Rupert Everett's advice to Gay Actors: "Stay In The Closet"

Rupert Everett has been openly gay since he came out 20 years ago, but he doesn't recommend that route for other actors.

"It's not that advisable to be honest. It's not very easy," he told UK's Guardian. "And, honestly, I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out."

At 50, the 'My Best Friend's Wedding' star says that homophobia in Hollywood has kept him from becoming a leading man. He says that heterosexuals are cast as gays (pointing to 'Brokeback Mountain' and 'Transamerica') but gay men are denied the plum straight roles and often reduced to drag.

"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," he said. "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."

Everett does admit that his openness about his sexuality has afforded him personal happiness if not professional success. He's glad he's not one of the "plenty" of gay Hollywood stars still stuck in the closet.

"I think, all in all, I'm probably much happier than they are," he said. "I may not be as rich or successful, but at least I'm vaguely free to be myself."

The outspoken actor has never been one to shy away from controversy. He previously said that President Obama has "gone black" and talked about Graydon Carter's "monster cock."

You can read the whole Guardian interview here.

The De-Gaying of “A Single Man”

While the heterosexualized poster for Tom Ford’s not-so-heterosexual “A Single Man” caused a wee stir last week, it seems the recently released trailer has just re-enforced those complaints.

A comparative study of the trailer that Tom Ford’s production company released as the film premiered in Venice and Toronto and the trailer The Weinstein Company just put out tells quite the tale. The new trailer uses the same music and mostly the same shots, except it adds in a bunch of quotes that not-so-subtly emphasize the film’s Oscar buzz, leaving out a few choice shots - pretty much all of which are suggestive of the film’s gay content.

The new trailer essentially is altered to suggest the core of the film is the relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore’s characters, even removing from the end of the trailer the names of both Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult (who play Firth’s love interests). Moreover, in the first trailer, we see Firth’s character kiss both Goode and Moore, in the second we just get Moore. There’s also a sequence of shots in the first trailer which crosscuts Firth, who plays a professor in the film, staring into the eyes of both a female student and a male student. In the second, as you might guess, we only get the female (in a telling twist, instead of cutting to the male eyes, the trailer cuts to a quote from Entertainment Weekly saying “[Firth’s] performance is bound to win attention in this year’s Oscar race”).

Gone completely in the new trailer are a few shots of Firth running into the smoking (literally and figuratively) male prostitute outside a liquor store (one of the film’s more homoerotic sequences), as well as a few shots of him and Hoult running romantically and shirtlessly into the ocean together.

In with the Oscar buzz, out with the gayness. It seems The Weinstein Company doesn’t want to take any chances with all those homophobic Academy members. Call it the “Brokeback Mountain” approach (and remember how well that worked out).

For Your Consideration: Oscar’s Gay Tendencies

A lot has gone down for the gays since “Brokeback Mountain”‘s cries-of-homophobia inducing loss for Oscar’s biggest prize four years ago, both in Hollywood and in America as a whole.  And with another award season upon us, we’re again faced with another big gay contender.  Following last year’s eight-time nominated “Milk,” Tom Ford’s “A Single Man” is set to begin its Weinstein Company-orchestrated push for gold any day now. Even if, like “Brokeback,” the phrase “universal story of love and loss” gets thrown around endlessly in “Single Man”‘s regard (and it will), it remains that the film depicts gay love and gay loss, and last time I checked - a good chunk of America sees a difference. And while “A Single Man” is likely to be nowhere near the Oscar juggernaut “Brokeback” or even “Milk” was, the way Hollywood and the Academy react to it might give us a good perception on how far we’ve come.

While at this point it’s a challenge to really make predictions for this year’s awards with any sort of certainly, Colin Firth seems like “A Single Man”‘s best bet at major contention. His startling turn as a suicidal gay man mourning the loss of his long-term lover seemed to win over even the film’s many detractors when it descended on Venice and Toronto last month. And when I consider Firth’s potential win, there’s one thing that really stands out to me when picturing it: After Sean Penn’s last year for “Milk,” the Academy would be handing back-to-back best actor statuettes to depictions of gay men.

It wouldn’t really be that shocking.  It’s actually been a intensely gay decade for the Oscars in terms of acting awards. If Firth were to win, he’d join Penn, Phillip Seymour Hoffman (“Capote,” 2005), Charlize Theron (“Monster, 2003), and, though less explicitly, Nicole Kidman (“The Hours,” 2002) as the fifth lead acting award given to the depicition of a gay person this decade. That’s a quarter of the overall awards, a much higher percentage than there are actual gay people.  And while that’s definitely progressive in a certain sense, I’m weary of championing an organization for simply giving Oscars to a bunch of heterosexuals for playing gay characters. Especially when that same organization refused its biggest prize to “Brokeback Mountain” in an act of arguable homophobia and definite cinematic injustice.

