Ten Actors Who Played Gay

3. Bruce Willis

In the 1997 suspense thriller The Jackal (a remake of the 1973 film The Day of the Jackal), Willis plays what might seem like a fairly standard role for him. He is a hardened, macho killer, a man of action and a master of disguise who can assume multiple identities. But this time, this killer's identities include a gay one.

In Washington, D.C., he goes to a gay bar, picks up a gay man (played by out actor Stephen Spinella), and kisses him. Straight male Willis fans might howl at the idea that "the Jackal" was genuinely meant to be queer — and no doubt it's not what the studio intended. But although the Spinella character does later prove of minor use to Willis, there seems to be no real reason why he couldn't have used a woman in the same way — or why he had to kiss Spinella.

All that said, the movie didn't exactly win any prizes for gay visibility. After a test audience responded with applause to the scene where Willis finally shoots Spinella dead, GLAAD persuaded the filmmakers to reshoot the scene to make it clear that Spinella is killed because he has realized that Willis is the Jackal, and not because he is gay. So, for those who are counting, that's one more gay movie character who meets an early, violent death — but hey, at least it's not because of homophobia, right?

2. Marlon Brando

In the 1967 film Reflections in a Golden Eye, based on a novel by bisexual writer Carson McCullers, Brando plays Maj. Weldon Penderton, the repressed homosexual husband of Leonora (played by Elizabeth Taylor). Penderton is obsessed with Pvt. Williams (played by Robert Forster), and from there on things unfold in the tragic, overwrought fashion you might expect from a gay-themed movie made in the '60s.

But there have been suggestions that Brando may have been less uptight in his own life. In a widely quoted (though unauthenticated) interview, he supposedly told a journalist that "like a large number of men, I too have had homosexual experiences, and I am not ashamed. … Deep down, I feel ambiguous."

Maria Schneider, his co-star in Last Tango in Paris, has been quoted as saying that she and Brando got along because "we're both bisexual." Assuming these quotations are accurate, it's a whole other question whether Brando had good taste in men. In a 1994 television interview on Larry King Live, promoting his autobiography, Brando famously finished by kissing King on the lips.

1. Forest Whitaker

Whitaker was this year's winner of the Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance as Idi Amin, the mad, bad, Ugandan dictator, in the British drama The Last King of Scotland. But his back catalogue includes not one but two queer roles. In 1992, he starred as the gentle, cricket-loving British soldier Jody in Neil Jordan's highly unconventional sleeper hit The Crying Game. Jody is in love with the beautiful, exotic, transgender Dil (played by Jaye Davidson), but he also flirts with IRA foot soldier Fergus (played by Stephen Rea), telling him, "You're the one … with the killer smile and the baby face. … You're the handsome one."

In 1994, Whitaker followed this up with an appearance as the gay fashion designer Cy Bianco, partnered with a flamboyant Richard E. Grant, in Robert Altman's flop satire of the fashion industry, Ready to Wear.