Cisgender actors in LGBTQ roles still spark debate
Hollywood celebrities just can’t quit playing LGBTQ characters – even when they mean well.
Selena Gomez, who famously dated Justin Bieber and Nick Jonas, recently signed on to play lesbian mountaineer Silvia Vasquez-Lavado. Cisgender actress Halle Berry considered taking on an undisclosed male transgender role over the summer.
In years prior, straight actors Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer sizzled onscreen as lovers in “Call Me By Your Name.” Cisgender actor Jeffrey Tambor played a transgender woman in “Transparent.” Straight actor Nick Robinson channeled a young gay man struggling with his identity in “Love, Simon.”
What’s wrong with this picture? Well, it’s complicated – though it mainly has to do with the scarcity of roles available for out LGBTQ actors to play LGBTQ characters.
All actors should be able to play all roles, in theory, but actors and industry experts are speaking out about the need for queer and transgender actors to play roles that represent these communities.
“It would be nice if there were enough LGBT roles that anyone could play them because there wasn’t any scarcity of representation,” says Jane Ward, a gender and sexuality studies professor at the University of California, Riverside. “However, that’s not the case.”
According to GLAAD’s annual Studio Responsibility Index, 22 of 118 films released by major movie studios in 2019 included characters who were lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (18.6%), slightly up from the previous year (20 out of 110 films, or 18.2%). Transgender characters were shut out for the third consecutive year.
On television, LGBTQ characters are projected to represent a record high of 10.2% of series regulars on prime-time scripted broadcast series (up from 8.8% the previous season), per GLAAD’s 2019-2020 “Where We Are on TV” report.
Is one problem more glaring than the other?
A straight person acting queer and a cisgender person acting transgender are two different things, just as sexual orientation and gender identity are.
Straight actors playing queer roles is “something that we give certain people a pass for,” says journalist Tre’vell Anderson, former director of culture and entertainment at Out magazine. Anderson notes that a movie such as “Love, Simon” avoided criticism for casting a straight lead actor because it was the first film by a major Hollywood studio to focus on a gay teenage romance.
Anderson, who is queer and transgender, thinks both the issue of straight people playing queer roles and cisgender people playing trans roles is urgent.
“All of those issues are important to me at once, and I think that we can advocate for all of them at once because ultimately we want our media to be an accurate reflection of the world in which we live,” they say.
Actor Billy Eichner, who is gay, told Deadline this year that Hollywood was
“so hypocritical” in how it treats LGBTQ actors, in that many attend fundraisers for the community but fail to tell LGBTQ stories with LGBTQ actors.
“We have the lived-in experience, to bring the intellectual nuance of it to the screen,” he told the outlet. “I don’t have to go sit with 30 gay people and try to find out what it’s like to be gay. I know, and no one knows better than me and my friends. I think we need to stop undervaluing that, the feeling that if a gay person plays a gay person it’s not acting but if a straight person plays a gay person, we give them an Oscar.”
Ryan Cassata, a transgender actor (“Two Eyes”), rarely gets the chance to audition for cisgender characters. “That has nothing to do with my agents,” he tells USA TODAY. “That’s just the way the industry is.” Since transgender people don’t get the opportunity to audition for cisgender roles, he thinks cisgender people shouldn’t take transgender roles away.
Transgender people bring authenticity to trans storytelling that cisgender people can’t. “I don’t think that a cis person could ever truly understand the trans experience, or what it means to be trans and the amount of oppression that we go through on a daily basis,” Cassata says.
This question of authenticity applies to lesbian, gay and bisexual people, too, though these letters of LGBTQ are more accepted identities, Cassata says.
Actress Lea DeLaria (“Orange Is the New Black”) knows this representation problem all too well.
“I’ve been talking about it for years,” says DeLaria, who played lesbian character Big Boo on the Netflix series. She says the only people talking about it back in 1993, when she became the first openly gay comic on television in the U.S., were her and Harvey Fierstein.
