Show Business: A Reluctance to Play

The movie industry is accustomed to seeing stars begging for parts. What it is not used to is a part begging for a star. That is exactly what happened, however, when Producer Jerry Wheeler ran a pleading ad in Hollywood's trade publications earlier this year. Didn't anybody, he seemed to be saying, want to appear in his film The Front Runner?

What was the catch? Did he want someone to play a rapist, a child molester or a drooling maniac? No. Those would have been easy parts to fill. Wheeler wanted a rugged star to play a college track coach who happens to be gay. And despite all the gains made by homosexuals in the U.S. in recent years, playing the part of a gay is still considered by many to be a fast ride to oblivion.

Trying to knock down that so-called wisdom, Wheeler listed 92 actors and actresses -- everyone from Marlon Brando to Robert Redford, Jane Alexander to Susannah York -- who have portrayed homosexuals or lesbians and lived to tell about it. He might just as well have saved his money. Not only did his ad fail to produce a star, but Jon Pennell, the young actor who had been signed as the coach's lover, withdrew, deciding that he did not want the role.

A few of the actors Wheeler approached might have turned him down, of course, because they disliked the script or the pay, a relatively meager $1 million. But most made it clear that they were frightened by the role. "There's a general feeling that homosexuality is a dangerous subject," says Front Runner Director Marshall W. Mason, who has made his name in the theater (Burn This, Fifth of July).

One of the few gay projects that have overcome this feeling is Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, which is now being shot with Fierstein re- creating his Broadway role. But Torch Song is about a drag queen and therefore outside the range of ordinary experience, as were the vastly popular movie and musical versions of La Cage aux Folles.

Historically, the movie actors who have got the most out of acting gay have been those who have played camp roles. No one confused Robert Preston with his outrageous queen in Victor/Victoria, Tom Courtenay with his prissy, mincing backstage assistant in The Dresser, or William Hurt with his flamboyant spinner of dreams in Kiss of the Spider Woman. All three were thought to be brave, tour de force performances.

Part of The Front Runner's problem, ironically, may be that it depicts an ordinary world and that the gay coach is supposed to look and act like any other coach. In the past, the stars who have been injured by playing gay roles have been those who did not appear to be acting, who were so natural that they seemed to be playing themselves. Laurence Luckinbill's agent, for instance, warned him not to accept the part of a bisexual schoolteacher in Mart Crowley's movie of The Boys in the Band (1970), which took a pioneering look at the gay world.

If dollars were all that counted, the agent may have given good advice. The Boys' boys were so convincing that many people incorrectly thought they were all gay, an assumption that cost Luckinbill, for one, a cigarette commercial worth $15,000. Said the casting director: "No fags smoke our fags." That snide comment did not stop Luckinbill from taking two subsequent gay parts, however.