To be honest, I'm not surprised at people try to force Paul out of an imaginary closet. The sad truth is that testosterone makes you a dog, sexuall speaking. You're only seeking after new flesh in the market all the time. The (equally) inconveinent truth is that being a public person exposes you to outings, unfortunately. Actors or any other public person should expect that kind of things as banks should expect burglars coming in. Why? People will never learn to behave. It's simply utopic, best wishes kind of thinking.It’s not as if actors haven’t gaybaited in the past. An actor from How to Get Away With Murder acknowledged that he did, that it was wrong, and apologized for it after the show is over. We’re not too far removed Tom Hanks winning the Oscar for Philadelphia, a gay film with practically no gay actors in substantial parts at all. Colman Domingo’s Oscar nomination this year is only the second nomination for an openly gay man playing a gay part- ever.
The mess with Kit Connor has made it impossible to have any sort of nuanced conversation about exploiting gay audiences or how we can make sure that there are gay people actively involved in telling our own stories. We should be able insist that at least some (but definitely not all) of the actors, screenwriters, producers, and directors of gay stories actually are gay so those stories are authentically told. And don’t we want talented gay actors to stay employed? There’s got be some way to make sure that gay people are actively involved without making people feel “forced out” like Kit Connor or insisting that straight people never take gay roles.
This film probably isn’t an appropriate target of those conversations, though. Andrew, this film’s lead, is out and proud. For where I’m standing, that should be enough and it’s progress from the Philadelphia days. Leave Paul alone.
Second and also in this line of thought, the aforementioned actor who apologized for gay-baiting in How to Get Away With Murder, is still doing it. I'm not going to drop names, but he has a thread in this forum, and you should see the kind of content he posts in social media. He keeps posting things addressed to a non-straight male audience (pit pics, sensual swim/run workouts, etc), so guys like me still wonder if he was really honest. To my experience he might be really more sexually fluid than we think, without the need to label himself. Now if you're ask him to be transparent, probably he will never be... And still he hasn't been in any new major project to my knowledge... So well