I recently had the pleasure of interviewing one of my favorite authors, Celia Laskey, about her book Cover Story. Set in the early aughts, a publicist is hired to keep her queer client in the closet but falls in love with her instead.
It’s the book I devoured during my silent haircut and haven’t stopped thinking about since.
I’ve edited my conversation with Celia for clarity and brevity.
Lelia Gowland (LG): Would you share what prompted the book?
Celia Laskey (CL): One of my friends is always jet-setting around, and at the time that I had this potluck party, he was dating the editor of a really popular fashion magazine. They were going to all these red carpet events and hobnobbing with celebrities.
I was mid-bite of a quinoa salad, and he was like, “Oh, guys, I have the funniest story! We were at this after-party recently, and I saw this A-list actor with multiple Academy Awards kiss a man.”
He was always publicly partnered with women.
We asked if he was bi, and my friend said no. Apparently the man he kissed was his long-time male partner, and everyone at the party seemed to know.
It was totally chill. All the other celebrities, and most of the people in the media, know. It's just the one thing that they don't reveal. The only people who don't know are the plebeians.
I'm like, okay. A, that's respectful, and we don't want to out anyone.
But B, why is that the only verboten topic? And why can you speculate about celebrities in heterosexual relationships but you will never speculate about same-sex relationships. If you won't do that, we're saying it's bad [to be queer] in some way, right?
Like, worse than affairs, worse than drug charges, worse than abuse charges? You're saying this is THE worst fucking thing.
LG: The plebeian's perception is that “Hollywood's so gay,” that it’s so queer-friendly. But in the afterword of Cover Story, you challenged me to think of any A-list openly queer celebrity, and I couldn't.
What's preventing these A-list celebrities from coming out in your mind?
CL: Definitely their careers. So many of the celebrities that I know for a fact are queer are complete heartthrobs for the opposite sex—especially when it is a male closeted celebrity.
Middle-aged women go crazy for these guys. [These men are] attractive, they're very interesting, and they have an open, feminine quality to them.
An older woman in my life had a crush on one of these closeted A-list actors. When I tried to tell her that he is queer, she put her hand up and said, “Stop! I don't want to hear that. Don't ruin my fantasy.”
LG: So for many straight fans, it feels personal. Knowing Heartthrob X is queer would ruin the illusion that he could come sweep them off their feet.
For the celebrities, it’s about perceived sexual appeal when having heartthrob status is what pays the bills.
CL: And I think it's even more than paying bills. I think that these celebrities want to work. It is their passion.
Sometimes I think, if I had to be closeted and write books about straight people in order to be successful, could I do it? This is my passion, this is my joy: writing. Would I, if I had to? I don't know. I don't think it would be actually possible for me
It's really, really heartbreaking to think about the fact that acting is these people's joy and purpose, and it's costing them their true identity.
LG: This feels so familiar. As someone who writes personal essays, it was really painful for me not to be out to my readers. I felt like I was choking on those truths.
But in my sphere, I wasn’t being silenced, I was silencing myself. There was no agent managing my career or encouraging me to hide this part of myself.
And it still took 37 years for me to say: This is my truth.
It's interesting to me to think about whether we are entitled to this information about celebrities? Where's that line between public and private?
CL: I don't feel that anyone has to come out, but I think for a lot of these celebrities, if they knew that their career would remain fully intact, if they knew that nothing would change in their career or the perception of them, then they would just be out.
I don't feel that we're owed it, but at the very least, I feel like it's important that the general public knows that closeting is still a huge reality and the people that you are seeing on TV and in magazines are not reflective, statistically, of the population at large in terms of queerness.
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Thursday, July 24
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