Should Gay Actors Come Out? I’m Inviting Your Discussion…

Actor Rupert Everett Just Made News By Advising Gay Actors Not To Come Out

In case you are unfamiliar with Everett, he became a well-known actor at age 25, for two films: Another Country and Dance With A Stranger. (Click for acting resume.) Some time later, he had a second go-round in the spotlight by playing a lead in a movie with Madonna, about a gay man who is a sperm donor so that she, his best friend, can have a baby. For a while, he was also Madonna’s best friend in real life, sharing the publicity spotlight with her, as is part of the real-life-best-friend option, when someone is a celeb best-friend. Around the same time, he played a very strong supporting role, in a movie with Julia Roberts. In this film, he played, guess who? A gay best friend. (And was he also the ‘beard’?)

Unlike the acting roles of the earlier decade of his career, in these movies with Madonna and Julia Roberts, Cameron Diaz; Everett acted in roles where the character was more than obviously gay. The roles he played were characterized by being gay, in the script, as part of the story. In both of these movies, the gay element of each of these characters, was a positive thing. Without the obvious sexual typing, the stories would have been different. The films would’ve been different.

Rupert Everett was a well-known actor when he came out, publicly.

It was around the same time that he made those films.

For a while there, it seemed that the world had changed. That all the gays who had always been a large percentage of those who worked in the arts, could finally stop having to carry on a charade of straightness, to the rest of the world, in the public view.

From my vantage point, these movies also carried a cultural message. And it was a big statement. It said to all gay people, everywhere, you are part of the culture now. You can be out, outside too. Instead of just indoors, behind closed doors. You can be gay outside of your homes, and outside of The Industry. The message was clear, to gays and to straights, everywhere. You’re out; you are now accepted, freely.

In this phase 3, of Rupert Everett’s acting career; he did something confounding and confusing.

He took it back.

He stated that he wished he’d stayed in, instead of coming out.

I am guessing that, by doing so, he seriously disappointed a whole world of gay people.

I am not gay; I reveal that only to show that I’m not able to speak ‘first person’. Yes, this is my blog, but about this, I’m not claiming authority.

I don’t feel that my commenting on what Rupert Everett did would be completely qualified. I’d like to get a discussion going, and maybe then I will share some of my own opinions. Everyone has their own opinion on declaring sexuality, altogether. I have some too. But first, I’d like this to be a discussion. I also think that this is a topic which has not been publicly broached, and for heaven’s sake, let’s start.

There are so many gays in acting. Always were. That’s the facts.

So I am putting the question of whether or not gay actors should come out, publicly, to the floor…To you.

I invite anyone and everyone to leave a comment (and you don’t need to leave your real name, if you that matters to you). To comment, click on the title of this piece, it’s a yellow-green color. That should open up a new page with the same article, but, at the bottom of that new page, will be a space for you to type in your opinion, or feelings, or even start a debate. Simple as that.

Today, I am excerpting from The Guardian, a British newspaper, where Rupert Everett gave made the radical retraction, during an interview about acting.

That’s followed by another post on this topic by a guest: Bernardo Villela wrote a response to what Everett said, for Hollywood Actor Prep.

“[Boarding school] certainly had an effect on how I relate to people. I think something short-circuits inside a kid when his parents abandon him to a whole lot of other kids. I think the terror that it brings on is like having acid thrown in your face, only it’s in your internal system. I think becoming an actor was lucky for me, because it forces you to try and excavate those feelings. But in another sense it’s bad because actors tend to save up most of their real feeling for the camera and are unable to use it in real life. I’ve muddled through anyway. But then I’ve never been very functional. I’m quite dysfunctional.”

“Hmm,” he says and appears to think about it for a moment before shrugging. What’s undeniable is that so much of his life has been informed by his sexuality, not just the roles that he has and hasn’t won, but his whole perception of himself – as someone on the margins of society who is forever looking in.

He winces when I mention civil partnerships. “If you want to have a marriage with some bad-tempered cow from Camden Council officiating, then you must have that, and I think it’s nice that you can have it. But I liked being a poof when it was illegal, frankly; it gave me a sense of being outside.”

