What Does It Take to Be a Gay Icon Today?

These shows also point to those cases where the characters are, for the most part, far more iconic than the actresses playing them. Consider, for example, Xena and Buffy, two characters who AfterElton.com has previously analyzed in terms of their iconic qualities. When it comes to the actresses playing them, only Lucy Lawless has gone that extra step toward becoming a gay icon by actively courting her gay fan base in interviews and at fan conventions.

While all the actresses on Sex and the City have their gay fans, only Sarah Jessica Parker seems to truly have become a gay icon — but she was well on her way even before the show began. As far back as 1995, Parker was telling interviewers that her career goal was to become a gay icon, and she has long demonstrated an awareness and appreciation of her gay fan base.

Her role on Sex and the City — and her emergence as a style maven and fashion icon — solidified this status. Evidence of the esteemed iconic company in which she is now placed cropped up recently on Weeds, where a newly outed gay man discussed his affection for a female character as being the “Judy Garland-Joan Crawford-Sarah Jessica Parker kind of love.”

When Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow,” the sadness in her voice, even when singing about such happy images as bluebirds and lemondrops, was palpable, hinting at complex depths beyond the wholesome image projected on screen. This was, in effect, the sound of the closet, and it spoke to gay men’s consciousness that the image they presented in their own public lives was often at odds with a truer sense of self that mainstream society would not condone.

This duality was only reinforced by the scandals in which Garland’s career became increasingly mired. Hearing shocking reports of drug and alcohol abuse, of exhaustion and collapse, gay men could not help but sympathize with a woman whose career, whose image, whose entire life, appeared to be dictated by an authoritarian studio system run by powerful men.

While Garland’s scandal-plagued life and tragic death hinted at the damaging aspects of a closet-like dual existence, there were other early icons who gay men admired for their determination to depart from societal standards and expectations. Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, in classic films like Jezebel (1938) and Mildred Pierce (1945), played strong-willed female characters who glaringly strayed from the subservient, meekly feminine norms associated with being a typical wife, mother, or daughter.

And in their careers and private lives, as well, they were labeled “difficult women” who fiercely fought studio executives who they thought were mismanaging their careers, who never settled happily down for conventional marriage (Davis was married four times, Crawford five). They were living embodiments of how strong-willed individuals might defy closet-like restrictions forced on them.

These qualities were further emphasized as they grew older. In Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), the two women portrayed aging spinsters, whose demented and cruel behavior to each other countered the very notions of sisterhood — animosity which was only accentuated by the famed, particularly nasty public feud that erupted between them.

As Baby Jane indicated, as the actresses aged, they were forced to take roles that portrayed them as inhuman and monstrous (see Berserk! (1967), aka “Circus of Terror” for a prime example), an indication of the disgust with which Hollywood, like the mainstream society it reflects and markets to, viewed women past a certain age, particularly those who had repeatedly flouted accepted wifely and maternal behaviors in pursuit of careers and independence.

But this too spoke to gay men, who recognized how they were also demonized both in film and in the minds of an ignorant public, who viewed their lack of conformity to heterosexual and masculine ideals as signs of deviance.

When it comes to identifying men considered gay icons, it’s tempting to say that while female icons are those figures whom gay men want to be, male icons are ones they want to bed. But that’s, at best, an oversimplification. While it’s true that a fair amount of body worship goes on among the gay community, there’s a difference between a sex object and an icon. Not every man on the AfterElton.com Hot 100 list, after all, is an icon. And it should be noted that, in general, male icons don’t seem to hold the same resonance — or spark the same reverence — that the divas do.

But there are certain male celebrities who have earned special status. To identify the true gay male icons today, it helps to turn to the dandy daddy of them all, Oscar Wilde, who during a period predating modern terminology for sexuality, had affairs with many men, several of which became publicly known, wrote passionately and thoughtfully about these affections, and suffered legal and social attacks for his actions. More recently, those men who have openly identified themselves as gay with a sense of style and wit have pretty much been considered icons, from Quentin Crisp to Harvey Fierstein.