Gay in Hollywood
A gay leading man isn’t going to bring men to the theater.

By Stanley Kurtz, fellow, the Hudson Institute
May 7, 2001 2:05 p.m.

et's face it: Sex is downright undemocratic. It isn't democratic that some people should look sexier than others. Nor is it democratic that, as a condition of getting pleasure or love, people should have to kowtow to conventions of masculinity and femininity. In fact, even when they're enthusiastically embraced, masculine and feminine ways are a standing insult to liberty and equality. It's undemocratic that a man should take more charge than a woman when it comes to driving, making money, the remote control, or the sexual act itself. What's that you say? Part of the point of democracy is to leave people free to make their own private choices about beauty, sex, and love? That, my friend, is merely a rationalization for private bigotry. People need to be reeducated: taught to ignore physical appearance, taught to treat men and women alike, and taught to eliminate all traces of inequality from their sexual fantasies.

This line of thinking explains in a nutshell why feminism, in its more frank and consistent versions, has never managed to break out of the academy. At bottom, feminism is a futile attempt to democratize sex. But sex is incorrigible. In a sense, sex is a grown-up way of getting back to all those undemocratic pleasures of childhood — caring and being cared for, demanding and giving in, escaping and being caught, bouncing and being bounced, finding someone — or being someone — who's too cute for words — and who belongs to you, and you alone. You name it. Nine times out of ten, if it's sexy, it reeks of exclusiveness and hierarchy — and has little or nothing to do with democracy. Democracy protects our right (within reason) to be sexy as we see fit, but democracy certainly doesn't describe, or account for, sexiness itself.

That brings me to Tom Cruise, who has just announced a $100-million libel suit against Kyle Bradford, a gay male porn star who claims that his secret affair with Cruise was the real reason for the recent breakup of Cruise's marriage to the lovely Nicole Kidman. Cruise maintains that this rumor has seriously damaged his marketability as a leading man in films that feature "heterosexual romance and action adventure." According to Cruise's lawyer, "While plaintiff believes in the right of others to follow their own sexual preference, vast numbers of the public throughout the world do not share that view and, believing that he had a homosexual affair and did so during his marriage, they will be less inclined to patronize Cruise's films …".

It's hardly surprising that an actor known for his James Bond-style roles would object to claims that a secret homosexual affair had destroyed his marriage. But Andrew Sullivan, maybe Washington's quickest and canniest pundit — and a tireless and honorable crusader for gay rights — is distressed by Cruise's lawsuit. According to Sullivan, Cruise's suit exposes Hollywood's hypocrisy on gay issues. If Hollywood's moguls are as pro-gay as they claim to be, asks Sullivan, why aren't there any openly homosexual leading men? Cruise's suit, says Sullivan, is really just ostensibly liberal Hollywood's way of "sending a deliberate message to gay stars and actors: Stay in the closet — or your career is toast." And by the way, asks Sullivan, "what exactly ... is incompatible between being gay and 'action adventure?' (Is Cruise peddling stereotypes as well as urging gays in movies to stay closeted?)"

However trivial this tiff might seem, it speaks volumes about the follies and foibles of today's movement for gay rights. Increasingly, that movement is pursuing a futile and counterproductive effort to democratize sex — to force people to act as though something as real and profound and undemocratic as sex itself — simply does not exist.

Everyone knows that a movie star's magic is closely bound up with his off-screen image. The old Hollywood system was built on that truth, and anyone old enough to remember how disappointed young girls were as, one by one, the Beatles got married, will understand that a performer's charisma cannot be completely separated from his off-stage life. But now we're supposed to believe that it's blatant discrimination if, having been told that he betrayed his famously beautiful wife for a gay male porn star, women find it harder to fantasize about — or men to admire and emulate — Tom Cruise. The denial of reality here is patent.

Of course a gay man is perfectly capable of playing either a heterosexual romantic lead (Rock Hudson proved that), an action adventure hero, or both. But in Hollywood, fantasy is currency. A gay James Bond isn't going to bring men to the theater. A gay boy-group won't sell copies of Tiger Beat. To condemn this as prejudice is to declare war upon sex itself.

No doubt the reply will come that this sort of logic could have justified racism in sports. If we'd given in to the prejudice of white audiences; if we'd catered to the well-established difficulty of identifying with sports heroes of another race; there would have been no Jackie Robinson, and thus no professional sporting world as we know it today.

