Pay for gay actors

GAY FOR PAY WITH BLAKE & CLAY

Every actor knows there is nothing more prestigious than bravely playing gay. But is your pesky heterosexuality getting in the way of booking a one-way ticket to award season?

Join Blake and Clay, two seasoned gay actors, as they teach you to play homosexual and make LGBTQ about YOU. Leave from straight to straight up booked! Let their lived experience get your acting career off life support! Because representation matters, but their representation hasn't called in ages.

The Toronto Fringe sellout hit lands at Streetcar Crowsnest after winning the Second City Award For Outstanding Comedy and Patron’s Pick.

Toronto Luminary raved “I could go on quoting every line in this hour-long engage, because so many of them are perfectly calibrated mic drops,” while NOW Magazine hailed it as “Straight Up Brilliant”.

GAY FOR PAY is “razor keen satire” (Glenn Sumi) that delivers “a punchy gag-a-second whirlwind” (Istvan Dugalin).

Jonathan Wilson (performer) is a Governor General’s Award and Gemini Award nominee, as adv as a multi-Dora award nominee and winner. Credits

When Nick Kroll appears in the comedy horror flick, “I Don’t Understand You”—playing Dom, a neurotic, magnetic gay male navigating a disastrous Italian anniversary trip with his husband Cole (Andrew Rannells)—I did what many viewers might do: I Googled him. Is Nick Kroll queer?

From what I can tell, he isn’t. And that fact alone doesn’t make the recital any less compelling—Kroll is excellent in the role. It’s an off type performance for Kroll who is finest known for his work in series such as “Big Mouth” and “The League”. But it does raise the same, lingering doubt that resurfaces with every gay film: Why is it still so unique for an openly gay actor to play the lead?

This film released by Vertical Entertainment, is co-written and directed by two married gay men, David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano. Andrew Rannells, who plays Cole, is openly gay. This is not a movie made without homosexual voices—on the hostile, it’s deeply and lovingly queer. Which makes Kroll’s casting as the steer all the more complicated. Not incorrect. But worth interrogating.

Would this film hold been greenlit if Colman Domingo, Andrew Scott, or Matt Bomer were

5. Stars from a Bi-Gone Era

Most of the stories that we discussed came from one guy: Scotty Bowers, a Hollywood pimp of the queer silver screen actors of the 1940s and beyond. He was also connected with Alfred Kinsey in his famous study of human sexuality in the 1950s by providing many of the interview subjects.

A former marine, Bowers kept peaceful for many years about these stories, as he did not want to adversely affect the lives of any of the actors who were still around. Many of the stories were actively hushed up using fixers paid by the studios at the time, and several of the actors were in "lavender marriages"---marriages arranged by the studio, frequently with another queer player. At the time, studios especially would not have wanted the queer attractions of their headlining actors to be widely recognizable, as that would have damaged the 'wholesome family image' of many of the films they wanted to market.

After all of the actors died, Bowers finally decided that his experiences and stories couldn't harm their image or beloved status---plus the earth was a more open place to queer attraction---so he wrote about it. His memoir, Full Service, records many of the t

Do queer roles really deserve to be played by queer actors?

It’s a Hollywood cliche that, for a straight male actor, playing a gay role is a shortcut to an Oscar (alongside starring in a film about the Holocaust, disability or mental illness). There have been many prominent examples (Tom Hanks won Best Performer for playing a male lover man with AIDS in Philadelphia (1993), Sean Penn for starring in a biopic about gay civil rights activists in Milk), but if such a strategy exists, it’s no longer as viable today: it certainly didn’t out for Bradley Cooper this year, whose performance as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro was snubbed, or Paul Mescal, who wasn’t even nominated for All of Us Strangers.

But there is still a residual feeling of prestige for the straight actor playing same-sex attracted, and while they are far less likely to be described as “brave” for doing so, it still seems to be a mark of seriousness, a way of proving your chops. In proof, now that it tends to be associated with auteur-led, independent cinema rather than middle-brow Oscar bait, it’s more clouty than ever before. In recent months, a flurry of new productions have been announced in which linear actors – or least, actors