In his latest film, Alexander Skarsgard continues the unfortunate tradition of Hollywood’s Gay Minstrel Show – this time substituting black leather for black face.
Wag The Fag
In early 1994, I sat in a movie theater watching the film Philadelphia. I knew it was a good movie, and an important one too, but something about it just didn’t feel right to me. I had recently finished college and come out myself, and watching a known straight actor like Tom Hanks play not only a gay man but one who was dying of AIDS, just gave me a little nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach.
My discomfort continued a few weeks later as I watched Hanks’ acceptance speech at that year’s Academy Awards ceremony. First came a joke comparing his onscreen gay lover (the equally straight Antonio Banderas) to his own ‘lover’ (Rita Wilson, who was already his wife of several years by then, but hey calling them both his lovers made for a better joke, right?). That nauseous feeling started stirring. Then came his tribute to a former teacher and classmate whom he described as two “gay Americans” who were very important in his life, although he admitted to speaking to them for the first time in years just nights before the ceremony (likely to get their approvals before name-checking them as gay on national television). That queasy feeling kept getting stronger, but the worst was still to come. Hanks finished his speech with some melodramatic rambling about a heaven overcrowded by AIDS angels; complete with overwrought references to specific symptoms of the disease (fevers, skin lesions, impaired vision) that were now being healed by God. While I do believe Hanks was being painfully sincere, I couldn’t help but find it all sincerely painful; made even more so by the camera’s constant cuts to an adoring audience of other straight Hollywood elites hanging worshipfully on his every word.
By then, Hollywood was already starting to get criticized for films about other minority populations told through the eyes of a “white savior,” whether in plot perspective or casting choices or both. Was Tom Hanks trying to be our “straight savior”? Was I wrong not to want his salvation? I did understand intellectually that Philadelphia was an important film that likely would not have been made at all – certainly not by a major Hollywood studio and director – without a star like Hanks attached. And I also intellectually understood that even the histrionics of his speech brought visibility to the gay community and awareness about AIDS, both of which were very much needed at that time. So I swallowed all that accumulated stomach acid, kept my discomfort to myself, and moved on.
Over the years, as more examples of gay-for-pay Hollywood continued littering the screen and consuming the spotlight, that kept getting harder to do. Flash forward to last Sunday. I’m sitting in another movie theater, watching Alexander Skarsgard in black leather fetish gear giving flashes of his private parts while simulating gay sex with a younger man in an alleyway.
Pillion is certainly not as good, or important, a film as Philadelphia. Its tone is confused at best, vacillating uneasily between titillating sex comedy and sentimental melodrama. And yet these two films, and many others, are similar in a profound way. Whether a generational crisis like AIDS, an inspirational figure like Harvey Milk, or a subculture like the LGBTQ leather community, there is no part of our story too personal to be coopted by straight Hollywood. The very things that are most unique to our collective gay experience – our tragedies, our heroes, our intimacies – all get taken from us and fed back to us onscreen by straight men wearing our sexuality like drag.
Even worse is when straight actors play more effeminate gay men. Watching straight actors put a lisp in their speech and a swoosh in their walk (Michael Douglas playing Liberace and Bradley Cooper playing Leonard Bernstein come to mind) is as offensive to me as a gay man as Old Hollywood’s fondness for white actors artificially darkening their complexions, or white actresses donning exaggerated makeup to mimic a slanted eye, must have been to black and Asian audiences. And I don’t buy the comparison that mimicking a lisp is just like an actor portraying an accent, because even the latter should come with some boundaries. When Meryl Streep pulls out one of her many accents to play Australian or European characters of Caucasian descent, that’s great. When she does it to play a Chilean woman (see, or maybe don’t see, The House of the Spirits)? It’s not the same thing. And I would hope the 2026 Streep would know better than her 1993 self.
But when it comes to playing gay? Hollywood knows I am in the minority of my minority here. Pandering can only happen when there is an audience to pander to, and most gay men are there for the taking. Just as women get pressured into impossible standards of beauty and femininity, we are programmed all our lives that the masculine, straight man is the ultimate model of maleness; and we finally believe it. So we come up with all sorts of reasons to justify straight actors playing gay, when the fact is that – whether as a function of fantasy or jealousy – most gay men just like it better that way. Everyone feels pressure to fit in sometimes. But as members of a minority, the pressure to fit into the majority is so omnipresent that we strip ourselves of what is most uniquely us in an effort to assimilate. We spend so much of our lives trying to see the world through eyes that are anyone’s but our own.
