Aaron Sorkin Comes to Newsweek's Aid in Gay Actor Controversy... Sort Of

It's been a rough week for Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh: after writing an editorial about how he can't buy gay actors in straight roles, he was eviscerated by Kristin Chenoweth and made the target of a boycott by Glee creator Ryan Murphy, despite his hasty attempt to reframe his intentions. Today, though, Setoodeh found an unlikely defender in The West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin.

Ironically, Sorkin is an ex-flame of Chenoweth's -- a fact that he'd rather you not know, as he makes clear in his HuffPo essay called "Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay." For a screenwriter and playwright, an unusual amount of Sorkin's own dirty laundry has been shared in the public eye -- including a past history of drug problems -- and it certainly informs where he's coming from on this one:

In her response to Setoodeh, Ms. Chenoweth made good point after good point after good point...

...and missed the point.

So did Setoodeh. [...]

But with sincere respect to Ms. Chenoweth and the hundreds and hundreds of Internet posters who've crashed down on Setoodeh in the last few days -- some understandably passionate and some unfortunately hostile -- I don't think Setoodeh was being homophobic. Just wrong.

The problem doesn't have anything to do with sexual preference. The problem has everything to do with the fact that we know too much about each other and we care too much about what we know. In one short decade we have been reconditioned to be entertained by the most private areas of other people's lives. We've become the family dog who's allowed to eat anything that falls on the floor, and the press is the little kid in the family who keeps dropping food. Sandy Bullock's life falls apart? That's for us. A golfer gets caught with strippers? We'll take that, thank you. Lindsay Lohan's an alcoholic? Mmm, mmm good! When Jennifer Aniston plays a movie character who's looking for love, her performance -- always sublime -- doesn't stand a chance against the real story we've been told it's okay to pay attention to, which is that Jennifer Aniston is looking for love. I can't hum a single John Mayer song but I can name five women he's slept with. Sean, for Setoodeh, the show began before you even showed up to the theater that night.

The volcanic eruption of tabloids, Internet insanity and -- you better believe it -- reality TV, has de-creepyized voyeurism. More than that, it's made the private lives of public people -- in the vocabulary of television writers -- the "A" story. And in a not-so-convoluted way, the "A" story has an author -- thousands of authors in an extraordinary collaboration. When I need the audience to know that a piece of information they're about to hear is important, I can use words, a close-up, a push-in, music... when the authors of the no-longer-private-lives "A" story want the audience to know that something's important, it shows up on our Yahoo homepage. (The third story on my homepage yesterday was that Britain, our closest ally, has a new Prime Minister. The first story was about Justin Bieber. Unless the new Prime Minister is Justin Bieber, something's obviously gone wrong.) Is Sean Hayes' sexuality relevant to his performance? It has to be -- the "authors" told us it was important. (Though Setoodeh would have done well to have asked himself if Mr. Hayes' performance would have been any different if C.C. Baxter was in love with a man instead of Ms. Chenoweth's Fran Kubelik. It wouldn't have been.)

I would never presume to -- and those words are almost always followed by whoever said them proceeding to do exactly what they just said they would never presume to do -- but I would never presume to tell someone how they should feel about something. I can only imagine that Setoodeh's piece felt like a solid kidney punch, not to just Mr. Hayes and the other actors tagged in the story, but to teenagers -- kids who live in daily fear of what their parents are going to say, of getting the hell beaten out of them at school, of being an oddity. Gay actors, you'll forgive the expression, are caught between a rock and a hard place. Only criminals and adulterers should have to hide who they are. And in addition to living their own lives in sun and not shadow, these actors want to -- admirably -- be role models for these kids. But they also know the blanker their canvas the better their chance of marginalizing the "A" story. They know that even in 2010, there's still no such thing as an actor who's gay, a movie star and alive all at the same time.

But what exactly is Sorkin prescribing? A straight actor wouldn't think twice about bringing his date on the red carpet (as Sorkin himself used to do with Chenoweth), but a gay actor ought to? If called upon to accept an award, should he thank everyone but his same-sex partner? Sure, there are all sorts of dirty details about actors that could muss up the "blank canvas" Sorkin would seek to preserve. Still, when it comes to basic human sexuality and love, the decision to obfuscate, lie, and compromise isn't a protection of an actor's personal life -- it's an obstruction to one.

Now That You Mention It, Rock Hudson Did Seem Gay [HuffPo]