DeLaria believes the problem is worse for lesbians, as even within their own community, it’s perceived as OK for straight women to play them. “Essentially, I’m being erased from my own (expletive) narrative,” she says.
Casting director Mike Page, who is queer, says that it’s unfortunate the industry has to think about which projects are going to get investors excited and what’s going to get media coverage. That’s why people are tempted to go with a bigger name, which usually means a straight, cisgender actor.
“We have to really weigh that against the options of casting authentically, and that’s been the general push and pull of the industry,” Page says.
But that’s no longer acceptable. “We need to give the opportunities for marginalized communities to not only represent themselves but to actually tell their stories,” he says.
The problem with ‘trans face’
Susan Stryker, Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair in Women’s Leadership at Mills College in Oakland, California, considers cisgender people playing transgender roles akin to racial impersonation. “Trans face,” if you will, says Stryker, who is transgender. When a well-known cisgender actor lands a high-profile gig playing a transgender character, that only exacerbates the issue.
“Casting particularly well-known cis actors in trans roles helps perpetuate the idea that transness is a kind of deception and that really underneath it all, we’re really just cis people in drag,” Stryker says.
Casting transgender people in transgender roles reinforces the point that this is what transgender people are like in everyday life, Stryker says. Examples of this include Jen Richards on “Mrs. Fletcher” and Jamie Clayton on “Sense8.”
“When there are so few representations that LGBT viewers can identify with, and then we find out as viewers that in fact, those actors are cis or straight, it is very disappointing because audiences are desperately looking for role models, and looking for people they can identify with,” Ward says.
Consider Laverne Cox, a Black transgender woman, playing Black transgender woman Sophia Burset on “Orange Is the New Black,” vs. Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender man, playing transgender woman Maura Pfefferman on “Transparent.”
“When you have a cis actor playing a trans role, that connection, that line from Sophia Burset to Laverne Cox to the Black trans women in your community, it just isn’t there,” Anderson says. “And I think that’s present as well when it comes to heterosexual straight actors playing queer roles.”
Part of the issue is many stars are reluctant to say straight and/or cisgender people shouldn’t play LGBTQ characters.
“I should be allowed to play any person, or any tree, or any animal because that is my job and the requirements of my job,” Scarlett Johansson told As If in 2019, about a year after dropping out of the film “Rub and Tug” amid backlash about her intention to play a transgender man. “There are a lot of social lines being drawn now, and a lot of political correctness is being reflected in art.”
Before bowing out of the project, Johansson responded to criticism by referencing other actors who took on transgender roles. “Tell them that they can be directed to Jeffrey Tambor, Jared Leto, and Felicity Huffman’s reps for comment,” Johansson said.
Cate Blanchett, who played a lesbian lead character in 2015’s “Carol,” defended the practice of straight people playing queer while showing the film at the Rome Film Festival. “I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience.”
Wentworth Miller: ‘I just don’t want to play straight characters’
LGBTQ actors have of course been cast in straight roles because of the lack of queer parts available. In the case of gay actor Wentworth Miller of “Prison Break,” he said in an Instagram post this month that he isn’t interested in playing straight characters anymore and has continued to discuss the need for better representation.
Ward, the professor of gender and sexuality studies, thinks Miller’s dilemma makes sense.
“If I were an actor, and I continued to be cast in heterosexual roles, I would feel very aware that there was a disconnect between my lived reality and the stories that TV networks were telling people about what the world is like,” University of California’s Ward says.
Anderson says it’s great for someone like Miller to only want to play queer characters and center those narratives. But there are a host of actors out there who don’t want to be relegated to playing only gay and transgender characters.
“Queer actors, on the whole, are still restricted to playing queer characters, and so that duality that is present for straight actors to not only play straight, but to also play queer and to also play trans, it’s just not present for the queer and trans actors that are out there,” Anderson says.
As for DeLaria: “They never audition me for a straight person, even if I’m absolutely perfect for the role,” she says.
