A Tale of Two Cities: How New York and Los Angeles Treat Their Out Actors

The Yankees versus the Dodgers. Subways versus suburban sprawl. Hot dogs versus hummus. New York and Los Angeles are opposites in many ways.

Including, it is said, the way two of these town’s most famous entertainment industries — theater in New York, and TV and movies in Los Angeles — treat their openly gay and bisexual actors. In the anything-goes world of theater, they say, it’s all about the work. But while the creative folks in the Hollywood movie and TV industry may be just as open-minded as their New York counter-parts, the financial stakes are higher — and they’re producing entertainment for more than just a liberal New York audience. According to the conventional wisdom, this has made them far less accepting of actors who are out to the general public.

But is the conventional wisdom true? And even if it is, how have things changed in recent years?

In looking for answers, AfterElton.com turned to insiders in both New York and Los Angeles, as well as out TV and theater actors including Chad Allen, Mad Men’s Bryan Batt, Cheyenne Jackson, and Christopher Sieber.

City of Illusions

For decades after its founding as the movie capital of the world, there were no openly gay actors in Los Angeles.

“We live in such a different world today when everyone knows [about gay people],” says David Ehrenstein, author of Open Secret: Gay Hollywood, 1928-1998. In the 30s, 40s, and 50s, “’gay’ was not talked about anywhere, ever, publicly. But if you were gay in show business, you were a hell of a lot better off than if you were a clerk back in Sheboygan. People worked at the studios all day, then they went home and lived their lives and no one bothered them.”

David Ehrenstein

Photo credit: Stephen Shugerman/Getty Images

There were definitely arranged marriages and fake opposite-sex “dates” for gay actors, Ehrenstein says, but these were for the public’s benefit, not the Hollywood community, which practiced an early form of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

In the 1960s and 70s, flamboyant comedians such as Rip Taylor, Paul Lynde, Alan Sues, and Charles Nelson Reilly camped it up on television, displaying what seems, in retrospect, to be obviously stereotypically “gay” characteristics. But none of these actors were openly gay — Nelson Reilly finally came out a few years before his death in 2007 — and most of Middle America perceived them to be colorful eccentrics, not “gay” per se.

“Paul felt stigmatized by the industry about being gay,” Steve Wilson, one of the authors of Center Square: The Paul Lynde Story, told Salon.com. “He got very fed up with [Hollywood Squares] and after a while, through a combination of the writers getting more risqué as the '70s wore on and Paul not caring one way or the other, he gradually let his guard down. Eventually, his gayness became incredibly obvious. His jokes came straight from gay culture, but mainstream America back then had practically nil exposure to that world.”

Everything changed in 1985, when Rock Hudson, formerly one of the biggest movie stars in the world and a strapping, supposedly heterosexual heartthrob, died of AIDS and was subsequently revealed to have been gay — something widely known in Hollywood circles.

“A big beloved star has his secret come out,” Ehrenstein says. “Everyone suddenly was given leave to discuss the idea of being closeted in Hollywood. That was the start of it, when the dam burst. You could no longer talk of ‘gay’ as this secret, shameful thing.”

Rock Hudson (left) & Richard Chamberlain

Few Hollywood celebrities voluntarily came out in the years that followed — though British actors Ian McKellen and Rupert Everett were exceptions to that rule, coming out in 1988 and 1989, respectively. Meanwhile, other gay actors were outed. Thorn Birds hunk Richard Chamberlain was revealed to be gay in a French magazine in 1989, though he didn’t actually come out until his 2003 autobiography, Shattered Love, in which he writes that he felt it necessary to stay closeted to protect his career. (Chamberlain declined to speak with AfterElton.com.)

Next Page! Those tabloid rumors about Kevin Spacey!