Straight Actors Playing Queer Characters Is Exhausting
It’s 2021 and what few LGBTQ+ films that are produced by major film studios continue to star cisgender heterosexual actors, rather than actual LGBTQ+ people.

Manscaping is an intimate documentary portrait of three queer men who are reimagining the traditional barbershop. Devan Shimoyama is a Black American artist, fast on the rise, whose barbershop painting series draws upon Afrofuturism and drag to envision the Black barbershop as a more inclusive space. Jessie Anderson is a young transgender Canadian barber and proprietor of Big Bro’s Barbershop, where trans, gender nonconforming, and queer customers know they won’t have to ‘go back into the closet’ to get a haircut. Richard Savvy, Australia’s ‘naked barber’, is a fetish barber/porn actor, and former ‘Sydney Mr. Leather’ who invites you to leave your shame and clothes at the door and to add the transformative power of kink to your cut. Their stories, artistry, and activism model ways we can cut through the toxicity of male fragility in favor of social inclusion and personal freedom.
It’s 2021 and what few LGBTQ+ films that are produced by major film studios continue to star cisgender heterosexual actors, rather than actual LGBTQ+ people.
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The differences in these films could not be more blatant, and yet Gus Van Sant has found a way to portray the same messages and use the same techniques in each.