Hollywood's Closet

My day at work today was a lot less exhausting than yesterday, probably because I went in more mentally prepared. I didn't have any really cranky customers, either, though I did have several of a type that we only ever see during the holidays. I'm talking about the people who come in with a list of five to seven items (sometimes more) and want you to basically be their personal shopper and take them from place to place all around the store, putting each item in their hand.

These customers, more often than not, are friendly and grateful for the help, but they're also incredibly time consuming while six other customers wait for assistance and people are calling for back up at the registers.

We were busier today, which is good. Yesterday we didn't even make half of our sales plan for the day, which is pretty awful for the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend.

But, enough about work.

Larry Gross has a really interesting article at Truthdig about the continuing existence of the Hollywood Closet for gay & lesbian actors and how the whole Hollywood system is basically structured around keeping onscreen talent closeted. It's definitely worth reading the whole thing, but here's a little something from it:

In a recent interview, after he came out publicly, Neil Patrick Harris spoke of the impact on him of seeing Danny Roberts, the gay cast member of “The Real World-New Orleans,” which aired in 2000 (Harris was 27 at the time!): “Danny Roberts was on a reality show, so I was watching him exist in his world and … what was empowering was to see him interacting socially and admiring the way he behaved in any given situation.”

In fact, for younger audiences, the presence of gay people is part of the recipe for establishing the verisimilitude of reality TV. This is important for the growing stream of cable-based reality shows, many highly successful, like “Project Runway” and “America’s Next Top Model,” which are almost as gay as the trend-setting “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.” The king of this reality mountain, “American Idol,” has not exactly been welcoming to the possibility of openly gay stars, as Clay Aiken well knew, and as this year’s quickly dropped openly gay contestant, Danny Noriega, discovered.

But reality programming is not the basis for big-budget movie making. Would the coveted young audiences flock to the opening weekend of the next installment of blockbuster franchises like “Mission Impossible,” the “Bourne” series, Spiderman, James Bond or Batman if they knew the lead actor was gay? Would teenage girls still make “High School Musical” a megahit if they knew the romance between Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens was limited to the screen? There’s no way to tell for sure, as no one is about to put the question to the test, but it seems safe to assume that the studios are not being paranoid here.

After all, think about this: If two straight young men go to the movies together, how do they sit? Time’s up. The answer is that they will almost always, if possible, leave an empty seat between them.

Ultimately, what it will take to cut through this Gordian knot is for someone credible for A-list roles breaking the rules and coming out – and succeeding. A Jackie Robinson moment – in part because this will also require a Branch Rickey in order to make it happen. There are a number of potential players who might be cast in this epochal role, some of whom have already begun to climb the ladder while remaining in their glass closets.

The article really highlights for me just how brave those who have come out truly are. Each person in Hollywood who has the courage to be who they are makes it that much easier for the next and eventually the structures in place to keep people in the closet will crumble. It does seem like there's such a long way to go, though.

By the way, I had to include the part with Neil Patrick Harris' comments on Danny Roberts, because I felt the same way about Danny when Real World New Orleans aired! His presence on the show meant so much to me and I still love the guy, even though I haven't seen him since the MTV News special that finally revealed his boyfriend Paul's face.

It was just so amazing to have this gay man who wasn't flamboyant or stereotypical (not that there's anything wrong with that, but up until Danny, that's the only sort of gay man reality TV ever included) on TV.