Newsweek is an apologist for the closet; Kristin Chenoweth issues a stern STFU.
Ugh. Memo to Newsweek: gay and lesbian actors in straight roles "works" fine. It's no more of a technical issue than a monogamous actor playing a prostitute, or someone who's never sat for the bar playing a lawyer. It's called acting.
If you can't get past the actor's known sexuality to find him or her believable in a straight role -- and that is the issue here, given that the essayist is talking about actors known to be gay, whether out or outed -- either the problem is with you, or he or she is not a very good actor. If you watch Rock Hudson and snicker about seeing him in a bubble bath instead of appreciating that "straight" was a role he felt he had to play his entire working life, not just on screen, then you're part of the problem. If knowing Jonathan Groff is gay makes his Glee performance feel "off" ... well, again, that's on you, because I didn't know he was gay until you told me I should have found his sexuality so obvious as to be "distracting". Was Matthew Morrison or Cory Monteith "writhing to" Like a Virgin equally testament to their sexuality? Or did you only think it seemed gay when the openly gay man did it? Guess what: you might be part of the problem.
And if the author thinks the problem only goes one way -- "It's OK for straight actors to play gay ... it's rare for someone to pull off the trick in reverse" -- then he hasn't been paying attention. Both Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal faced massive speculation regarding their sexuality after they were cast in Brokeback Mountain, and Gyllenhaal continues to. The supposed "problem" with gay and lesbian actors in straight roles is the conception, illustrated amply by the Newsweek piece claiming to bemoan it, that homosexuality pervades every aspect of a person so thoroughly that he or she cannot realistically play straight. The source of wild speculation or wild adulation when straight actors are convincing in gay roles is a corrolary to this -- that somehow it's either extra-magical or suspicious when a straight actor convinces us that he or she is attracted to someone of the same sex. And yeah, that's kind of the author's point. So why is he combing through the performances of gay and lesbian actors for evidence of their supposedly essential gay-ness in order to make it?
Showing posts with label old Hollywood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label old Hollywood. Show all posts
02 December 2008
Tag, I'm It!
I've been tagged! Thanks, Lisa!
The rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself.
Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
Here are six random things about me, in the order in which they occurred to me:
1. I adore really, really bad versions of Christmas carols. I blame a cassette tape my parents owned (or, indeed, probably still own), which we listened to endlessly on van trips to Steamboat Springs during the ski/Christmas season. It featured an instrumental version of, I think, "Oh Holy Night" apparently recorded by the Tinny Wavering Strings Ensemble, as well as a musical rendering of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in which each phrase describing Santa Claus was rendered in a different US regional accent. The real show-stopper was the over-enthusiastic, fakey, corn-pone accent on "His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow!" As our mother has a beautiful and authentic Alabama accent, all three of us kids found it unbearably hilarious. This also relates to a van-borne trip as adults to see the city's best Christmas decorations -- frustrated by simultaneously attempting to drive, decipher a whimsically-scaled map printed by the newspaper, and discuss the route over the dulcet tones of the van's 1980s-era FM radio half-tuned to a station playing (terrible) Christmas music, my dad barked, to the rest of the family's hysterical amusement, "Will you turn that shit off? It just adds to the general irritation!"
2. The first concert I went to was Michael Jackson's Thriller tour in Denver. I think I was in fourth grade. The awesomeness began when my dad hopped the verge between the interstate and its frontage road in our van (for some reason, there's a lot about the van in this list so far) in order to get out of the traffic on I-25, and did not end until after first recess at school the next day, when I recounted the set list to my assembled friends. For a brief moment, I was ... kind of popular. Plus, it set off a show-going career that averaged one a week in my mid-twenties.
3. Two of my most prized possessions are black-and-white photos taken by my dad in the neighborhood of Princeton, NJ. I pulled them out of a collection of art pieces in my parents' basement because my it was my dad who first got me interested in photography, and we both went to Princeton. When I turned them over to put them into frames, I read the notes on date, exposure, and processing he had jotted on the back -- and found he had printed both on my birthdate, but three years before I was born! Spooky.
4. Every time I start a new knitting project, I think of my grandmother, who taught me how to cast on and do the basic stitches. During her final hospitalization, when she was drifting in and out of awareness, my mom showed her a pair of socks I'd made; a few days later, she reported to my aunt with perfect clarity, "Amy made socks on number one needles!" I didn't realize until then how much it meant to her that I had picked up her hobby.
