— Doogie’s gay!
— Ted Haggard is obscenely gay! You know how we liberals always make jokes about really, really homophobic morons being gay? THIS IS WHY.
— Kirstie Alley’s running around in a bikini! (OK, so we’re not exactly sure how this is gay. But it does seem a little gay, don’t it?)
— And on a serious note … from half of Tucson’s 490th registered domestic partnership … please, talk to everyone you know and encourage them to get to the polls to vote against Proposition 107. It’s an awful bit of pure bigotry that we have a legitimate chance of defeating. Let’s do it.
This article appears in Nov 2-8, 2006.
Neil Patrick Harris being an openly gay person detracts from ablity to have that sense of believability in the character he plays on TV: Swarly the womanizer on How I Met Your Mother. No issue with NPH being gay, but there now is that mental disconnect when watching that show. Unless his character becomes a bisexual one.
I guess I just don’t think of people’s sexual preferences when watching them act — you know, if they are good actors. For me, it would be the same as watching some actress and thinking ‘oh, but this is weird, because she is married to x, not this guy’ or ‘but this guy is a horndog who would never get romantic with one girl’ etc….
Why would someone’s sexuality take you out of the story any more than the rest of their ‘real’ life?
I am with Ann on this, Michael. Are you saying I could never play a believable womanizer? (Follow-up question: Should I be offended by this, or consider it a compliment?)
To clarify, I was commenting specifically about NPH and his identity. I believe that when it comes to actors, the strongest identity is the “persona” we associate them with. For example, for me Brad Garrett is always going to be that guy Robert from Everybody Loves Raymond, but his costar Ray Romano isn’t merely the specific Raymond he played on TV. In that same vein, upon seeing movie trailers for Will Arnett’s movie Let’s Go To Prison, I thought, “Oh man! I wonder what GOB will be like here” instead of, “I wonder what Will Arnett will be like.” We identify actors and actresses by their strongest identity. With that in mind, to me, Neil Patrick Harris is Neil Patrick Harris – he’s not Doogie Howser, he’s NPH, the dude hopped up on ecstasy from Harold & Kumar. So when I see Neil Patrick Harris as a womanizer on TV, now that him coming out is a current topic of discussion, it’s hard to see him being in that role. When the discussion dies down, I think the mental disconnect for me will die out too.