However, I do have to hand it to the Oscars in its post-“Brokeback” years. Not for honoring Sean Penn as Harvey Milk, but for actually honoring openly gay people.  While they have yet to award an even semi-openly gay actor (and no, Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey don’t retroactively count), they have had a gay host (I speak of Ellen deGeneres, in case you thought I was being cheeky with regard to last year’s host), a gay screenwriting winner (“Milk”‘s Dustin Lance Black), and last year, two of its five director nominees were, yep, gay (and one was even making a film about gays).  What’s more, “Hairspray” director Adam Shankman is coming in to co-produce the ceremony this year, following Bill Condon as the second gay Oscar maestro in a row.  Oscar was always a gay icon, it just seems like all of a sudden he’s in on the joke.

This year could also find as many as three best pictures helmed by gay men. In addition to “A Single Man,” there’s Rob Marshall’s “Nine,” and Lee Daniels’ “Precious: Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” the latter of which also features a major gay character.  What I think is really interesting here - and what speaks volumes to social systems in behind-the-scenes Hollywood - is Lee Daniels’s prospective nomination.  If he gets nominated for best director, it would be much more monumental because he is African-American than it would be because he is openly gay.  And this opens up a completely different can of socially injust worms than this article is prepared to properly contexualize.

But in brief…  The 2000s have seen scores of African-Americans take home acting Oscars.  Six wins and seventeen nominations - with a good likelihood of additions coming this year.  In terms of wins, this is more than was received in total prior to this decade. Quite disturbingly, “Precious” would be the first best picture nominee ever directed by an African-American, and Daniels only the second black best director nominee. Gays, on the other hand, have received nearly a dozen best director nominations.  But let’s keep in mind the fact that all of them have been white men. In fact, there have been more nominations for gay men for best director than all non-male and non-white people combined.

t’s difficult to really let any trend at the Oscars really speak as a representation of the Oscars themselves. Because in a way, the Oscars just represent the American film industry.  It’s a complex set of politics to simplify in a sentence, but I think it’s reasonable to suggest that in the Hollywood power hierachy, as long as you’re a white male (and let’s face it, straight-acting), being gay is not as much of a disadvantage as say, being female or black.

But let’s bring it back to “A Single Man.”  While perhaps the least likely of the three gay-helmed films to get a picture nod, the film offers the most in terms of any sort of real social connotation for acceptance of gays in the mainstream.  Like “Milk” before it, “A Single Man” would be a film with gay content directed by an actual homosexual. While films with gay content and films directed by gays have, as noted, made it to Oscar’s shortlist before - the list of films in which those two collide has been much more limited. Because while the Oscars, and Hollywood, seem more than willing to let gay, white men into their director’s club, it’s a whole other story if they are directing films about actual gays.  And as nice as it is when they do, I’d just like to see the day when “A Single Latina Lesbian” makes the shortlist. - Peter Knegt

RARE in more ways than one

Its rare that we post something up here that's not totally Film/Media related, but this is a cultural Blog after all, and this topic has some relation to "Our Last Days As Children", but... well... just see for yourself. Hell Hath Frozen Over.

Dick Cheney rarely takes a position that places him at a more progressive tilt than President Obama. But on Monday, the former vice president did just that, saying that he supports gay marriage as long as it is deemed legal by state and not federal government.

Speaking at the National Press Club for the Gerald R. Ford Foundation journalism awards, Cheney was asked about recent rulings and legislative action in Iowa and elsewhere that allowed for gay couples to legally wed.

"I think that freedom means freedom for everyone," replied the former V.P. "As many of you know, one of my daughters is gay and it is something we have lived with for a long time in our family. I think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish. Any kind of arrangement they wish. The question of whether or not there ought to be a federal statute to protect this, I don't support. I do believe that the historically the way marriage has been regulated is at the state level. It has always been a state issue and I think that is the way it ought to be handled, on a state-by-state basis. ... But I don't have any problem with that. People ought to get a shot at that."

Cheney has made similar arguments in support of gay marriage in the past, including during the run-up to the 2004 election. But his current comments come at a moment when the Republican Party and conservative movement is increasingly split on the issue. Bush recount lawyer Ted Olsen and John McCain campaign manager Steve Schmidt have both argued in favor of gay marriage. The religious right, as expected, remains opposed.

Caught up in the debate is the Obama administration. The president has said he supports civil unions for gay couples but that he remains committed to marriage being between and man and woman. His press department has been completely quiet about the recent California Supreme Court case upholding a ban on gay marriage in the state -- something that, it seems, Cheney would object to in spirit if not law.