Sigh no more, DEI

Homophobia is alive and well

A headline caught my eye in today’s paper. It could have been a headline from any time, I suppose. There is nothing inherent in it to tell me it was today’s paper. Even the prefix homo- marks only what’s trending, but doesn’t make it special.

It’s what an actor says of Hollywood, seat of the film industry. One is tempted to say that they’re a Hollywood actor, the suggestion being that that would lend a certain kudos to the remark: not just any old actor, you know. Some Hollywood actors also acted in Shakespeare. Memorable is the 1993 film of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, featuring an array of Hollywood actors acquitting themselves to audiences’ delight as characters from 15th century Spanish Sicily. It’s a comedy, whose cast includes the director, Kenneth Branagh (Shakespearean actor), as well as his (then) wife, Emma Thompson (one hesitates to say Hollywood; better screen actor), plus Robert Sean Leonard (Hollywood actor—he commits suicide in Dead Poets Society), Kate Beckinsale (costume drama and action hero actor—an odd combo—and daughter of the late, lamented Richard Beckinsale), Denzel Washington (Hollywood), Keanu Reeves (Hollywood), Richard Briers (more Surrey actor), Michael Keaton (Holly), Brian Blessed (Shakespearean, Hollywood and everything-in-between (including Z-Cars) actor), and Ben Elton (writer and … actor).

There’s nothing much significant about this one film’s cast, except that there’s nothing significant about it. The film itself was successful, despite reservations expressed by backers and distributors. It ends with a song, which I like and which you can like as well, via the link at the foot of this piece.

In Shakespeare’s time, it was against the law in England for women to appear on the stage. For that reason, female parts had to be played by male actors: men for older, matronly characters, and boys for the girls. Imagine if that law still applied—what our view might be of drama in which all the parts were played by men. It might cut out some of the love scenes for a start, which would pose their own challenges to film makers.

The White Lotus is currently courting controversy by portraying an incestuous relationship between two brothers (with the sister getting in on the act, all with brazen nonchalance). In the seventies, the idea of a group of couples throwing their car keys into a bowl and extracting a set at random was enough to scandalise us. Now, darker—home—truths get paraded before our eyes, as society pursues its quest for the ultimate taboo. This sort of uncomfortable family viewing gets parked alongside the notion that it’s unacceptable for an actor to be gay in his private life.

A director who once rejected my audition told me, “You have to look the part.” That is true. A Black protagonist is best played by actors who are themselves Black. A man is best played by a man, and when that is not the case, that will often form a central theme in the plot. So, there are characteristics that get portrayed in the finished product that stem from the reality: a shared characteristic with the actors themselves. For the rest, the actor … acts. They put it on. The director in question said I was more suited to playing the part of a hooligan, an imposing, threatening mafia-type. That’s what the audience expects to see on the stage when those kinds of characters are presented: big and burly. No one who was big and burly ever, so it seems, worked in real life as a schools administrator, which was the occupation of the part I auditioned for. That director was not wrong, but with one twist: you must look to what the audience has persuaded themselves they want to see. I wondered how many of the audience would have ever knowingly met a schools administrator.

Back in the 6th century BC, the distinction between what was portrayed on a theatre stage (such as they had them) and what was the reality behind the guy who was saying the words had not yet been fully established: i.e. it was less than certain to the audience that the actor was in fact saying words that belonged to their character. In order to emphasise that distinction, actors in those days wore masks. The mask and the actors’ plain garb were the guarantee for their safety. They formed a barrier between the audience’s perception of the spoken words and the real person behind the act, the reason being that officials in the audience might otherwise attribute the words they heard to the individual himself, and not the character. I suppose it must have happened, which was why these lengths were gone to. This falls into the same line of thinking as the idea of executing a messenger who relays bad news, which the ancient Greeks also had a tendency to do.

Even with a play as established as Much Ado About Nothing, the expectations of the film’s backers and distributors needed to be taken into account, the most important being to make money. What makes a production make money is something you could write a book about, and somewhere in that tome would be a chapter on Whether or not the audience associates the actors with being gay in their private lives. It is that imagined chapter of that book that Nathan Lane (gay Hollywood actor) is well positioned to write, having been its victim throughout his career. It is his headline in the paper.

