I don’t have a problem with straight people playing gay, but I do have a problem with hollywood insisting that gay people can only play gay people. It seems that once an actor or actress comes out, it becomes incredibly difficult for them to find anything other than gay roles.
JOhn.
(Hey, isn’t it about time for ATGG part 5? Or have all of the questions been answered?)
Though Anthony Perkins’s career might’ve suffered more from revelations he was gay than from revelations he was a cannibal. (Which he was. Gay that is, not a cannibal. AKAIK.)
An actor acts, so if he or she is best suited to the role, let them play it. But Ian McKellan kicks ass, regardless. 
Esprix
Well, look at Ellen Degeneres. A year before she came out on her show (the Puppy Episode in 1997) she played a woman being stalked in the movie Mr. Wrong. Looking back at that movie, I just have a hard time with its “plausibility” when I keep thinking “lesbian”. (That’s not to mention what a bad movie it was anyway.) I don’t think it’s necessarily Hollywood pushing them to play straight, I think that there’s a believability factor involved when an openly gay actor/actress is playing straight. It’d be like Fred Phelps starring as head of the Kansas chapter of P-Flag teaching tolerance in the ABC Afterschool Special. No matter how well he acted, I’m not gonna believe the performance.
So why is it any different when a straight actor plays gay?
Esprix
I’m not sure if you’re asking jkusters or me. I get the same seperated feeling when I see Eric McCormick playing gay on W&G as I do watching Rock Hudson in Pillow Talk. It just seems affected and that’s probably because I’m watching it with my bias of the actor’s known sexuality and not their performance. YMMV, of course.
On a tangent, would you find a love scene between k.d. lang and Rupert Everett plausible?
As long as k.d. topped I would.
It worked with Madonna in The Next Best Thing, although his character was supposed to be gay…
Esprix
Miss Chatelaine with a strap-on. I’m all about that admission price.
“Happy holiday and remember to wave to me on my float. I’ll be the man in the big red dress.” -HF
Is anyone else excited to see Harvey Fierstein [URLhttp://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/26/opinion/26FIER.html]playing Mrs. Claus in The Macy’s Christmas Parade?
Does this represent an advance for gay folks, or is it just high camp (like appearing in Hairspray)?
Sorry, too much nog. Here’s that link again.
“It just seems affected and that’s probably because I’m watching it with my bias of the actor’s known sexuality and not their performance.”
How did you feel about it BEFORE you knew Rock Hudson was gay. Was it any different?
I gots a question I’ve been waiting to ask an ATGG thread. Since this one got bumped and Esprix doesn’t seem to mind, I guess now’s the time. I’m sure it’s been asked at some point already, maybe repeatedly, but what the hey. Oh, and forgive my ignorance on this point, of cuss.
My Q: generally speaking, to what extent are tops and bottoms “married” to their top or bottom preference? Is it generally “I’m a top and that’s that, thankyewvettymuch” or “I prefer top, but I’m flexible”, or does it vary too much to generalize? If you meet a totally kick-ass amazing guy you could see marrying some day, but find out that you’re both bottoms, is that the end of the relationship or just a minor hurdle?
Yes, because the bias wasn’t there. Neither was the knowledge. Perception of an actor/actress’s private life does affect how I watch their performance.* Should it? No.
*(Take a Woody Allen movie, some people have the bias from his involvement with Soon-Yi in their minds while watching a movie, said involvement has nothing to do with the movie or its contents but it’s something that bleeds in from real life.)
I think it’s great! Yeah it’s campy, but he is a multi Tony award winner, he’s very hot on Broadway right now, and he’s an actor. If a straight guy can play gay, and a gay guy can play straight, certainly Harvey, of all people, can play Mrs. Clause! 
My favorite quote from the article:
It’s a sexual preference like any other. Some won’t do anything but, some are flexible, some are flexible but only under certain circumstances or with certain people, and frankly, some don’t do the whole top/bottom thing at all. Similarly, meeting Mr. Right and finding out you’re both tops or both bottoms, whether or not the relationship works depends on the individuals involved and how much it matters to them. For myself, I’ve been in relationships where we weren’t 100% sexually compatible, and sometimes we made it work and sometimes we didn’t. Just like any other relationship, each one is different and the individual dynamics between you and someone else varies from person to person.
Esprix
[mischievous]Right noun, wrong verb, surely?[/mischievous]
Nice to see this back. It’s pretty much our finest hour, you know.
Q: To what extent does the gay community play at being straight? No ‘in the closet’ but making a joke out of it.
Example: I’m listening to Jill Sobule a while back and ‘I Kissed A Girl’ comes on. It’s a song about a woman having her first lesbian experience and deciding that kissing a girl was pretty good. (The video is beautiful by the way…Jill passes up Fabio for her girlfriend.)
And I’m thinking that would be a GREAT camp number for a gay band to do. Really over the top about ‘kissing a girl’. But I’m also thinking that with the persecution the gay community has withstood over the years that sort of thing might set off repercussions. Certainly Jews rarely make campy fun of ‘I’m acting like a goy!’.
So how 'bout it?
Actually, Jonathan, I intend on doing “I Kissed A Girl” as a solo the next time I’m asked to perform without making any changes, because it would be just that funny. In general, poking fun at “playing straight” or the stuff that society expects us to do is probably more comfortable nowadays since we better understand how ridiculous it all is. 40 years ago marrying a woman and having kids, even though you were gay, was not unusual, and most of the older gay men I know do have grown children from previous marriages (they are all divorced). Nowadays, though, with more and more people coming out at younger and younger ages, that “normalcy” is fading (although certainly not gone), so making a joke (hopefully a good-natured one) about it is funny rather than sad.
Did that make sense?
Esprix
It’s like the acting-striaght game the guys in the Broken Hearts Club play at the first of the movie.
But I was so butch when I said it!
Homebrew and Esprix are right, of course. Gay men play the stereotypical straight guy joke for sheer giggles sometimes, but I don’t think it has quite the same nasty bite to it that straight men “fagging it up” does. A gay guy acting straight is partially doing it out of self-mockery, as generally those acting “butch” are the ones most femme (I do it sometimes). I’ve also seen lesbians do it too. One of my friends, Jess, is not your stereotypical butch lesbian, but her normal attire consists of jeans, a worn t-shirt, eyebrow piercing, and a bandana. As a joke for Halloween she came in dressed very feminine with makeup, a nice top, and a short skirt. For some reason it was hilarious.