Dennis Quaid told The Associated Press in 2002 about “Far From Heaven”: “By Take 3 it was just fine, just another scene.Rex Wockner, a syndicated San Diego journalist who for nearly two decades has compiled a weekly “Quote Unquote” column of people talking about gay-related topics, shared some of his favorite “kissing” quotes from celebrity interviews. After the stubble answer (“One word,” Gyllenhaal told People about Ledger’s face: “Exfoliate”) and the ooky answer (“That why we had stunt doubles,” Ledger quipped about the love scenes to CBS’s “Early Show”), Gyllenhaal finally started saying it was like kissing anybody else - “like doing a love scene with a woman I’m not particularly attracted to,” he told the London Telegraph.
Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger fielded kissing questions a thousand ways when “Brokeback Mountain” was released in 2005. But then that’s even more evidence, I think, for the argument that people should be allowed to be who they are.”) (Another actor from that show, Hal Sparks, was more circumspect: “When you don’t have the internal impetus that makes you gay in the first place, you’re kind of flying blind in that area. You feel dirty,” Chris Potter, from Showtime’s “Queer as Folk,” once told MSNBC. You want to go to a strip bar or touch the makeup girls. Straight actors who have played gay roles usually give the same answer: a combination of disgust, bravado and the sure-is-weird feeling of stubble not their own. If an actor were to say he enjoyed a scene where he kisses another man, then he’s somehow less of a man.” To answer this, Scholibo puts forth the biggest academic “duh” in cultural studies: “Everything in culture is rooted in the idea of masculinity, patriarchy … You have to be disgusted by two men kissing, otherwise there goes (your) masculinity. “No one ever asks him how ‘gross’ it is to kiss a woman.” “No one ever asks Neil Patrick Harris what it’s like to play a straight guy who sleeps with lots of women” on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother,” Scholibo says. “It’s especially not as funny as it might have been a month ago, before Proposition 8 was passed,” amending California’s constitution to forbid gay marriage. It’s titillating,” says Corey Scholibo, entertainment editor for the Advocate magazine.īut the joking “just isn’t funny anymore,” he says.
“This kind of thing goes on any time there’s a movie where two men kiss and whether it’s a gay audience or a mainstream audience, it’s something everyone wants to know about. “If you wanted, I’d be willing to kiss you right now,” Franco offered. “I mean, do you really want to be good at kissing a guy?” Letterman said as his audience howled with delight. “See, if it’s me, I’m kind of hoping I do screw it up,” Letterman shot back.
“I didn’t want to screw it up,” Franco told Letterman on “Late Show” last week. Yes, it was strange, but no more so than a scene in which he had to cook dinner, which he would never, ever do in real life. Yes, one scene involved more than a minute of continuous kissing with Penn on Castro Street in front of hundreds of people. No, he and Penn did not rehearse the kissing. He’s had to rehash the same stories again and again: Franco has tried to walk a fine line of laughing along in such interviews, while pointing out that “Milk” is essentially a movie about fighting for acceptance. Judging from interviews during the years, actors who have filmed scenes in which they have pointed a revolver at someone’s head and pulled the trigger still think gay kissing is the grossest thing they’ve done for a movie. It’s a post-ironic, post-homophobic homophobia, the kind seen most weeks in “Saturday Night Live” sketches or in any Judd Apatow movie. There’s a whiff of discomfort of the Seinfeldian, “not-that-there’s-anything-wrong-with-it” variety. We live in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera but for men who kiss men, it’s still the final frontier. Underlying it all is this notion that a gay kissing scene must be a male actor’s worst Hollywood job hazard, including stunt work, extreme weather or five hours of special-effects makeup.