Pride month is a time of celebration but also an occasion for reflection. For some of us, there is a bittersweet lifetime of memories that are joyous, painful, and all places between.
Sometimes the darker memories make the sweeter ones resonate even more. We can’t help but be reminded that the latter are hard-won — that there was adversity along the way before sunlight came.
Sometimes that adversity is delivered in such a way as to appear innocuous and lighthearted, to the point that even our most genuine allies completely fail to see it. Our straight friends don’t have context for these experiences.
I was reminded of this earlier this year when a teacher I greatly respected from drama school entered hospice care and died shortly thereafter. I admired her and her husband. They taught us on-camera technique. Everyone loved and respected them. It was impossible not to. To give you an idea of how highly regarded they are — Blythe Danner’s name was right above mine on the list of contributors to end-of-life expenses on GoFundMe.
Still, the most vivid memory of their class is one where I felt they failed me.
They had cast our class in groups and assigned us to perform typical scenes from various TV crime dramas and soap operas. This was with the objective of learning how to work effectively on-camera in plot-advancing scenes that are decidedly not rich in dialogue.
I was given my scene with two fellow actors and immediately saw it for what it was — an opening Law & Order-type segment where the gruff, one-scene-only building orderly leads the two detectives to where he discovered the victim’s body.
“Soon as I saw him I knew he was a goner.” That kind of thing.
I played the part exactly as written, not ornamenting it or embellishing. I wore one of my father’s old work coats. I gave my voice a rough, no-nonsense, up-early-in the morning husk. This is not hard for me to do. It’s a pretty simple acting assignment.
Unless you feel a need to complicate things.
Another set of three actors followed us to do the same scene, and the one playing my part — a straight guy from Europe who was defending Trump and his cronies the last time I checked in on Facebook — played it quite differently.
He played the part gay. Very gay.
What I saw was something I can only describe as the gay equivalent of black face. He waved his arms frenziedly, clutched his invisible pearls, feigned distress, and pitched his voice sky high. Hank Azaria in The Birdcage is subtle by comparison.
It was not only inappropriate for the assignment and scene as written, but it was reductive and deeply offensive. My toes twitched in anxiety at the thought of how my teachers would address what we had all just seen. I was in total shock.
But the shock was far from over.
My teacher — the one who died earlier this year — smiled and lavished praise upon him: “Now, that’s how you impress casting and get remembered, by making interesting, gutsy choices like that…” Her husband nodded in agreement.
Is that worth it if it means performing a minstrel show-like caricature?
That’s to say nothing of shamelessly hamming it up.
I have played all different types of straight characters in my time as an actor and never once has anyone said it was something brave or revolutionary for me to do it capably. Yet here I was seeing yet another straight actor — this time, for doing an offensively poor job — being put on a pedestal for being original and “gutsy.”
Isn’t it funny how that works out?
This afternoon was no different. There was certainly no praise for my ability to be completely different than the person I really am — and, if I may say so myself, unlike the other guy, no one could catch me “acting.”
A decade later I must forgive myself for being so stunned that I said absolutely nothing, like my lungs had been drained of air. I felt no allyship in that room. I felt outnumbered. I find it hard to believe no one there felt uncomfortable with what they saw — but no one said a damn thing.
Since time immemorial, LGBTQ people have engaged in the creative arts because they are a refuge where who we are is not a liability but an asset. This experience threw a bucket of cold water on that for me. I thought, “This is my sphere, I have earned the right to be here, and Mr. Straight, Tall, and Athletic gets to reduce me and take this away from me, too.
He gets to have everything else. Can I at least have some artistic respect — and maybe even some dignity?”
These experiences have helped shape me for the better, though. They have taught me to own every inch of my back and shoulders and stand tall.
I also have to learn to forgive my teachers. They were seasoned pros but also a product of their time — as we all are. I know they never would have wanted me to feel that way. They had no way of knowing how offensive this was because in their time just a gay character transparently depicted at all was largely considered a sign of progress.
They did not — could not — understand my experience as a gay person in that room.
But they ended up teaching me a valuable lesson anyway.
What’s more? Today, things are different. Just one decade later, I truly don’t believe you’d see anything like this happen in a reputable drama school. No straight guy with any common sense would dare do it. If he did, I am confident someone would raise objections.
There is no “Straight Pride.” That would be redundant. Every day is Straight Pride.
We are not cartoons — we are nuanced, complex, and come in many different varieties. We are people.
And unlike our straight counterparts, we have worked hard to be our authentic selves. We have to keep at it.
This, by the way, is why there is no “Straight Pride.” That would be redundant. Every day is Straight Pride.
For all the progress that seems to have been dialed back and taken away from us, it’s important to remember what has changed for the better…and to not forget how things used to be such a short time ago.
By showing our pride, we made it clear that we demand to be treated with respect — no asterisks, no caveats, no ifs, ands, or buts.
If I stick around long enough to become a wise elder in our community, my hope is that a story like mine would be met with disbelief if I were to tell it to a young gay person, that they would have no context for anything like it.
“How come they get a life, and we get a lifestyle?”
That is at it should be. I believe we’ll get there.
My late friend Gary Pfeffer was a treasured mentor who helped countless LGBTQ people come out and reclaim their lives. As he always put it, “How come they get a life, and we get a lifestyle?”
Exactly. There is more work to be done.
We must continue to insist upon dignity — in rooms both great and small.
Happy Pride, everyone.
