It’s terrible to see a lot of celebrities hiding their sexuality out of fear it will ruin their careers, which is why I feel Zachary Quinto has shown enormous courage for coming out as a gay man.
There’s always been rumors and urban legends about who’s gay in Hollywood, and I believe that Neil Patrick Harris finally came out to finally put rumors about himself to rest. (It had no apparent effect on his career).
Outing became big in the early nineties when the gay community became more militant in the face of the AIDS crisis, but at the same time, no matter how obvious someone’s homosexuality must be, there have been serious risks to coming out, or being outed, that have kept many gay people in the closet. Just look at how everyone got their shorts in a knot about gay marriage.
And in fact, Quinto initially dodged questions about his sexuality to The New York Times by telling them, “Boundaries are very important to me.” Quinto performed in Angels in America on stage, and he told New York Magazine, “As a gay man, it made me feel like there’s still so much work to be done, and there’s still so many things that need to be looked at and addressed.”
Frankly, I could care less who’s gay and who isn’t in Hollywood or anywhere else, and it would be wonderful to see the day when a major A-list movie star comes out and it won’t make a difference. I think we’re definitely going to see that day in our lifetime, and after the initial shock wears off, I would like to think and hope the public will move on, realize a gay man can play a convincing heterosexual in a film, and it makes no difference what he does in his own bedroom.
To paraphrase Ian McKellen, who has been out of the closet for decades now, people told him he couldn’t star in a movie with a female lead because nobody would believe she’d be in love with him. Of course they could believe it, he replied. It’s called acting.
As Adam B. Vary of Entertainment Weekly put it, Quinto’s turn as Spock “is widely regarded as the best thing about J.J. Abrams’ fabulous Star Trek reboot, in part because he brought a slow-burn romantic fire to the iconic relationship with Zoe Saldana’s Uhura.”
When Star Trek 2 is ready, Vary continues, “My guess is that, come Sunday morning of Star Trek 2’s opening weekend, Quinto’s sexuality off-screen will affect the film’s box office an infinitesimal amount in comparison to whether the movie simply kicks ass.”
In our recent report on Star Trek hitting its 45th anniversary, George Clayton Johnson (Twilight Zone, Logan’s Run), said the wonderful thing about Star Trek was it showed us there was a future. And now as Quinto is showing us, the future will also thankfully include people of all diversities.