Where do we go from here?
Understanding will come as more LGBTQ characters are added to stories and more actors fill these roles, with people educating themselves along the way.
Netflix’s transgender history documentary “Disclosure” is one such way for people to educate themselves.
The documentary covers the transgender experience in Hollywood, from transgender character Edie Stokes on CBS’ “The Jeffersons” in 1977 through FX’s groundbreaking ballroom drama “Pose,” which boasts many Black transgender series regulars.
“When we know better, we do better,” Cox told USA TODAY in June, discussing “Disclosure.”
There have been more wins in entertainment for the LGBTQ community in recent years.
Pop TV’s critical darling “Schitt’s Creek” swept the Emmys this year, cocreated by and starring gay actor and writer Dan Levy.
Billy Porter was the first openly gay man to win an Emmy for best actor in a drama in 2019 for “Pose.”
“A Fantastic Woman,” starring transgender woman Daniela Vega who plays a trans character, won best foreign film at the 2018 Oscars.
“Wonderful to see how much more common it is for LGBTQ actors to be cast in LGBTQ roles,” George Takei wrote on Twitter in June, along with a video featuring LGBTQ actors in LGBTQ roles.
Page, a member of the Casting Society of America and co-chair of its equity in entertainment committee, says it has been an uphill battle casting LGBTQ actors in LGBTQ roles but has seen success.
While it used to be common practice for agents to dissuade actors from coming out or accepting queer roles (for fear it might damage their careers), that has lessened as actors have come out of the closet.
That’s not to say the problem is gone – even with casting directors leading the charge for change.
“There are members of our profession that are still stuck in the old-school thinking, which is incredibly heartbreaking and unfortunate,” Page says.
Still, 80% of Americans say they don’t personally know someone who is transgender, according to GLAAD. That means most of what audiences learn about transgender people comes from the media.
As more trans people have more pull within the industry, greater levels of education are taking place with more people at higher levels paying attention, Stryker says.
“I don’t want to say that only LGBT actors can play those parts well; I don’t think that that’s true, actually,” Ward says. “The question is more about the politics of viewership and of labor.
“The entertainment industry is a workplace, and if it is to be an equitable workplace, then we need LGBT actors to have access to roles.”
Kristen Stewart, who is queer and plays a queer character in the new Christmas movie “Happiest Season,” has no “sure-shot answer for that.”
“I would never want to tell a story that really should be told by somebody who’s lived that experience,” she told Variety.
“Having said that, it’s a slippery slope conversation because that means I could never play another straight character if I’m going to hold everyone to the letter of this particular law. I think it’s such a gray area.”
Page says that more change will come as activists continue to call for action and audiences tune into stories that accurately depict these communities.
He apologizes on behalf of the profession to those members of the community who haven’t gotten their day in the spotlight. “There are many of us fighting for accurate representation, fighting for inclusion,” Page says.
While increased visibility is the goal, there are negative consequences to heightened attention, too, particularly for the transgender community.
“It’s important to bear in mind that heightened levels of visibility to trans issues, has had the paradoxical effect of increasing violence being directed at the most marginalized members of the community, particularly trans women of color,” Stryker says.
At least 38 transgender or gender nonconforming people have been killed so far in 2020, according to the Human Rights Campaign. Most of these were Black and Latino transgender women.
That said, change can only come if the industry meaningfully changes. “Be committed to casting queer individuals in queer roles. And by the way, it’s going to make your project 1,000 times better,” DeLaria says.
She acknowledges the industry has improved but there’s still a long way to go; she recently lost out on the recurring role of a lesbian on “Law & Order: SVU” that ultimately went to a straight woman.
“Why do you think Big Boo stood out so much in (‘Orange Is the New Black’) and why people loved her so much?” DeLaria says. “It’s because that part was written by a lesbian and portrayed by a lesbian. We were there the whole time to make sure that everything she did was correct in a queer way.”