As Ammonite and Supernova enter theaters and get their VOD releases, audiences are given their annual taste of queer cinema for the winter awards season. And once again, as it was in 2005 when Brokeback Mountain was dominating the Oscars conversation, what few queer-themed films that are released continue to star mostly heterosexual and cisgender actors. As a gay man, I have to wonder why this keeps happening so often, decade after decade. And I must be clear, I am first in line to praise Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s powerful performances in Todd Haynes’s Carol, and I do think films like Philadelphia, Milk, Call Me by Your Name, and Brokeback Mountain are worthy of the accolades they receive for their writing, directing, and acting. But I do have to wonder, would these films feel more truthful, or at least more emotionally rich, if these gay characters were actually played by gay people? It isn’t as if there’s a shortage of highly skilled working gay actors, there are certainly trained LGBTQ+ performers out there who struggle to navigate an unequal system.
In a 2020 GLAAD study, of the 118 films counted from major film studios in 2019, 22 (18.6%) contained characters identified as LGBTQ, showing a slight improvement of two films from the previous year’s 20 films (18.2%). GLAAD also reported that the racial diversity of LGBTQ characters decreased to only 34% of LGBTQ characters being people of color. Of these few characters that are identified as LGBTQ, most were portrayed by otherwise successful heterosexual actors (such as in Rocketman, Booksmart, and Velvet Buzzsaw). What if an unknown gay actor played Elio in the high-profile Call Me by Your Name and received an Oscar nomination for his breakout performance, instead of chiseled Tumblr-boy dreamboat Timothée Chalamet? In the massively successful Rocketman, instead of hunky Taron Egerton playing the most muscular version of Elton John ever, what if a gay actor who fits Elton John’s description a little better portrayed the gay icon? Would Ryan Murphy’s The Prom not benefit from replacing James Corden’s arm-flailing, gay-lisped performance with someone like Tituss Burgess?
When a straight actor plays a gay character, it is devoid of any potential authenticity — it is a projection. Some actors will draw from stereotypes and “play gay”… whatever that means to them. Many people would argue that “they are just acting”, and “that is their job, as actors, to replicate truth”, but these arguments don’t change the fact that hardly ever do LGBTQ+ actors get the opportunity to play these types of roles in the first place. There are certainly gay, lesbian, and bisexual actors who have been successful portraying heterosexual characters, but it is not the same issue the other way around because of how many heterosexual and cisgender roles are available in comparison.
Most major film studio executives will not include LGBTQ+ characters in their films out of fear of backlash with international box office success. They see inclusivity as too big of a risk to take when releasing their films to anti-LGBTQ countries. As a result, audiences receive representation in the form of that two-second-long gay Le Fou moment from 2017’s Beauty and the Beast, or that one-scene-long gay role in Avengers: Endgame played by one of the film’s straight directors. Queer people are minimized to these blink-and-you-miss-it characters. Ramin Setoodeh and Elizabeth Wagmeister of Variety said it best;
