The Limitation of Queerness in Hollywood

Scrolling through Twitter, I was targeted by two Love, Victor ads. It’s Pride Month. I wasn’t insulted by the painfully obvious rainbow-marketing by yet another corporate entity. I love rainbow things and if the Internet wants to serve them to me on a silver platter, the only person who’s going to be upset is my partner as they watch my half of rent turn from green to shades of ROY G. BIV. What made me roll my eyes was the casting.

When Love, Simon was released in 2018, the world rejoiced and simultaneously groaned. Yay for the gays, but why is a straight kid playing the main character? Hulu didn’t bat an eyelash during its casting of the spinoff show Love, Victor, with another straight actor playing a queer role.

As a naturally analytical person, I started thinking about straight, cis-gender actors playing queer or transgender characters. I’ve read many pieces that pose the question: “Should queer parts be reserved for queer actors?” But I feel that question is too broad. Too complicated. Acting is called acting for a reason. You step into another person’s perspective and sell it. But something about pretending to have a lived experience so deeply rooted in a person’s identity doesn’t seem realistic to me.

So instead, I ask you, would reserving queer parts for queer actors break the box that queer actors are typecast in?

In an interview for Pink News, It’s a Sin actor Nathaniel Curtis elaborated on the inequality of roles given to openly queer (and I will add: trans) actors versus their straight counterparts. “Openly queer actors are not seen as equal to straight actors. They are not given the same opportunities. They are not given the same roles. They are not given the same positive publicity.” Reserving more queer roles for queer actors would broaden the Hollywood stereotypes of LGBTQIA+ folks. It would open doors to out queer actors who have been typecast and pigeonholed because of their queerness. That is the future in film we should be moving toward. Queer roles should be as diverse as the people who live out and proud lives. Reserving roles for queer people would allow queer actors more upward mobility in their careers.

Let’s break this down with an example from the beloved yet controversial show from the early 2010s: Glee. Actor Chris Colfer is an openly gay man who played an openly gay character. His straight counterpart, and love interest, was played by Darren Criss. Colfer and Criss have both gone on to play gay characters. They have gone on to play straight characters. I mean, technically they have. The only straight role Colfer has played was a character who was pretending to be gay his whole life to appease his mother. (There are a lot of problematic things we don’t have time to unpack here).

Colfer is known as being a gay actor. Criss is known as a straight actor who can play gay. Criss even had to go so far as to publicly announce he would no longer play gay men because he didn’t want to be “another straight boy taking a gay man’s role.” While, conversely, Colfer shared the following about how being an out gay man has affected his acting career with Hollywood Outbreak: “People try to pigeonhole you. People tried typecasting me before they even saw me in anything else. I never understood that – why don’t you wait until my next project before you start telling what my career is going to look like for the next ten years.”

So here we have two actors who’s rise to fame happened in the same show. The straight man had to make a point to turn down scripts with queer characters because Hollywood couldn’t give him enough. And the gay man has only played straight once, and even in that role he was technically a gay male stereotype.

Not all actors believe that queer roles should be reserved for queer actors. The 2020 holiday rom-com Happiest Season centered a lesbian love story between two characters played by Kristen Stewart and Mackenzie Davis. Much like the dynamic between Colfer and Criss, Stewart is a lesbian woman and Davis is a straight woman. In an interview for Variety Stewart was asked what she thought about the importance of queer actors playing queer characters. “I would never want to tell a story that really should be told by somebody who’s lived that experience. Having said that, it’s a slippery slope conversation because that means I could never play another straight character if I’m going to hold everyone to the letter of this particular law.”

As stated earlier, reserving queer roles for queer actors is too limiting of a question. Stewart makes a good point. She wouldn’t want to be limited to only queer roles. I agree! Hollywood actors are paid the big bucks because they are able to transport us into a world of their creation. But when casting directors decide to shrink the world in which an actor can create that is where the issues arise.

We cannot keep the conversation about queer actors limited to who is and who isn’t allowed to play them. We have to understand why it is important. In 2019, there were only 50 total LBGTQIA+ characters in all mainstream releases, according to the 2020 GLAAD Studio Responsibility Index. Of those mainstream releases, there were zero transgender or non-binary characters. Out of the 382.2 million people who live in the United States, there must be more than 50 queer actors. There must more than zero transgender and gender non-conforming actors. An entire community of talent is limited by the same queerness that Hollywood creatives are profiting from. Queerness isn’t limiting. It is diverse, giving, rich and nuanced. Queerness in film shouldn’t be limited to queer actors, but the same typecasting limitations need to be lifted from queer actors in order for real change to occur.