The industry that brings us make-believe employing actors still goes to great pains to dissimulate some aspects of what those actors do in private. By coming out from behind his mask, Thespis lost the protection of anonymity that he had when the mask was still raised. In 26 centuries, lowering it still raises controversy: over the degree to which actors should present their private selves on the stage.

Whether you call it bias, prejudice, preconceived notions, stereotypes, tropes, Hollywood is no case apart when it comes to selling stuff. The prototype model for just about anyone is out there somewhere and, once a film director catches their archetypal essence, that will instil itself in everyone’s minds as the one and only. In his breakout movie role, The Birdcage (1996), Nathan Lane plays one half of a gay couple who run a cabaret in Miami’s South Beach. His other half is played by Robin Williams. The plot is guided by their son from Williams’s marriage, whose girlfriend is the daughter of a traditionally minded senator. The senator wants to meet her boyfriend’s family, which in the senator’s speak is not the family of a gay community. How to disguise from the senator the fact that this couple is two men? More particularly, what to do about Nathan?

Image: Nathan Lane.¹

He’s melodramatic, camp, over the top and very loving. I’d like to say he portrays a typical gay man, but he doesn’t. He is nothing like typical in that movie. It’s a sad preconception: those who know nothing about gay society are curious to learn, but from a safe distance, which includes a fascination with outliers. The click bait. The circus performers. But not the regular guys, because they look too normal to be interesting. Too just like us. Maybe that’s the disturbing part: the idea that someone who looks just like them, could be one of them.

Gay men who meet the normal criterion in turn tread a thin line when engaging with supposedly tolerant straight people: the acronym TMI is never far from the tip of their tongues. We constantly have to be aware that our inclusion in broader society does not include inclusion of every last aspect of what we are, and we must carry with us sharpened sensibility for which aspect of who we are is acceptable (to the people who we are not, that is) and which aspect isn’t. Still, Lane gets the best laughs, and that’s what a comedy is all about—timing. Gay people need to know their audience and to have good timing. How true to life his movie persona is to his own, I can’t say. After all, why would I want to know that? He’s an actor, isn’t he?

In The Birdcage, Williams is at his wits’ end to masculinise Lane’s gait. “Let me give you an image. It’s a cliché, but it’s an image: John Wayne.” The most manly man within easy reach. Lane rises to the challenge and staggers, as if weighted down by gun holsters and bandoliers, walking wordlessly like John Wayne would, across the café and back to the table. “Not good?” he asks. Williams replies, “Actually, it’s perfect. I just never realised John Wayne walked that way.” It proves that, as far as the walk goes, John Wayne and Liberace were more identical than we could’ve imagined. That said, the walk we see is the walk we expect to see.

Homophobia is alive and well in Hollywood. So says Nathan Lane. Wasn’t it always? When a person, a company, an institution, even an industry, makes great play about its change of heart, about being part of Pride celebrations, of even seeing the error of their ways, that they have seen the light, resolved that they will change, move perspectives, stating that exclusion is wrong, inclusion is right, recognising that visceral dislike as a measure of what’s good and what’s bad is alien, then we know it is acting. Not without purpose, for acting’s sake, but for the balance sheet’s.

Much Ado About Nothing incorporates much of what is germane here: elements of mistaken identity, rumour and supposition, and the use of masks, not to mention unjust punishment of the messenger as a plot element (Ho, now you strike like the blind man – ’twas the boy that stole your meat, and you’ll beat the post). In spite of all this, it has a happy ending, but that’s contrived from the outset.

In 2,600 years, the acting industry has perfected only the art of how to make profit. And they still wear masks, albeit different ones these days. Business language is a formal style of writing whose aim is to eliminate all emotion from commercial correspondence. That is its purpose, because business and emotions do not mix. The elimination of homophobia, in Hollywood or anywhere else, would—even if it were possible—entail eliminating precisely an emotional response, and that is a Sysephean task. Moreover, whether at its own initiative or as a trending response, a business that seems to embrace inclusion, which is merely an emotion, needs to be regarded with suspicion, for when it does so, it is simply much ado about something. So sigh no more.

Clip: the song Sigh No More from the 1993 film Much Ado About Nothing.

1. By Btvway - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86673859.