The Celluloid Closet

"I tried to think of these five recommendations as a unit. Having recommended books about the invention of the studio, the rise of the studios, the value of the studios and the way filmmakers work, I wanted to recommend one book at least about the dark side of the system. The Celluloid Closet is a history written by Vito Russo several decades ago about how gay people were depicted, demonized, villainized and caricaturized in films from the 1910s to the 1970s. It’s important for anyone who’s interested in movies to know that the effect of a cultural system as powerful as Hollywood moviemaking can also be pernicious, that it can dehumanize people and reinforce the ugliest cultural perceptions of particular groups of people. It took a really, really long time for gay people to be treated as human beings in American movies. The Celluloid Closet is a fascinating and valuable exploration of that. Of course, this is a subject that is very much on the front burner. African-Americans, Asians and Pacific Islanders, Indigenous peoples, Latino people, trans people and gay people are focused on how they are portrayed in film. The Celluloid Close is great reading for anyone who wants to understand that movies can be a powerful ally or a powerful obstacle. There are a lot of arguments, including within the gay community, over the idea that all gay parts should be played by gay actors. There are places where all minorities are in the same boat and there are places where they’re not. Sexuality isn’t like race, in some respects. And it’s important to remember that these distinctions really do matter. There are, for one thing, serious legal and ethical issues involved in demanding to know someone’s sexuality before you cast them. My personal preference would be to see a world in which gay actors are castable in any role, rather than a world in which we have to decide that gay people are the only people who are qualified to play gay parts. Art isn’t autobiography. But I don’t think that that issue should overshadow the importance of representation . As I said, there are logistical and even ethical complications in casting mandates for gay parts. There’s no ethical issue in saying African American roles should be played by African American actors and, at the same time, that African American actors should be castable in any role. You asked how things have changed. The only way I can answer it is to say that it’s not so much that they have changed as that they are changing. For one thing, if we take gay people specifically, there are way more out gay actors than there used to be. A larger question is how many gay parts there are and how great is the variety of gay parts and lesbian parts and parts for trans people. And how many gay stories there are and how many specifically trans movies are made. This is a fight for progress on several different fronts at once. The fewer opportunities there are overall the more unfairly packed every decision about one of those parts is. It’s unfair for a gay actor or a Black actor to have to go into a part feeling that they are carrying the representational burden for a group of people that goes far beyond that part. That is a challenge that straight people and white people don’t have to carry around their neck. The first thing that has to get solved is there must be more opportunities, more roles, so that the playing field can at least be level, in terms of an actor feeling that their job is to do the job that they were hired to do, not the job that they were hired to do, plus the fulfillment of an obligation to a community that is only an obligation because there are so few jobs."