When I was thirteen, my parents took me to see My Best Friend's Wedding.
In retrospect, it really wasn't the type of movie you should take a twelve-year-old too, but even at that young age, I worshipped at the altar of Julia Roberts, and so I asked if I could see it, and because it was PG-13 (RIP) and I was thirteen--off we went.
Many people have made the argument that My Best Friend's Wedding has not aged well, and while they're wrong, that's not the hill I'm here to die on today. I'm here to talk about Rupert Everett.
In the history of cinematic scene-stealers, there should be an entire chapter devoted to Rupert Everett as George, a character who has barely any reason to exist and walks away with the entire film.
More than that, he was playing a gay character, and, as best I can recall, he had a large role in me realizing that I was gay. I'm sure he wasn't the first gay person I'd seen in a movie or in real life, but something about his confidence, his swagger, his unapologetic queer badass-ery flipped a switch in me.
Actually, that's not true.
Watching him in the film, I thought--Wow, there's something about that guy. I found him attractive. I enjoyed his performance. I'm not sure it went beyond that.
But then I came home and read in one of the hundred entertainment magazines I subscribed to that he was openly gay himself.
That was when the switch flipped.
Up until that moment, the idea of being gay was more conceptual than anything. I knew gay people existed, but it was hard to find examples of them playing somebody like George, and it was nearly impossible to find one who was comfortable enough to admit that both they and the character they were playing shared the same sexuality.
Something about it made the idea of being gay less of an idea and more of a discovery.
Cut to a few months later when I, still not quite sure what to make of my Rupert Everett revelation, went to see As Good As It Gets. It was another movie a thirteen-year-old shouldn't necessarily be watching, but these days, comparatively, it's about as offensive as a Disney cartoon.
In the movie, there's a character named Simon, played by Greg Kinnear, who is, in many ways, the opposite of George. He's vulnerable, soft-spoken, and sort of Bohemian despite living in a gorgeous apartment in New York that I'm not sure he could afford (#90sTrend), and while I definitely found myself attracted to George, I fell madly in love with Simon.
Much of that is thanks to the tenderness and compassion Greg Kinnear brought to the role. So if you think this is going to lead to Kinnear bashing, fear not.
At this point, I had started to think that maybe more gay characters in movies were being played by gay men. I assumed that someone who could make me fall in love with a gay character must be gay themselves. I was wrong.
Reader, you might think I'm being hyperbolic, but little, teenage, still-closeted Kevin was heartbroken. There was something about finding out that this character who had made such an impact on me was, in some ways, more fictional than he had seemed when I was watching him in the theater, that gutted me.
You might try to meet me with logic here, and I would just like to once again remind you that I was essentially a baby in regards to attraction and sexuality. Nothing made sense, nor should it. I had no access to the kinds of resources and information that are available today, and that's not "In my day" kind of statement, it's just to say that I had no assistance in processing how I was feeling, which you can probably assume since I was navigating my awakening via potential Oscar nominees.
I just knew there was something about Kinnear playing that character that felt...cruel.
It felt as though someone was telling me that there really wasn't any version of Simon out there. That it was a fabrication in the vein of dragons and elves; outside the realm of possibility.
Many times over the years, I have spoken with straight friends about why casting heterosexual actors in LGBTQ roles is a problem. They often meet me with--
"But you can't ask someone if they're gay in an audition."
Recently, I've started meeting them with a trick another friend taught me.
"Ask the people auditioning for you why playing a role would matter to them."
Very few gay people when asked why playing a gay character would matter to them will refrain from letting you know they're gay.
But yes, I suppose a few could want to keep that private, but in many cases, especially on film, no effort is made when it comes to casting gay actors, and we have a lot more openly gay artists now than we did when I was thirteen. Yet we're still seeing people like Colin Firth and Ewan McGregor and Stanley Tucci and Paul Bettany playing gay roles and receiving acclaim for it.
I'm grateful that Greg Kinnear played Simon now, because I can't imagine anyone else in that role. That doesn't mean I can forget how much it would have meant to the younger version of myself if they had found an openly gay actor to play the role instead. It would have affirmed something for me.
As we've been having conversations over the past year about why representation matters, we often leave gay people out of that conversation.
The fact that people comfortable telling me that straight actors should be able to play gay roles, and saying things like "So are you arguing that gay people shouldn't be able to play straight roles?" shows you that, in many ways, sexuality is still something even very liberal people think they can have an opinion about even if they identify as heterosexual.
Is straight-passing possible?
Absolutely.
Have I ever been able to do it?
Nope.
This month, as everyone's posting their Pride statements and pledges, we need to remember that until we make it one year without one straight actor receiving praise for playing a role that an LGBTQ actor could have done just as well, we still have a long way to go.
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