Still stuck in the film closet

HATS off to Jodie Foster.

At the Golden Globe Awards last week the 50-year-old Taxi Driver star admitted to the audience something that was truly shocking. Yes, the two-time Oscar-winner confessed to liking Mel Gibson.

Collecting her Cecil B DeMille lifetime achievement award, Foster also used the opportunity to say that she was gay. Foster insisted that she was not going to do some “big coming-out speech tonight because I already did my coming out about a thousand years ago back”, adding, “in those very quaint days when a fragile young girl would open up to trusted friends and family.

“But now I’m told, apparently, that every celebrity is expected to honour the details of their private life with a press conference, a fragrance and a prime-time reality show.”

Not quite, and if the truth be told Foster’s wasn’t the most fluid coming-out performance one could imagine; certainly not on a par with something served up all polished and perfect on a prime-time ‘reality’ show. Of course, many among the Golden Globes audience were left musing, “Tell us something we don’t know”.

Rumours about Foster’s sexuality have bubbled away for years. In the wake of her heralded performance in The Silence of the Lambs, for example, which made Foster one of the most famous movie stars on the planet, gay groups urged her to come out, but she declined.

Many gay and lesbian people feel betrayed by actors’ timidity on the matters, but, like the world of football, opinion in the film industry is guided by latent homophobia.

In the footballer’s changing room, of course, it is machismo that rules the roost and an openly gay player would risk vilification, not only from his fellow professionals, but also from the hordes of unforgiving fans. In Hollywood too, which is widely seen as a bastion of liberal ideals, conservatism plays a part. Many commentators cite Brokeback Mountain’s unjustified loss to Crash in the Best Picture category at the 2006 Oscars as a triumph for Hollywood homophobia.

Certainly, two of Hollywood’s elder statesman, Ernest Borgnine and Tony Curtis, both caused a stir by refusing to watch Brokeback Mountain, the latter saying that a film about gay cowboys would not have appealed to John Wayne.

Even more powerful than machismo, however, is money, and it is cold, hard cash that really propels Hollywood’s reluctance to support openly gay performers. Writers, producers and directors of movies? They can come out, no problem, the more and the merrier, and plenty of filmmakers have thanked their same-sex partners when collecting Hollywood awards.

For actors, however, it is a different matter. Hollywood is one of the world’s most formulaic industries, with the big-budget pictures defined by “four quadrant” rules, where everything is focused on appealing to all sexes and all ages. When a Hollywood studio spends upwards of $100m on marketing one of its stellar summer releases, it does not what the marketing and promotion jeopardised by its stars’ sexuality.

Speaking on the BBC’s Hard Talk programme last week, gay English actor Rupert Everett advised young gay actors not to come out, as their admission could hinder their career progression. “One of the frustrating things about a career in cinema in the current climate is that straight men get to play as many gay parts as they want and win tons of awards doing so, but the other way doesn’t really work,” he said.

“Coming out doesn’t really work either,” added the star of My Best Friend’s Wedding. “With structure of Hollywood and the very conservative cinema-owners in America, the mainstream actor has had to become straighter and straighter.”

There are exceptions of course. Alongside Everett there are also Simon Callow and Ian McKellan to name just two, but neither of them is a matinee idol. Indeed, author Jackie Collins has said that she believes that openly gay American actor Matt Bomer lost out on the lead role in a now defunct 2003 Superman project because of his sexuality.

“His audition tape went in and he called up the agent and somebody didn’t like him and told the producers he was gay,” recalled Collins. They said, ‘No, no, we can’t cast you’.”

Actor and stage director Antony Sher, meanwhile, who along with director Gregory Doran became one of the first gay couples to enter into a civil partnership in the UK, agrees that Hollywood is notoriously conservative, because of the size of the American movie-going marketplace.

“Test audiences are Midwestern, very conservative people,” he said, “so it’s possible that those kinds of people would be uncomfortable watching a gay man play a sex scene with a woman or whatever. But the world is changing, so that audience is going to change as well.”

Who knows, when Foster’s two children finally reach their mother’s age the world may have changed and no one will need to come out at a Hollywood awards ceremony. Until that time, we’ll just have to raise a glass to Jodie and marvel at her shocking confession — about Mel.