Big Gay Closet

When SATC writer and director Michael Patrick King presented Nixon with the Vito Russo Award at this year’s GLAAD Awards, he described her as being out: out and proud as an actress, out as a breast cancer survivor, out as a woman who was with a man for 15 years, and out as a woman who is now in love with a woman. Nixon’s been doing a lot of coming out in the past few years.

She met partner Christine Marinoni (then an education organizer) in 2001, when Nixon was campaigning to reduce public-school class sizes in New York City. The two women became friends and confidants during Nixon’s 2003 split from Danny Mozes, her partner of 15 years and the father of her two children, 13-year-old Samantha and 7-year-old Charles. She and Marinoni started dating in 2004.

Nixon’s either reluctant to talk about the tipping point—from friend to girlfriend—or there’s simply not a clear delineation between the two. But her costar and close friend Kristin Davis, who plays SATC’s proper Charlotte York, says there never really was “a coming-out moment.” Although ­Davis says she’d “met and known Christine,” she didn’t have any inkling of their budding relationship until it dawned on her how much Nixon was devoting to the schools campaign—and to Marinoni. “They’d be on the phone and writing speeches,” Davis says, “and I thought, She’s really into this.”

Her costars weren’t the only ones to take notice. “Shortly after we started seeing each other—like a month after—we got a press inquiry about it,” Nixon says. “And I thought, This is crazy.”

Uninterested in addressing media questions about her new relationship (or the gender of her steady date), Nixon understood that she might need help managing the new attention, so she hired a publicist for the first time. He was “a very nice man who I won’t name, but he does have a number of clients who are closeted,” she says, adding that the publicist’s approach was to kill all the rumors—to essentially deny that Nixon was seeing a woman.

via Cynthia Nixon is More Than Just Sex | Cover Stories | Advocate.com.

I love Cynthia Nixon for the way she pinged off the screen when she was Miranda on SATC. I love her for loving being out and wanting to be out. I love how she discusses her identity as lesbian/bisexual without worrying that it’s a problem to feel somewhere in the middle. I just love her.

The past week was almost all about the Cinco de Gayo announcement which turned out to be a bit of an anti-climax (“Who?”  echoed the world over, from gay blog to gay blog) but still interesting and important as one of America’s country music’s stars came crooning out of the closet with a new album and a new book.

Of course, we’d known last week since TMZ published her identity well ahead of the official announcement.

Feel like reliving it?

In chronological order, the Cinco de Gayo posts from the past week:

Newly Out Chely Wright:  ”I had a gun in my mouth” (This was the interview that The Advocate published too early and had to take back down. They published it again on the 5th)

Queerty asks: Did Chely Wright & Howard Bragman have a responsibility to closeted celebs?

Newsy.com: Will Chely Wright’s fans listen to a lesbian?

On the 5th, which was meant to be the official Chely Wright outing, New Zealand Olympian Blake Skjellerup came out in the Australian gay magazine DNA’s special sports issue. He also tweeted a very cute tweet.

We had a new contributor share a story of her very first girl-crush. When’s the first time you fell in love with someone of the same sex as you? Tell us!

Another new contributor told us the story of going to pride with her three gay aunts, and how she caught the attention of every woman in the room.

Oh and the incredible Jane Lynch — of The L Word and, more recently, Glee fame — spoke about her early affair with a teacher and about coming out.

Finally we (along with the rest of the queer blogosphere) gave a virtual standing ovation to Rachel Maddow who made it clear on her show why it is newsworthy when the vehemently anti-gays turn out to be gay, as she addressed the George Rekers/rentboy scandal.

More to come this week. I have a fantastic kinda-coming-out-story ready for tomorrow and hoping a few more will land in my inbox soon!

Have a Happy Mothers’ Day, regardless of how happy your mother is. Sometimes for us gay folks, family isn’t all that.

Jacq

Would you cast them to kiss a boy?

There are a lot of out gay people in the public eye.

I mean, just off the top of my head (and I’m no pop culture guru), I was able to name just under 30.

Now, when I was reading Michael Urie’s interview in The Advocate, one thing he said struck me. And I’m paraphrasing here, but he basically said that being out can negatively affect your chances of getting that romantic lead role — that if people know that you are not straight, that you are unlikely to be cast as straight. Please note, I’m pretty sure that doesn’t apply to gay characters, who can be played by anyone willing to do so.

He also pointed out that for some people it would be more of an issue than for others. Say, for instance if George Clooney turned out to be gay. Just by virtue of how hyper masculine he is, he gets a lot of romantic lead roles. But, Michael Urie says that if he came out as loving the dudes, that kind of work would dry up.

My question is: is this the same thing for lesbians? I’m thinking it might not be.

Personally, I can’t see Portia deRossi having trouble being cast as the romantic lead, even if she is married to Ellen. I think there’s a really important reason why lesbians might not face the same difficulties.

Nevermind how I know this, but a popular porn site lists videos of women having sex with other women under “straight”. Only men having sex with men is under “gay”. There is no “lesbian” category.

A man who has sex with men is not really ever able to be considered straight again. Because of perceptions of male sexuality, once a man has slept with another man, he is  “gay”.

However, a woman having sex with another woman is often perceived as no more than titillation, or an experiment and transitory. Lesbianism lacks the permanence that male homosexuality has in the public consciousness.

So, while lesbians may have it easier in coming out and in the resulting casting decisions, it could be because our society as a whole does not give them same kind of legitimacy to lesbianism as a sexual identity as it does to male homosexuality.

What do you think?