It's a great argument. The desire to think of a sports hero as a good and noble person in real life is immensely powerful. And for that very reason, allowing blacks into professional sports really did signal, and help to provoke, a much-needed expansion of our capacity to identify with the lives and struggles of someone of another race. But the analogy to sex just doesn't hold up. Precisely because we insist on making a connection between the fantasy on screen and an actor's real life, a homosexual actor playing a heterosexual romantic hero short-circuit's an audience's ability to fully enjoy his movie roles. There's no real analogy to sports, but it would be something like finding out that your favorite baseball star was actually bored by the game and was only in it for the money. The point is, from the audience's point of view, a star's public performances should extend, not contradict, his real-life roles. That may often be an illusion, but the need for that illusion is real. And nowhere do fantasy and reality blend more powerfully or inextricably than in the delicate game of sex.

A more revealing analogy to the gay leading-man issue is "lookism," that infamous bogeyman of radical feminism, quickly rejected by the public at large as a laughable instance of campus P.C. It may be unfair to treat people differently simply because of their looks, but it's both an inescapable human reality, and an ineradicable part of our sexuality. And Hollywood, of course, is the worldwide capital of lookism. The fundamental problem with the modern gay-rights movement is that it falls somewhere in between the nobility of the civil rights struggle, and the hopeless absurdity of the battle against lookism — but can only see it self in the light of the former.

Andrew Sullivan isn't just an advocate of gay romantic leads in Hollywood; he is also the most articulate and influential spokesman for the movement to legalize same-sex marriage. And Sullivan's vision for Hollywood tells us something of profound importance about the meaning of same-sex marriage.

The institution of marriage offers special support and encouragement to heterosexual couples. Its purpose is to keep the sometimes fragile bonds between couples from fraying — ultimately, for the sake of the next generation. Marriage accomplishes this, in part, by encouraging the feeling that men and women belong together; that they complement and complete one another; that their deepest fulfillment rests with one another. Gay marriage is guaranteed to undermine that feeling, and thereby to advance the process of turning a sacred union (whether in the literal religious sense or not) into nothing more than a temporary and infinitely malleable contractual arrangement.

Agree or disagree, it is certainly possible to argue, as does Andrew Sullivan, that as a way of expressing social approval for homosexuality, gay marriage is a change worth making. But it is simply not credible to argue, as does Andrew Sullivan, that this fundamental transformation of the institution would in no way undermine heterosexual marriage. The demystifying effects of state-sanctioned homosexual coupling on the institution of marriage will be quite like the effects on a schoolgirl crush of a rumor that Justin Timberlake is gay. It's true that in either case, heterosexual disappointment "sends a message" to gays that they are not full players in the game. This may be "unfair," but the unfairness of sex simply cannot be got rid of.

Maybe 97% or so of the population is straight. It's a tragedy that our social and cultural institutions must often slight the best interests of the minority in favor of the best interests of the vast majority, but it's a fact that these interests often run at cross-purposes. An influx of gay actors playing heterosexual leading men will surely mean a decline in ticket sales. And just as surely, gay marriage will strike an immense blow against the prestige and power of marriage — at least for the overwhelming majority of the population. This is not completely democratic; but it is completely real.

A world in which sexuality had finally been tamed by democracy would be a world without Tom Cruises and a world without marriage. Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman have been elevated to stardom in the first place only because of lookist prejudice. Surely there are better, if less visually appealing, actors out there. And marriage itself, in an important sense, is "undemocratic." The strictly democratic solution to sexual relationships would be an infinitely flexible series of contracts binding any number or gender of people, for any length of time, under an endlessly variable set of rights and obligations. But the overwhelming fact of heterosexual dominance — and the compelling social interest in encouraging family stability for the sake of the next generation — make marriage as we know it the central and necessary institution that it is.

It is entirely possible to believe that society has a compelling interest in keeping marriage in its present form, while still supporting a goodly amount of freedom in private sexual conduct. That's where Cruise's lawyer got it wrong. There's no real contradiction between the right of others to follow their own sexual proclivities and the understandable preference of moviegoers for heterosexual actors to play heterosexual parts. The right to practice homosexuality obligates no one to treat an actor's homosexuality as irrelevant to their praise and enthusiasm for that actor.

So if all those liberal Hollywood types are hypocrites, maybe the accusation ought to be reversed. Maybe the real Hollywood hypocrisy is to pretend that gay marriage isn't going to undermine marriage itself, when everything you know about the way the world works is telling you that it will.