The bisexual star chastizes his peers by name for advising gay actors to stay in the closet
Alan Cumming has some choice words for a few of his fellow gay actors. Open about his sexuality for years now, the Good Wife and Cabaret star has admonished a couple of his peers by name for encouraging young gay actors to not come out.
"I was horrified when Richard Chamberlain and Rupert Everett said gay actors should stay in the closet. They were saying to people that they should live a lie and not be liberated, to live in fear of being found out," said Cumming.
Chamberlain, who revealed his homosexuality in his 2003 memoir, told the Advocate in 2010: "Personally, I wouldn't advise a gay leading man–type actor to come out ... There's still a tremendous amount of homophobia in our culture. It's regrettable, it's stupid, it's heartless, and it's immoral, but there it is."
Everett made his remarks in 2009, claiming that had he not come out 20 years earlier he would have landed more leading roles.
Cumming is unsympathetic:
Sometimes with people I know, they're playing the hunky action guy and there's resistance to them coming out because it's so connected to straight masculinity. There's a plastic kind of movie star who has a very short shelf with very small kind of ambition. I see that but I still don't agree with it.
His remarks are included in a lengthy item that British journalist Gareth McLean posted on his blog this week, and come even as the state of North Carolina is set to pass a ban on same-sex marriages. McLean interviewed a few marquee gay actors about how far the portrayal of gays has come since he was a child.
Growing up, one of the few models of what it meant to be a gay man was Mr Humphries from Are You Being Served?
Today society is much more open to the realistic portrayal of gay men – and even open to the idea of gay or bisexual actors like himself playing straight men.
"It shouldn't really matter but I'm aware that it's a really positive thing," Cumming told McLean. "I'm not alone though: Neil Patrick Harris plays a lothario in How I Met Your Mother and Ricky Martin is in Evita [playing Che on Broadway]."
Be that as it may, McLean did note that it was difficult to get public people, even outspokenly gay public people, to talk about their experiences.
McLean writes: "It was surprisingly tricky to get out public figures to discuss being out for this piece, and one was candid enough to admit that he didn't want to be 'a poster-boy for the issue'. This is nothing new."