Interview With Sir Ian McKellen (page 5)
by Michael Jensen, September 27, 2006
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AE: I guess the thing that disturbed me about the recent George Michael shenanigans was when he said what he was doing was the culture of gay men, as if he were speaking for all gay men.
IM: He's not, but he's betrayed into a position he probably doesn't believe. [Pauses.] I've heard from many gay people that being gay is to do with behaving differently from heterosexuals and that our attitudes to sex and relationships is quite other. These are the people who don't want to get married and want to go cottaging and cruising and so on. But that's their point of view. But you can't, from an odd interview or remark that a famous person makes in response to a question they haven't invited — you have to take the reply with a pinch of salt. There are enough openly gay people, at least in this country, with a very high profile that give a different point of view.
AE: That's a good reminder. I do think people forget that. Which current gay actors most impress you?
IM: I don't really think of actors as being gay. I think of them as being actors. But let me think for a second. There's so many of them. Antony Sher is one of our great actors. He was born in South Africa, but is now a British citizen who has just got married, I'm happy to say, to his partner. Simon Russell Beale, star of the National Theater, a younger actor who is absolutely terrific. In your country, Cherry Jones is a remarkable actor. You know, it's a worry, isn't it, that there aren't more openly lesbian [actors], full stop, but that's a whole other issue. A middle-aged friend of mine who is a actor says, 'Don't ask me to come out. It's hard enough getting work as a woman without being gay on top of it.' It's harder for women, much harder.
AE: Do you remember a costar of yours from Gods and Monsters named Jack Plotnick?
IM: Of course!
AE: We just did an interview with him, and he's got a new series over here called Lovespring International which is quite funny. It's quite refreshing because he gets to play a very aggressively heterosexual character.
IM: Good! I got on very well with Jack.
AE: A New York Times reporter recently commented that Bravo, a cable network with many queer-friendly shows, is actually the preeminent gay network because it is a more welcoming place than our two strictly gay networks, here! and Logo. The point seemed to be that a strictly gay network wasn't a good thing. Would you agree or disagree with that?
IM: Well, why not if the people want it? That's fine. I don't know what the motives are of the people running it. Probably to make money. Everything is welcome as far as I'm concerned. I would hate to think that as a gay man, all I could watch was the gay network. I think sometimes I would like in the news to see it presented from a gay point of view. I don't know where I would go for that. I suppose The Advocate and maybe AfterElton, I don't know. But you know in assessing, let's say the current war in the Middle East, we ought to know what impact the changes and violence there is having on gay people. Iran is not a place to live as a gay person. And I gather it is much harder being gay in [the] current Iraq than it used to be under Saddam Hussein, oddly enough. And gay people do talk about this, but whether it gets reflected on the gay channels. Is there a gay news channel?
AE: There isn't a gay news channel, but there are some shows that do cover gay news by gay people for gay people.
IM: I wonder how they define what gay news is?
AE: I imagine anything that specifically affects us, like anti-gay or pro-gay legislation. I think what they do is report on things that our mainstream media doesn't. It can be rather shocking what our media outlets — especially the broadcast ones — don't report, ranging from homophobic legislation being passed to comments by politicians.
IM: Well, thank goodness for MySpace and all the means of communication on the net where the word must go around very, very quickly indeed. You don't look to newspapers to tell you the whole truth. And that's the same whether you're straight or gay or Christian or atheist. With the internet, I would've thought it was easier these days for news that we're interested in, or news from our point of view, to be circulated, but quite where you would go for it, I don't know. If these gay channels are covering the stories that everyone else is covering, but from a gay point of view — very interesting thing indeed.
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