five to ten years that the notion of a commercially viable and openly gay actor has become a cultural reality. the safety and sustainability of being an out gay celebrity is still by no means assured. what you are suggesting is that we now move into a climate where queer roles should only be made available to openly queer actors, which would necessitate that they make their sexualities and relationships a matter of public discussion. it is immoral to require this of gay actors. mandating that actors come out is every bit as unethical as mandating that actors stay in the closet. you are not owed personal, intimate information from any creative professional, ever, and you do not require it to enjoy their art.
the idea that casting ought to be literal is not new. people of colour have made the argument for a long time, given hollywood’s history of racial discrimination and whitewashing. what you’ve done is airlift this argument into a new context, that of queer roles and queer actors, and assume the same principle applies. it doesn’t. requiring that black roles be played by black actors harms nobody. requiring that queer roles be played by openly queer actors amounts to a systemic invasion of privacy. mickey rooney caking on yellow makeup and affecting pidgin english is an act of violence in a way that heath ledger kissing jake gyllenhaal is not. homophobia and racism have manifested in the film industry in radically different forms, and the solutions to these problems will necessarily look different.
bongdanceking 