But it’s not as if he tries particularly hard to be extra diplomatic with me because of it. Almost the reverse. But then what has he got left to lose? He’s lost it so many times before, it’s little wonder that he shrugs in the face of public disapproval, or Hollywood outrage. At one point, after making the film Hearts of Fire, the press was so bad he went to live in France. “I had always been considered a talentless nob, but now there was proof,” he writes.

After years in the wilderness, he thought he’d hit a new low when he was sent the script for My Best Friend’s Wedding and saw that the character they wanted him to play had three lines and was introduced as “George, a middle-aged gay man, sits at a table with a flute of champagne… I thought I had finally arrived at the end of the road.” But the part was rewritten for him and went on to be a huge hit, and he was courted by every major studio in Hollywood in what he calls his “Evita victory tour”. It didn’t last though. Because it never does with Everett. He appeared in The Next Big Thing with Madonna. Only it wasn’t. “I have never read such bad reviews in my life,” he writes. “It blew my new career out of the water and turned my pubic hair white overnight.”

But then, it’s at the moments when he’s down on his luck that he appears to have the most fun. “We now live in a world where the only thing to have is success, but failure is marvellous. It’s fertiliser, it’s like living fertiliser, because you’re forced on yourself. Mind you, having said that, I don’t know if aged 60 I’m going to be able to come up with some fabulous new reinvention.”

He says that he was ambitious when he was young, that he was determined to succeed at all costs – he describes both himself and Paula Yates as “hell-bent” – but it seems to be as much a hunger for life as it is for global domination. Conventional stardom is beyond him. Or at least it is now. “What I really wouldn’t want to do is to spend my time going to awards ceremonies, and going, ‘And the nominations are,’ which is what you have to do if you’re in the big time now.”

It’s not just that Rupert Everett is unusually candid, he’s also unusually articulate, and if he criticises other people it’s only because he criticises himself first. The great mystery, of course, is why he’s not Madonna-famous himself. His alter ego, the actor for whom he’s endlessly mistaken, is Hugh Grant, and if you read his first reviews, or saw his first films, Another Country and Dance With a Stranger, you’d have thought that he’d have gone on to conquer the universe. He was all set to be the new Cary Grant, a latter-day Gregory Peck. Instead he’s spending what should be the glory years of his career gadding around in a skirt and heels. He’s back next month in St Trinian’s 2, The Legend of Fritton’s Gold. He played both the headmistress, Camilla Fritton, and her brother, Carnaby Fritton, in the first and was a star turn as both, although particularly as Camilla, modelled on a mixture of his mother and the real Camilla (Parker Bowles). He’s the best thing in it by about a million miles, his comic timing brilliant, but it’s not likely to be the sort of work that is garlanded with awards and critical praise.

I wonder, after reading his autobiography, if he has some sort of professional death wish. It’s always been at the moment when he’s enjoying his greatest success that he’s suffered his most disastrous setbacks. Does he have some sort of drive to muck things up? I ask it tentatively, but the question enrages him.

“No!” he says. “That’s just not true! People have always said that to me, and I’ve gone, ‘Yes, that’s so true.’ But it’s not actually. The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business. It just doesn’t work and you’re going to hit a brick wall at some point. You’re going to manage to make it roll for a certain amount of time, but at the first sign of failure they’ll cut you right off. And I’m sick of saying, ‘Yes, it’s probably my own fault.’ Because I’ve always tried to make it work and when it stops working somewhere, I try to make it work somewhere else. But the fact of the matter is, and I don’t care who disagrees, it doesn’t work if you’re gay.”

It’s quite an outburst. But then Rupert Everett has committed two apparently unforgivable sins in the eyes of Hollywood: he’s not only gay, he’s openly gay. And it’s not a career path that he’d recommend. “It’s not that advisable to be honest. It’s not very easy. And, honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out.”

Who are the famous gay Hollywood stars? There aren’t any, although he says that there are “probably” plenty still in the closet. But “I think, all in all, I’m probably much happier than they are. I may not be as rich or successful, but at least I’m vaguely free to be myself.”

Is this sour grapes? Everett has made all sorts of career mistakes (deciding to be a pop star being just one), but if you look at the facts, it does seem to be, at the very least, part of the explanation. In the past few years there have been films which featured gay characters – Brokeback Mountain and Transamerica – but they’ve been played by heterosexual men, and while a straight man can play gay, a gay man can’t play straight.

