“All this hoo-ha about bad role models and positive images! Of course gay people are murderers, bigamists, drug addicts and nasty people--just as much as heterosexual people are all of these things. What it all boils down to is, we are all people, and we all have the same human desires. It just happens that some desires go this way and some desires go that way.” – Jaye Davidson

From the silent era on, Hollywood has paraded before us a veritable dynasty of villainous emperors, kings and royalty, many often effeminately decadent. For sheer fruity and unflattering gay stereotype portrayal in a “toga” film, no one tops Jay Robinson as the raving, hissy fit-throwing and deranged Caligula in The Robe (1953) and Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954).

As noted by Glenn Erickson of DVD Savant:

“The great Jay Robinson returns to chew up the scenery as no one's done before or since. Caligula's an extreme character, and Robinson's whining, nasal squeal does him justice. Robinson practically foams at the mouth while mocking Susan Hayward for her infidelity. His overacted leering suggests all kinds of obscenities that the film can't show. They've even put what look like devilish horns on his little golden crown.”

Charles Laughton, (no stranger to playing pathetic, perverted curmudgeons of all kinds), steals the show as depraved, half-mad Emperor Nero in Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Sign of the Cross (1932). He burns Rome. He slaughters Christians (all while hosting outlandish, gluttonous orgies). More interested in poetry and the amusing agonies of the Coliseum, this Nero is quite oblivious to his horny wife Empress Claudette Colbert’s attraction to hero Fredric March. A fascinating actor who thoroughly relished his many misanthropic roles, Laughton (gay in real life) could both attract and repel audiences with his oddly charming, misfit appeal. He was able to project his own conflicting feelings about his homosexuality and his ungainly looks into his acting talent, to great effect.

Most recently, Damien-like Joaquin Phoenix appeared as the patricidal, incestuous and all-round creepy Emperor Commodus in The Gladiator (2000).

There’s Roddy McDowall as the way-less-than-masculine Octavian in Cleopatra (1963). In the idiotic The Silver Chalice (1954), we have Jacques Aubuchon as a poof of a Nero and the always sexually weird Jack Palance as nefarious Simon the Magician.

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