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From Risky to Rewarding: How Playing Gay Has Come a Long Way, Baby.

In a 2012 interview with the UK’s The Telegraph, Rachael Stirling, who played Nan Astley in the BBC’s 2002 adaptation of Tipping the Velvet, said she found it hard to be taken seriously as an actress after her participation in the “salacious” mini series.

“It was a brilliant project, and I don’t regret it,” Rachael said, “but there wasn’t a lot of aftercare and the long-term effects weren’t considered. Nobody sat down and said that you might find it hard to be taken seriously as an actor afterwards.”

Three years later, she added that after playing Nan, she only had the opportunities to play sexually explicit roles (“I was offered every lesbian under the sun and every opportunity to take my clothes off”), and she should have “known better” than to participate in the version she refers to as “Dip My Velvet.”

Photo by Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

Stirling’s experience of being typecast for lesbian roles is one reason why many actresses have historically feared taking these roles. On the plus side, Stirling’s experience is dissimilar to the experience of many actresses playing lesbian/bisexual film roles in the rest of the English-speaking world during the same time period. Because many actresses who have “played gay” since the early 2000s have gone on to have highly successful careers, actresses in 2016 considering playing a gay role have a much more balanced sample pool to judge how the role could ultimately affect their careers (or not) than actresses in the ’90s or early 2000s.

In hindsight, “Tipping the Velvet” is PG-13 rated compared to “Game of Thrones” or “Spartacus”

Although Stirling may have viewed the appearance of a “racy” lesbian mini-series on the BBC in 2002 as novel, across the pond Hollywood was taking a strong interest in bringing queer storylines to the fore. In the first five years of 2000, Hollywood released If These Walls Could Talk 2 (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), The Hours (2002), and Monster (2004). Actresses profited from these critically acclaimed movies: Vanessa Redgrave won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for her role in If These Walls Could Talk 2. Both Naomi Watts and Laura Harring won film awards for their performances in Mulholland Drive. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar and Golden Globe for her role in The Hours, while Julianne Moore was nominated for both and Meryl Streep (who first played a lesbian in Woody Allen‘s Manhattan), was nominated for a Golden Globe. Charlize Theron won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Monster. For actresses in the right place at the right time, playing a lesbian or bisexual character could be a low risk, high reward career move.

“If These Walls Could Talk 2:” Lesbians Lesbianing

There’s a problem with viewing these movies and the effect they had on actresses as prototypical of the time, of course. For one thing, in most cases the actresses taking these roles were already A-List, meaning that the risk of losing stature by playing gay was low. For another, movies like The Hours and Monster were known to be Oscar bait, with good scripts, good directors, and good actresses. Finally, to focus on those examples is to ignore good but marginally successful movies like The Truth About Jane (Lifetime TV movie, 2000) and Lost and Delirious (2001), which had a marginal impact upon the careers of the actresses in them.

Luckily, examples of concrete backlash against playing a gay character in approximately that time period are few. In 2007, Laura Dern told Ellen DeGeneres that she had been unable to get an acting job for more than a year after playing Ellen’s love interest on the tv sitcom Ellen in 1997, although she expressed gratitude for the opportunity to be part of the groundbreaking episode.

If Hollywood’s relationship with queer roles in the early 2000s was at an inflection point, how are things today? To take it a step further, if an up and coming actress considering a gay role in 2016 was concerned the role would have a negative impact on her career, as Dern claimed her role on Ellen did, how would she predict what sort of impact the role could have on her career? Theoretically, it would be possible to create an algorithm that would parse a huge table of inputs such as director prestige, production company, skill/reputation of other actors involved, acting history, etc., to predict the effect.

Since no such algorithm exists, however, the actress would have to decide whether or not to take the role based on anecdotal data and her own feelings about the role. Using such anecdotal data, it appears that many skilled actresses who played gay early on in their careers ended up having highly successful careers down the road-suggesting that the roles did not negatively affect their careers. A few notable examples:

Before breaking out as the star of Scandal in 2012, Kerry Washington played queer roles in both She Hate Me (2006) and The Dead Girl.

