Exile from mainstream

Gay films are currently all the rage in Tinseltown - as long as they're not too gay. BRIAN FINNEGANlooks at how homosexuals are faring in Hollywood and asks if an openly gay actor will ever get to be the leading man "If you're a straight guy playing a gay role, you get rewarded for that. If you're a gay man and you want to play a straight role, you don't get cast

'IT MIGHT JUST be the most important film in the history of gay representations in Hollywood." So said one gushing review of I Love You Phillip Morris, the Jim Carrey/Ewan McGregor comedy which opens in Ireland this week. The nearest thing to a mainstream gay rom-com, it features unapologetic characters and a smattering of full-on sex between its lead and several men, but this film's journey, from its premiere at Sundance more than a year ago to its theatrical release, tells a less positive story about the gay state of play in Tinseltown. A tale as packed with double standards as it is with paranoia, it reveals a glass ceiling that no one seems to be able to crack.

In recent decades, there have been a number of films hailed as changing the face of gay representations. The first of these, Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia(1993), tackled Aids and homophobia and won a best actor Oscar for its star Tom Hanks. The gravity with which it was greeted, along with Hanks's Oscar speech, in which he thanked a gay teacher for inspiring him to be an actor, pointed to a new era for the industry in which executives might greenlight films with sympathetic, leading gay characters on the basis that middle-American audiences might actually pay to see them. Influential critic Roger Ebert called it "a righteous first step".

However, that era never materialised. It took another 12 years before Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountainhad everyone singing about a brave new gay Hollywood once more.

In the meantime, the very po-faced Philadelphiaironically ushered in the decade of the GBF, or the "gay best friend", a time when lovable characters came out of the closet to support the female leads of romantic comedies. The apotheosis of these movies, My Best Friend's Wedding(1997), a Julia Roberts vehicle in which the GBF was played by Rupert Everett, an actual gay man, briefly proclaimed the dawn of a time when openly gay actors might become A-list stars.

But Everett never made it past the GBF stakes in Hollywood, except to play the standard villain with a British accent in the risible Inspector Gadgettwo years later. More recently, Everett went on record to say that gay actors should stay in the closet. "The fact is that you could not be, and still cannot be, a 25-year-old homosexual trying to make it in the British film business or the American film business or even the Italian film business," he told the Guardianlast December, adding that, more than ever, Hollywood today is "very, very right wing".

Almost 10 years after coming out killed Everett's Hollywood career, Brokeback Mountaincreated the current "gay for pay" phenomenon, where heterosexual actors line up to play homosexuals with statuettes in mind. The late, straight Heath Ledger cleaned up during the 2006 awards season for his performance in Brokeback, although notably he failed to deliver on his Oscar nomination and the film lost out to the forgettable racism drama Crash in the best film category. Dubbed "the gay cowboy movie", Brokeback Mountaindared to tell the story of a star-cross'd man-on-man romance from the point of view of a guy struggling with his sexual orientation. The New York Timesdeclared it "the first Hollywood movie to unmask the homoerotic strain in American culture", while Rolling Stonesaid it was "an eye-opener".

Suddenly everyone was looking for the next Brokeback. An adaptation of Patricia Nell Warren's novel The Front Runner, a longtime a pet project of Paul Newman in which an Olympic coach falls for his star athlete, was rescued from the development doldrums with Brad Pitt reportedly lined up to play the coach. Gus Van Sant's Milk, the story of the first openly gay elected politician in the US, went into production with Sean Penn in the title role, and a little-known autobiography by Steve McVicker called I Love You Phillip Morris: A True Story of Life, Love, and Prison Breakswent into development with Jim Carrey attached.

In 2009, Penn won the best actor gong at the Oscars for his performance in Milk, so it might have seemed like the optimum time to unleash I Love You Phillip Morrison the world. But at the Sundance film festival that year, where the film had a glitzy world premiere, its writer/directors, Glenn Ficarra and John Requa said: "We have no distributor as of yet. Who's buying?"

Months later, the film remained distributor-free until Luc Bresson's French company, Europacorp, stepped in at Cannes. However, although it opens in cinemas across Europe this month, audiences in the US have yet to see it. The film's release date has been put off three times there - it's now slated for limited exhibition in April.

Perhaps the distribution difficulties stem from the fact that there's never really been a film quite like I Love You Phillip Morris. Originally pitched to financiers as Catch Me If You Canmeets Brokeback Mountain, it follows Steve Russell (Carrey), a policeman who, after nearly dying in a car accident, decides to come out, leave his wife and move to Miami in search of beaches and boys. Finding his new lifestyle too expensive, Russell resorts to credit-card fraud to keep up with the gay Joneses. This lands him in prison, where he meets the love of his life, Phillip Morris (McGregor), who he later springs from the clink by impersonating a lawyer.

The film veers sharply away from Hollywood gay conventions within the first 10 minutes, when we see Carrey joyfully engaging in a bout of high-octane anal sex before saying to the audience: "Did I mention I'm gay?" and in doing so it leaves studio execs with one big question - without the victimhood of Philadelphia,the tragedy of Brokeback, or the political gravitas of Milk, will Jim Carrey, who can usually guarantee financial success for a multiplex movie, keep audiences on side while playing an unashamed, sex-positive gay man?

For fear that he won't, many of the film's gay elements seem to have been toned down pre-release. Amid rumours of re-cuts, the poster campaign went from showing Carrey and McGregor in each other's arms to picturing Carrey alone, and a new trailer was cut. In interviews, the film's directors are downplaying the homosexuality, and halfway through the final cut, the love story becomes little more than background padding.

Last month, the heterosexual British actor, Colin Firth won a Bafta for his performance as a gay man grieving the loss of his long-term partner in A Single Man, and was nominated for an Oscar for the role. Having also been gay for pay in the film version of Mamma Mia!Firth hit the nail on the head at the London premiere of A Single Manwhen he told reporters that he was part of Hollywood's gay problem.

"If you're known as a straight guy playing a gay role, you get rewarded for that. If you're a gay man and you want to play a straight role, you don't get cast - and if a gay man wants to play a gay role now, you don't get cast," he said. "I think it needs to be addressed and I feel complicit in the problem. I don't mean to be. I think we should all be allowed to play whoever - but I think there are still some invisible boundaries which are still uncrossable."

In TV, which increasingly feeds stars into the movie A-list, those boundaries have been well and truly crossed. Actors such as TR Knight and Neil Patrick Harris have come out of the closet, yet continue to play a straight love interest and an inveterate womaniser in, respectively, Grey's Anatomyand How I Met Your Mother. Gay actor Bryan Batt plays a gay man in Mad Men. But if the slow journey of I Love You Phillip Morrissays anything, it's that the movie industry may take a long time to catch up. The people in charge of the purse-strings are clearly nervous about the film's impact, particularly on the lucrative brand that is Jim Carrey, and in that light, it's hard to imagine them taking any risks by putting gay actors at the forefront of their money-making plans.

Put it this way: it's unlikely you'll be seeing a gay actor playing James Bond anytime soon, and a certain hugely successful, chiselled leading man won't be inching his closet door open in the near future.

Brian Finnegan is the editor of Gay Community News