5. My pet peeve surpassing all others is whistling. You will never see me fly into a seething rage faster than if someone is whistling in my vicinity. I have no idea why, but I can tell you that even typing about people whistling is putting me on edge.
6. I am kind of obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. Because of her looks, and the drugs, and the death, and the marriages, and the rumored affairs, and the media's (and public's) desire to fit her into a preconceived slot (dumb sexy blonde No. 357), a lot of people don't know how smart and talented she really was. For example: she wrote to her stepson with Arthur Miller about meeting Robert Kennedy for the first time, and said she asked him what his department was going to do for civil rights.
Tag, you're it (there are only three, because I don't know all that many blogs): Cari at Implosion Explosion, Stephanie at Dogs in the Moonlight (who probably won't respond, as she is in Madagascar), Maughta at Judge a Book by its Cover, and Stephanie at Natural/Artificial.
The rules:
Link to the person who tagged you.
Post the rules on your blog.
Write six random things about yourself.
Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
Let the tagger know when your entry is up.
Here are six random things about me, in the order in which they occurred to me:
1. I adore really, really bad versions of Christmas carols. I blame a cassette tape my parents owned (or, indeed, probably still own), which we listened to endlessly on van trips to Steamboat Springs during the ski/Christmas season. It featured an instrumental version of, I think, "Oh Holy Night" apparently recorded by the Tinny Wavering Strings Ensemble, as well as a musical rendering of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" in which each phrase describing Santa Claus was rendered in a different US regional accent. The real show-stopper was the over-enthusiastic, fakey, corn-pone accent on "His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow!" As our mother has a beautiful and authentic Alabama accent, all three of us kids found it unbearably hilarious. This also relates to a van-borne trip as adults to see the city's best Christmas decorations -- frustrated by simultaneously attempting to drive, decipher a whimsically-scaled map printed by the newspaper, and discuss the route over the dulcet tones of the van's 1980s-era FM radio half-tuned to a station playing (terrible) Christmas music, my dad barked, to the rest of the family's hysterical amusement, "Will you turn that shit off? It just adds to the general irritation!"
2. The first concert I went to was Michael Jackson's Thriller tour in Denver. I think I was in fourth grade. The awesomeness began when my dad hopped the verge between the interstate and its frontage road in our van (for some reason, there's a lot about the van in this list so far) in order to get out of the traffic on I-25, and did not end until after first recess at school the next day, when I recounted the set list to my assembled friends. For a brief moment, I was ... kind of popular. Plus, it set off a show-going career that averaged one a week in my mid-twenties.
3. Two of my most prized possessions are black-and-white photos taken by my dad in the neighborhood of Princeton, NJ. I pulled them out of a collection of art pieces in my parents' basement because my it was my dad who first got me interested in photography, and we both went to Princeton. When I turned them over to put them into frames, I read the notes on date, exposure, and processing he had jotted on the back -- and found he had printed both on my birthdate, but three years before I was born! Spooky.
4. Every time I start a new knitting project, I think of my grandmother, who taught me how to cast on and do the basic stitches. During her final hospitalization, when she was drifting in and out of awareness, my mom showed her a pair of socks I'd made; a few days later, she reported to my aunt with perfect clarity, "Amy made socks on number one needles!" I didn't realize until then how much it meant to her that I had picked up her hobby.
5. My pet peeve surpassing all others is whistling. You will never see me fly into a seething rage faster than if someone is whistling in my vicinity. I have no idea why, but I can tell you that even typing about people whistling is putting me on edge.
6. I am kind of obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. Because of her looks, and the drugs, and the death, and the marriages, and the rumored affairs, and the media's (and public's) desire to fit her into a preconceived slot (dumb sexy blonde No. 357), a lot of people don't know how smart and talented she really was. For example: she wrote to her stepson with Arthur Miller about meeting Robert Kennedy for the first time, and said she asked him what his department was going to do for civil rights.
Tag, you're it (there are only three, because I don't know all that many blogs): Cari at Implosion Explosion, Stephanie at Dogs in the Moonlight (who probably won't respond, as she is in Madagascar), Maughta at Judge a Book by its Cover, and Stephanie at Natural/Artificial.
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