The cinematic curse of disabled queerness

Yet many non-disabled actors have won Oscars for playing disabled and the list is shockingly long at nearly 70 nominations and 27 wins.

The same questions are raised continually: Why don’t directors cast disabled people in disabled roles or cast LGBTQ people in LGBTQ roles? How much does the lack of true representation influence how these roles are portrayed on screen and who chooses to bring them to the screen at all? Why is the disabled villain a trope and the disabled gay villain, like “The Whale’s” Charlie a villain by virtue solely of being one or the other or both?

by Victoria A. Brownworth

Brendan Fraser is a good actor, possibly even a great actor. But when he won the Best Actor Oscar at the 95th Academy Awards, count me among those not cheering. I didn’t need yet another depiction of a tragic disabled person who would rather be dead than disabled and whose gayness is yet another trope for misery.

Fraser’s performance in “The Whale” was heralded as emotionally riveting and deeply compelling. But for many queer and disabled (and queer disabled) viewers, it was yet another example of the villainizing of disabled and fat people on screen. It was also, yet again, a straight actor winning an Oscar for playing a dying gay person, exactly 30 years after Tom Hanks won the Oscar for playing Andy Beckett, a gay man dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia.”

Long ago, I learned about the dead lesbian trope as a teenager, watching Shirley MacLaine hang herself late one night on TV in an airing of “The Children’s Hour.” That film of the Lillian Hellman play both introduced me to lesbians on screen and shaped – or perhaps warped – my teenage lesbian life. So too did seeing a repertory screening of Sandy Dennis, a real life lesbian, and Anne Heywood in the film version of D.H. Lawrence’s novella “The Fox.” Dennis’s character is felled by a tree so her sexually frustrated butch partner, Heywood, can return to wearing dresses and be with a man.

Both films were nominated for Oscars and other awards, with MacLaine and Heywood winning acting awards for their portrayals of unhappy les- bians. “The Fox” was the fifth most popular film in Britain in 1968.

Stigmatizing

The history of how Hollywood handles disability and queerness and its intersection is as fraught as it is disturbing and outraging. That history melds the terrible treatment by the studios of gay and bisexual notables with the stigmatizing of disabled people.

With only a handful of exceptions, disability only wins awards when it’s presented by non-disabled directors and actors. It’s still shocking that in 2021, the Academy thought there was more humanity in an octopus than in the story of the groundbreaking disability rights movement in America.

The Oscar for Best Documentary Feature went to “My Octopus Teacher” instead of the extraordinary story of a major civil rights movement impacting America’s 63 million disabled people, “Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution.”

Hollywood’s dark history of hiding gay and lesbian actors with sham marriages and fake news stories about heterosexual liaisons slams up against the equally long history of having straight actors play gay roles and non-disabled people play disabled. That actors are nominated for and/or win Oscars for playing gay or playing disabled is almost always a given.

Some actors have built their careers on playing dying or murdered LGTBQ people who are also sometimes disabled. Just as Fraser won the Best Actor Oscar for playing a dying disabled gay man, Jared Leto won Best Supporting Actor in 2014 playing a dying trans woman and Matthew McConaughey won Best Actor that same year for the same film, “Dallas Buyers Club,” for his role as a straight man with AIDS.

Oscar-worthy?

Hilary Swank won the Best Actress Oscar in 1999 for playing murdered trans man Brandon Teena in “Boys Don’t Cry” and in 2005 won Best Actress again for playing disabled in “Million Dollar Baby.” Charlize Theron played mentally ill lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos in 2004 and won the Best Actress Oscar for making the complicated and deeply damaged Wuornos into deranged and despicable terrorist in “Monster.”

In 2005 Sean Penn won Best Actor for playing the murdered Harvey Milk in “Milk.” Eddie Redmayne was nominated for two Best Actor Oscars back to back in 2015 and 2016. He played disabled physicist Stephen Hawking in “The Theory of Everything” and trans woman Lili Elbe in “The Danish Girl.”

He won for his portrayal of Hawking.

At this year’s Oscars, several nominees were straight actors playing gay. In addition to Fraser, Cate Blanchett was nominated as Best Actress for her role as narcissistic lesbian conductor Lydia Tár. (In 2016 Blanchett was nominated for playing the eponymous lesbian role in “Carol.”) Stephanie Hsu was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” in which she plays lesbian Joy Wang and also Jobu Tupaki, who is homicidal.

Thus far only three disabled actors have won Oscars: Harold Russell, an amputee and veteran of World War II won Best Supporting Actor in 1947 for “The Best Years of Our Lives,” Deaf actor Marlee Matlin won Best Actress in 1987 for “Children of a Lesser God” and Deaf actor Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor in 2022 for “CODA.” (Matlin co-stars in that film.) So every 30 to 40 years a disabled actor gets to play disabled and win.

Daniel Aronofsky, who directed “The Whale,” has made a career of portraying disabled and gay people as monstrous and winning awards for it. In addition to “The Whale,” Natalie Portman won the Best Actress Oscar for her portrayal of a psycho lesbian ballerina, Nina, in Aronofsky’s “Black Swan.” Ellen Burstyn was nominated for Best Actress for “Requiem for a Dream” where she also loses her mind.

So, how is adding another gay disabled monster to the film canon a good thing? Why are we made to be repulsed by Charlie and why was such a depiction lauded by the Academy?

The addition of queerness and disability into the Hollywood canon as anything but vehicles for non-LGBTQ and non-disabled actors may be much further down that path of inclusion. Lauding “The Whale” as anything but a vicious and stigmatizing portrayal of the intersection of disability and queerness would be an error, and yet another setback for marginalized people who deserve their own true-to-life stories.t