Hollywood taps into that damaged part of our collective psyche and exploits it. When Brendan Frazier gets hired to put on a lisp and a fat suit to play an obese gay man in The Whale, Hollywood is not only saying there are no gay actors good enough for the role but no fat ones either. And, like Pillion, that was a small indie film that would’ve achieved the same de minimis box office results with or without a celebrity heterosexual in the lead. But again, Hollywood knows its gay audience and that casting decision sadly tracks. If you want proof, just fire up some gay hookup apps and count the profiles that include some variation of “no fats or femmes please.” Hollywood may not use the same language, but they sure deliver the same message. And, like the real gay S&M biker slaves hired to fill out the background cast of Pillion, we obediently eat it up; happily ceding a place at the table just to stay in the room.
This all comes with a very dark undercurrent of gay-baiting, especially when sexually charged gay screen roles are contrasted with the very privileged and very heterosexual lives led by the actors playing them. That is not about “outing” anyone. You don’t have to come out when you’re already the in-crowd, a point that is even more obvious for the straight Hollywood in-crowd because of how publicly they navigate their straight lives in a straight world. They’ll play gay men in a movie but then march down the red carpet of its premiere with a beautiful wife or girlfriend dutifully in tow. I often imagine thought bubbles over the heads of actors like Skarsgard and Cooper: See how talented I am? I am a hot straight alpha with a supermodel on my arm everywhere I go, but I can still play a convincing fag.
Not that thought bubbles are always required. Skarsgard is a particularly notorious gay-baiter; frequently playing homoerotic onscreen roles and then dropping deliberate inuendoes into the offscreen interviews he gives to promote them. After making some provocative statements to Variety a few months ago, where he mentioned past relationships with both genders, it was widely and understandably assumed that he had used the interview to come out as bisexual. That viral assumption apparently crossed his own line in the sand, and he was compelled to give a new interview in Vogue asserting that was not the case and that he couldn’t even remember what his earlier comments had been intended to mean. The thought bubble there? Hey, I’ll play gay for you boys, but please don’t forget I’m still the straight man you want and can’t have.
I imagine it must be at least as problematic for gay women, with even fewer roles of substance on offer to them that still often get scooped up by heterosexual actresses. I know Jodie Foster can’t play everything – she at least needs someone else to play her own love interests, right? But watching Annette Bening butch herself up to play lesbians when she spends her real life as the glamorous trophy wife of Hollywood’s most notorious womanizer? I won’t apologize for finding that gross.
A popular contrarian view is the assertion that limiting straight actors from playing gay roles would mean the reverse is true as well; that gay actors couldn’t play straight roles. That argument is attractive to some because it gives the illusion of cover under the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion; when in fact it misses the point entirely and is a complete inversion of those principles. Look at it this way: If Viola Davis gets cast in a role written for Nicole Kidman, that would be an example of DEI in action. If a role intended for Viola gets reimagined and given to Nicole? No.
Others point to the fact that many of the biographical gay figures who have been depicted in films, like the above-referenced Liberace and Bernstein or Freddy Mercury, sadly spent most or even all of their lives publicly declaring their heterosexuality; and so having them portrayed by heterosexual actors is not only fair but adds additional irony and pathos to their characterizations. I call BS on that thinking too. These were people who couldn’t live freely as gay men during their lifetimes, and in death they can’t even be played by gay men? That is not an echo or an amplification of their tragic closets; merely the reinforcement and continuance of them.
Then there is the 2022 film Bros, which got a lot of attention for being a major studio production with an equally major budget and a majorly gay cast (including Billy Eichner and Lawrence McFarlane as the romantic leads). When the movie failed at the box office, it became another bullet in the ammunition against openly gay actors fronting feature films. But I find that argument as hollow as I found the film. Bros was just a standard romcom where, forget straight or gay, the two leads may as well have been played by Kate Hudson and Owen Wilson (whose own box office resumes are littered with far more misses than hits). But these were gay actors, so they weren’t given second chances. It was back to YouTube for Eichner, back to the Hallmark Channel for McFarlane, and back to square one for gay actors in Hollywood.