It does seem extraordinary that this is still the case, I say, in 21st century America.

“It’s worse now. A gay man can only do drag.”

Really?

“I’ve been reduced to drag. The next stop is probably The Dick Emery Show for me.”

When he won the part of Prince Charming in Shrek 2, he writes that he was thrilled, as it was “a role I would never get in a live-action movie”. Everett was born with the looks of a leading man – he’s lost the pretty boy quality he had in his youth but he’s still strikingly good-looking – and yet he’s never got to play the leading man.

“Being in Hollywood is like being in the Christian right these days. It’s very, very right wing, no matter how much they claim they’re all Democrats and they’re fighting for Barack Obama. I was in Hollywood a lot in the build-up to the Iraq war and there wasn’t anybody who was against it. It was as if the American people were unable to access anything outside that bubble of cinematic reality, J-Lo’s bum, Ben Affleck, all that. They couldn’t access Iraq, they’re absolutely addicted to this extraordinary version of life, this warped mirror of society that the Hollywood studio system has produced. These huge groups like Viacom produce these extraordinary stories where the good win and the bad lose and the villain smokes a cigarette and young couples don’t have sex and everyone says ‘Gosh!’ at worst. It’s this whole language of political correctness, which I think is the closest thing to evil.”

Whoa! Actors just aren’t supposed to say things like this. Not Hollywood actors. And they’re certainly not supposed to slag off studios by name. They’ve learned to be so bland. Their personal opinions tend to simply be an exercise in brand management. But Everett just shrugs. He refuses to play that game. There’s a nonchalant, don’t-care quality about him that’s hugely appealing. In Red Carpets, he writes about how his agent sent him to Ethiopia to improve his public image. He came across as too selfish, she said; he needed to be photographed doing good. He grumbles about the episode in his autobiography, about the aid workers (“They all drove me mad with their piousness, and they couldn’t stand me”).

I don’t think he can help himself. Or at least doesn’t want to help himself. He’s damning about Hollywood “celebrity” and keeping his mouth shut would, in his terms, I think, be equivalent to toeing the company line, or rehearsing corporate lies.

Everett’s memoir is entirely unlike the usual Hollywood memoir: he tells stories that aren’t always entirely flattering, about himself, about other people, about the way the star system works, which is fabulous for the reader, but perhaps less so for his subjects. Julia Roberts is “beautiful and tinged with madness”. When she gives him a lift on the Sony jet from Chicago, where they’re filming, to New York, he writes, “I witnessed the whole machine grind into action, the grandeur of Hollywood in transporting its livestock from A to B.” Sharon Stone he describes as a goddess, but it’s only when he starts rehearsals that “I realised something that had hitherto escaped me. She was utterly unhinged.”

He was a star at 22, a has-been at 30, a Hollywood ingenue at 40, and here he is again, aged 50, still handsome, still game, gadding around in the new St Trinian’s film in a made-to-measure girdle and a pair of false breasts.

But then what hasn’t Everett done? There’s a touch of the Forrest Gump to the story of his life, as contained within his funny, candid, and intermittently rude memoir, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins. He was part of a bohemian demi-monde in London before he was famous, through whom he met David Bowie, Bianca Jagger and Andy Warhol. His first play, Another Country, was a smash hit, which was made into a film which was an even bigger hit, and that led to Orson Welles hand-picking him to be his protege (inconveniently dropping dead before fulfilling his promise), which took him to Hollywood, where he managed to meet his hero, Christopher Isherwood, within about five minutes, and then almost everyone else: Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Collins, Lauren Bacall, Gregory Peck. He was still only 25.

What’s more, he has a special knack of always being where the action is: in Moscow with the tanks and Yeltsin during the 1991 coup, strolling through downtown Manhattan on 11 September, nightclubbing in Miami with Gianni Versace before he was shot, sleeping with Béatrice Dalle when she was the most desirable woman in France, having an affair with Paula Yates when she was one half of the most famous couple in Britain. Not forgetting his most publicly defining role: gay best friend to Madonna.

Or at least he was. Until she read his book.

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