In 1994, Kate Winslet played Juliet Hulme in Heavenly Creatures. The next year, she would go on to play Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, followed by Ophelia in 1996’s Hamlet and Rose DeWitt Bukater in 1997’s Titanic before eventually winning an Oscar in 2009 for The Reader.

Michelle Williams was already Jen Lindley on Dawson’s Creek when she took on the role of Linda in If These Walls Could Talk 2 in 2000, but her career took off in 2005 with Brokeback Mountain. She then starred with other A-Listers in 2010’s Blue Valentine and Shutter Island and 2013’s Oz the Great and Powerful.

Angelina Jolie was just starting out when she starred in the made for TV movie Gia in 1998. By the next year, she was rubbing elbows with A-Listers in Pushing Tin, The Bone Collector, and Girl, Interrupted, for which she received an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

Naomi Watts was a virtual unknown when she took the role of Betty in Mulholland Drive in 2001, but it was the start of something bigger. The next year she was in the blockbuster The Ring, followed by an Oscar-nominated turn in 21 Grams (2003) and a rise to A-List status.

Of course, this is cherry picking. Just as the four award-winning movies listed above cannot be seen as representative of all queer movies in the early 2000s, the career paths of these future A-List actresses cannot be taken as the norm. Clearly, many more women have played queer roles than have eventually risen to A-List stardom. That doesn’t moot the utility of looking at their experiences, however.

It seems most accurate to say that many actresses have played lesbian roles and had successful careers after the role, including Laura Dern, who within two years after “the Puppy Episode” was back to being cast in movies like October Sky (1999) and Jurassic Park III (2001) and now has a thriving film and TV career.

Nowadays, most actresses seem to have reached a similar conclusion about the probable lack of correlation between playing gay and the success or failure of an acting career…without having to research to find anecdotal evidence. According to a University of California Los Angeles survey of members of the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists in 2013, 33% of actresses surveyed had played a lesbian or bisexual role, and a whopping 74% of those who had not played a queer role said they were willing to play such a role but just hadn’t been offered one. Admittedly, a few reported they believed playing a gay character would make it harder to be cast in future roles (4%), worried about typecasting (4%), or worried they would be mistaken as gay themselves (4%), but overall, 68% reported that the sexual orientation of a character didn’t factor into their decision to take a role.

A change from the mood of the early and mid-1990s, actresses are now often positive about playing gay roles. This August Alexis Bledel raved of Jenny’s Wedding, in which she plays the other bride, “When I read the script. I was like, sign me up!” she says. “I was really excited about it. I had never read anything like it.”

This June, Nicole Kidman revealed that her only career regret was turning down a role in a Jane Campion movie because it required a same-sex kiss and wearing a shower cap…a regret she “absolved” by donning a shower cap and snogging her close friend Naomi Watts. Perhaps her real penance, Kidman played Virginia Woolf in The Hours and was originally signed on in 2008 to play the role of transgender painter Einar Wegener in The Danish Girl-the same role that eventually went to Eddie Redmayne and, at different points in time, both Gwyneth Paltrow and Charlize Theron were cast in the role of Lili’s wife, Gerda Wegener.

For some actresses, the role significantly helped their careers. Special shout out to Julianne Moore, who played lesbian and bi roles in The Hours, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee (2009), Chloe (2009), The Kids are All Right (2010), and Freeheld (2015).

On the balance, barring further evidence, our hypothetical actress should take the role or not based on factors unrelated to the character’s sexuality, because nowadays a queer role is no more or less likely to change her career for better or worse than any other role. Some roles are good, some bad; some careers take off, some fail. There is an additional incentive to accepting gay roles for her to consider that is not captured by numbers, however: the unparalleled loyalty of lesbian, bisexual, and queer female fans, which has an economic and psychological impact not captured by current metrics.

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