This is why it’s so important for smaller stories and films, which are never going to be big box office regardless of casting, to give gay roles to gay actors. But that’s also the conundrum. Precisely because they are free from major studio expectations, indie films can explore more unique and provocative subject matter, which is like catnip to the acting egos of straight celebrities. Skarsgard doesn’t want to play gay in the innocuous Bros. He wants to do it in the more uniquely gay indie film Pillion, where he can really get down and dirty and maybe even give a performance that gets called (gulp) “brave.” It’s nothing more than identity appropriation disguised as thespian artistry, and it is vile.
I don’t think anyone could say with a straight face (pun intended) that there aren’t enough gay actors in Hollywood; many of whom have been devoted to the craft since their high school drama clubs gave them some first glimpses of self-worth and belonging. But for all its liberal posturing about equality, the Hollywood drama club is not as welcoming or as inclusive. Only a few openly gay leading men are the chosen ones, and even they are mostly relegated to stage and television roles (at least when a Hugh Jackman or an Andrew Garfield is not piggishly taking those away from them too). And the rest fight it out for the funny gay friend roles (except when the producers think a straight actor will get a bigger laugh for flaming it up). Who could have known that high school was the easy part?
Now we have the hysteria surrounding Heated Rivalry, the Canadian series airing on HBO in the U.S. I would have gotten around to watching it, until the extent of its manipulative promotional campaign reached new heights on the gay-baiting meter. Pronouncing their refusal to discuss their sexualities, the two stars of the series proceeded to go on a whirlwind marketing tour; wearing flamboyant fashions on red carpets, giving titillating interviews side by side about their “freak chemistry” on and off camera, and even getting matching tattoos that say “sex sells”. How is that not the very definition of gay-baiting? And it was confirmed as such on none other than Valentine’s Day, when one of the pair did come out – as having a girlfriend.
Early on in their marketing blitz, the show’s creator Jacob Tierney had gone on the strategic offensive by issuing a statement comparing the viral speculation about his stars’ sexualities to an unfortunate incident a few years back when an actor on the Netflix series Heartstopper shared that he felt publicly pressured into coming out. This was a red herring for two reasons. First, that actor was still a teenager at the time, while the Heated Rivalry stars are both working adult professionals in their mid-twenties. Second, the Heartstopper actor wasn’t engaging in any of the wag-the-dog antics of the gay-baiting Heated Rivalry crew. Wag the fag might be a better descriptor of their accumulating titillations.
Tierney’s hovering involvement lends another disturbing element to the Heated Rivalry roadshow. It has often been said that Hollywood has an even bigger casting couch for men than for women, partly because of the number of gay men driven into creative or executive roles behind the camera when their own on-screen ambitions go up in smoke. Tierney is a former actor, is openly gay in his mid-forties, and apparently loves to give interviews as much as his younger stars (and they are both more than two decades his junior). It’s uncomfortably reminiscent of the way Harvey Weinstein once inserted himself into the spotlight with the younger starlets who appeared in his movies. We of course all learned later what Weinstein was doing, and I have absolutely no information to assert that Tierney is capable of anything even remotely similar. But he is giving that same creepy, puppet master energy. It may be telling that his next project is scheduled to be a Netflix production chronicling the relationship between Aristotle and Alexander the Great; possibly the historical prototype for the trope of older ‘daddies’ being sexual with much younger ‘twinks.’ I think I’ll wait to find out who’s playing them before I decide if I’ll watch.
Because I will no longer support Hollywood projects that don’t support me. Tom Hanks conceded in a 2022 interview that Philadelphia had been of its time but that it would be “inauthentic” for him or another straight actor to play that role today. I obviously agree, but it’s just as obvious that Hollywood still doesn’t. There have been a long line of straight actors taking his place (or, rather, taking our place), and I’m not playing anymore. I am no longer spending my money to watch straightwashed images of myself and my community. I am no longer willing to see my life through anyone else’s eyes, even the baby blues of Alexander Skarsgard.
I am willing to let go of some thirty-year old resentments, though. There is no denying that Hollywood was critical in positively advancing the gay community and especially in raising both awareness and money for AIDS. So maybe we did need Hollywood to save us then, and I can even be grateful to Hollywood for answering the call. But in 2026, I feel like we deserve a chance to save ourselves.
And that starts with getting the chance to play ourselves.
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