The popular British TV series, Little Britain features a character known as ‘the only gay in the village’. The Welsh village in which it is set is clearly a more liberal place than Hollywood in as much as at least it does acknowledge having one gay man.
Statistically speaking, around 6% of the male population are gay. More than one in twenty men… except if those 20 men happen to be in Hollywood where being openly gay is still considered a nail in the coffin of the career of any male actor.
Trying to think of the name of a famous gay American actor can be a bit of a brain teaser. Everyone knows about Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift… now, but not at the height of their careers and anyway, they were stars in the 50s and 60s. However, attitudes have changed very little in Hollywood over the intervening decades and although there are rumours about some of the A list stars who attend movie premiers with an ever changing string of beauties hanging from their arms, they are still only rumours.
Why Are There no Gay Actors in Hollywood?
Award winning director Todd Holland (Malcolm in the Middle, The Larry Sanders Show), who is openly gay, admitted that he advises young male actors to ‘stay in the closet’ telling them that it is necessary if they want to succeed in Hollywood.
Attitudes in Tinseltown are so archaic that even a straight actor who accepts the role of a gay character can be considered to be making a potentially career damaging move.
A top movie producer commented that Jake Gyllenhaal’s decision to take the role of Jack Twist in the 2005 movie, Brokeback Mountain ‘was the most stupid move he could make’ predicting that playing a gay cowboy would alienate Gyllenhaal’s teen fan base and kill his career. Of course it did nothing of the sort and Brokeback Mountain went on to become a huge commercial and critical success - which just goes to show how in touch Hollywood producers are with public opinion.
What gay American actors think about this hypocritical hoo-ha is unclear as they are still an incredibly rare breed and have to remain well hidden for survival purposes. In Britain, where attitudes to homosexuality, and other aspects of the film business such as the approach to nudity in movies, is more matter of fact, gay British actors have spoken out about Hollywood’s firmly locked closet on a number of occasions.
Rupert Everett claimed that he lost film roles such as the lead in Basic Instinct 2 because he was gay; although maybe he should be thankful about that one.
"I wanted to be a movie star. I had a difficult set of circumstances to deal with, particularly for a movie career,” he told New York Times Magazine. “Being gay, really. It just doesn’t work."
Sir Ian McKellan on the other hand has been quoted as saying that his career in mainstream movies ‘really took off’ after he came out and said he was gay. However, he also firmly believes that in America attitudes to gay men in starring roles are behind the times and has commented that "it is very, very, very difficult for an American actor who wants a film career to be open about his sexuality."
In a business where suspending belief is the name of the game, the very idea that a gay actor can convince audiences that they’re a super cool action hero seems, for studio executives anyway, to be one that is beyond any actor’s capabilities and, more importantly in business terms, one that movie fans simply won’t accept.
The world may have made huge advancements in terms of how anyone who is gay is treated in society, but in Hollywood it might as well still be 1950. Sir Ian McKellen summed it up perfectly in an interview with The Observer newspaper in 2006.
'Nobody has ever looked to Hollywood for social advance. Hollywood is a dream factory...” he observed. “… It couldn't be more staid and old-ladyship if it tried.”
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