The straight labor of playing gay

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay examines the celebrity interview as a significant promotional paratext because it is through these that white, cisgender, heterosexual actors are asked to comment upon playing gay. We focus on paratexts around Scandal, Modern Family, Behind the Candelabra and Call Me By Your Name because they are important sources for shaping the ways audiences respond to media and are often re-circulated beyond their original context through social media. We highlight how white, heterosexual actors emphasize labor in order to insist on the paratextual distance between his veridical self and the role he has been employed to play. As a discursive strategy, this is accomplished by a recognized, seamlessly performed and strikingly blatant routine. Collectively, audiences, interviewers, and the actors themselves work to consistently demonstrate social, cultural, and industrial commitments to what we are calling a possessive investment in straightness, which we define, building on George Lipsitz’s (2006) work, as concerned with not only the resources, power and opportunity white heterosexual actors have in taking on gay roles, but the social, cultural and industrial willingness to help these actors re-assert their claims to heterosexuality and normativity.