This film has been on my radar for a while but I never managed to watch it. I think I'll be watching it this weekend!
As for how 'being gay' has gone from being an insult to being something (largely) neutral: I come from a Catholic family in which being gay would have resulted in me getting kicked out of the house. I often heard statements like "It's just a trend to be gay" and "Why do they have to throw their sexuality in my face?" at home. Luckily, I've always been interested in people who are different and managed to kick that thinking in the melons early on. Though I have to say, it really helped to get out of that environment first.
I'm gonna go with the shallow analysis here and say that if straight actors can't play gay characters, then gay actors can't play straight characters.
Sure, people will say, but power dynamics, minority representation...! Nah.
These kinds of "rules" should just make straightforward sense to people. And since of course gay people should be able to play straight characters, the inverse should be equally true. The impulse to police this comes from a decent place but is exactly the kind of - I'm really terribly sorry to have to use this term, but I've run out of denial of its existence - virtue signaling that has made a lot of people under 30 disgusted with the left.
I'm okay with applying this standard to trans actors, for what it's worth. Which it did not, until very recently; I think it was only with Laverne Cox on OITB that this was finally written in stone. Very different thing, much less mutable and something where authenticity is more important - it's more like race than sexual preference in many ways. As an almost-tautological general rule, authenticity does not matter AT ALL in acting, if you're good at it, but there are exceptions.
This film has been on my radar for a while but I never managed to watch it. I think I'll be watching it this weekend!
As for how 'being gay' has gone from being an insult to being something (largely) neutral: I come from a Catholic family in which being gay would have resulted in me getting kicked out of the house. I often heard statements like "It's just a trend to be gay" and "Why do they have to throw their sexuality in my face?" at home. Luckily, I've always been interested in people who are different and managed to kick that thinking in the melons early on. Though I have to say, it really helped to get out of that environment first.
I'm gonna go with the shallow analysis here and say that if straight actors can't play gay characters, then gay actors can't play straight characters.
Sure, people will say, but power dynamics, minority representation...! Nah.
These kinds of "rules" should just make straightforward sense to people. And since of course gay people should be able to play straight characters, the inverse should be equally true. The impulse to police this comes from a decent place but is exactly the kind of - I'm really terribly sorry to have to use this term, but I've run out of denial of its existence - virtue signaling that has made a lot of people under 30 disgusted with the left.
I'm okay with applying this standard to trans actors, for what it's worth. Which it did not, until very recently; I think it was only with Laverne Cox on OITB that this was finally written in stone. Very different thing, much less mutable and something where authenticity is more important - it's more like race than sexual preference in many ways. As an almost-tautological general rule, authenticity does not matter AT ALL in acting, if you're good at it, but there are exceptions.