Hollywood's last taboo
AS Top Gun star Kelly McGillis admits she's gay, we reveal the very mixed fortunes of other leading actress who led similar double lives in the past...
Kelly McGillis always said that she found starring opposite Tom Cruise in iconic Eighties movie Top Gun an “uncomfortable experience.”
Inches taller than her co-star, she was perpetually forced to slouch, slump and lean over so that she would not dwarf him.
“I towered over him, really,” she recalled. “I had bad posture through the whole movie.”
Yet this week a new reason for her discomfort at the time emerged: the actress, now 51, announced that she is a lesbian.
“I’m done with the man thing,” says McGillis, now looking for a fresh partner. “Definitely a woman.”
McGillis, who has revealed that she was raped in her New York apartment in 1982 while an aspiring actress, says: “I had a lot of things happen that convinced me that God was punishing me because I was gay.”
Coming out as a lesbian was “an ongoing process from the time I was probably 12,” she confesses.
It’s a brave some would say perilous move in an industry that claims to be open-minded and liberal, yet paradoxically often ostracises gays and lesbians once they come out.
“Being lesbian is Hollywood’s last unspoken prejudice,” says an insider. “It can still be career death.”
The gay magazine Out, lamenting the fact that agents, managers and publicists tell stars not to reveal their true sexuality, said: “These people aren’t homophobic, they’ll remind you.
I felt God was punishing me for being gay
"They’re simply reflecting the reality they perceive, which is that the public can’t handle an openly gay actor in straight roles.”
Lesbians are hardly newcomers to Hollywood. In the Forties, a coterie of leading ladies became privately known as the Sewing Circle, a polite euphemism for the sisterhood allegedly indulging in steamy lesbian encounters which included Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Joan Crawford.
Being exposed as a lesbian could have ended their glittering careers and, amazingly, it is claimed that almost 70 years later little has changed.
Some stars are afraid to reveal their sexual preference, even at the height of their success. Jodie Foster, at a breakfast celebrating powerful women in Hollywood in 2007, concluded her speech by thanking “my beautiful Cydney, who sticks with me through all the rotten and the bliss”.
After decades of rumour and innuendo, it was the closest that The Silence Of The Lambs star dared come to admitting her sexuality but she would go no further in confirming long-standing reports that Cydney Bernard was her lover and co-parent to her two children.
As Hollywood inches towards increased tolerance of alternative lifestyles, a handful of female stars have come out of the closet, only to find their choice of roles severely limited.
“An actress can be beautiful and sexy but the moment she comes out publicly as a lesbian, producers have a hard time imagining her as a romantic leading lady,” says a studio insider.
Ironically, there are more lesbian characters than ever on TV (often played by heterosexual actresses) and off-screen there are those flirting with lesbianism seemingly for shock value: Madonna planting a kiss on Britney Spears; Lindsay Lohan romancing Hollywood DJ Samantha Ronson; and repeated images of reality TV show contestants kissing in hot tubs.
Angelina Jolie has admitted to romancing a female friend, while Drew Barrymore says that she considers herself bisexual, though she adds: “I don’t think I could ever just solely be with a woman. It’s just not enough for me.”
Yet for those lesbians who proudly come out of the closet, Hollywood can offer an icy reception.
Anne Heche, 39, starred in Donnie Brasco, Volcano and the remake of Psycho, until she went public with her love for TV sitcom star and rising movie actress Ellen DeGeneres and her film career slowed.
DeGeneres, 51, was building a successful movie career as a romantic leading lady but after she came out studio bosses cooled off towards her and she had to reinvent herself as a daytime TV chat show host.
Last year, DeGeneres married actress Portia de Rossi, 36, the blonde beauty in hit TV comedy Ally McBeal. Though de Rossi has recently won the role of a hard-nosed boss in TV series Better Off Ted, her days as a romantic lead
appear to be numbered.
Rosie O’Donnell, 47, who was developing a reputation as a character actress through such films as A League Of Their Own and The Flintstones, also saw her acting career stall after she came out and found refuge in her own television chat show, which has now been axed.
Sex And The City co-star Cynthia Nixon, 43, left her boyfriend and their two children in 2004 and began dating a female public school advocate. “It didn’t change who I am,” she maintains.
“I’m just a woman who fell in love with a woman.”
The exploits of the Sewing Circle of Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn and Co were well known in Beverly Hills society.
Screen legends including Tallulah Bankhead, Barbara Stanwyck, Myrna Loy and Elsa Lanchester were also involved, hiding their sexuality by finding male “beards” to chaperone them to premieres and parties, or even having
a “lavender marriage,” often to gay men.
Axel Madsen, author of The Sewing Circle, claimed that Garbo’s famed isolation and privacy was not vanity, but “her fear of being discovered a lesbian”. Stanwyck’s lovers reportedly included Garbo, Dietrich and Joan Crawford.
For years, the Sewing Circle’s sexual silence has been emulated by Hollywood’s leading lesbians and shattered by only a few now including Kelly McGillis.
The actress struggled with life in the public eye ever since she starred opposite Harrison Ford in 1985’s Amish murder mystery Witness and she was unnerved by the phenomenon that Top Gun became the following year.
After starring opposite Jodie Foster in 1988 rape drama The Accused, she retreated from Hollywood to focus on running restaurants, only occasionally venturing back into acting for small, independently-made films or to perform on stage.
Lesbian rumours first flew after she starred with Foster and again in 2001 when she appeared in gay love story The Monkey’s Mask. Even so, she said: “This is a role, not a statement about my life. It isn’t about me ‘coming out,’ but if people want to think that fine. I don’t care.”
McGillis kept the rumours swirling when she appeared on American lesbian TV drama The L Word in 2007. Yet she hid her sexual orientation through two difficult marriages: her first, to Boyd Black in 1979, ended after three years; her second, to yachting millionaire Fred Tillman, collapsed in 2002 after 13 years and two daughters: Kelsey, now 19, and Sonora, 16.
In Hollywood, Neil Giuliano, president of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says: “We applaud Kelly’s decision to come out and look forward to her adding her voice and experiences to the growing understanding of gay and lesbian lives.”
But his optimism may not be matched by the Hollywood executives who hire the stars. And lesbian romances, like any others, do not always end happily ever after.
Only months after Jodie Foster finally acknowledged her partner of 15 years, the couple split and the actress was seen with a younger companion.
Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche parted months after jointly coming out and Heche turned back to men and marriage, and had two children.
Hollywood’s enduring prejudice against lesbians, far deeper-rooted than its anxiety over gay men, “is the story that won’t go away”, wrote Axel Madsen, who died in 2007.
“We may be in the 21st century and find gay lifestyles served up in mainstream entertainment from novels and sitcoms, but to describe oneself as a lesbian in today’s star-crazy Hollywood is as much of a career killer as it was during the halcyon days of Louis B Mayer and Greta Garbo.”
Kelly McGillis may no longer feel that God is punishing her for being lesbian but Hollywood’s last unspoken prejudice may still exact its price.
