A Knight Out

Crusader for gay rights and noble of the British theater, Sir Ian McKellen storms American Screens.

Beth Coleman wrote on RuPaul for Issue No. 4 and also writes for ArtForum and The Village Voice.

It ISN'T ALWAYS EASY to mark the day and hour when a person is 'out,"' says Sir lan McKellen on the telephone from his home in London. Coming out certainly hasn't slowed McKellen. One of England's greatest stage actors, he'll be a familiar face in this country in coming months, appearing in two films as well as the HBO adaptation of Randy Shilts And the Band Played On. "I have been out to my colleagues [at England's National Theatre] all my life," he says. "When I came out to the press, there were many people assuming that my career would come to a shuddering halt or change drastically which it hasn't."

Indeed, since that fateful BBC interview in 1998 McKellen has appeared in several films, including Scandal and Last Action Hero, in addition to his stage work at home and abroad. In 1991 he became the first openly gay man ever knighted. Offstage, McKellen has been a vocal friend to stateside gay men and lesbians. Whether at the April March on Washington or the 1992 Tony Awards, he readily takes the podium to speak out on gay rights.

"It's true I get a number of scripts on gay themes more than I used to," he notes, "but what jobs I choose to do depends on a number of issues, from the mundane of how much time and money, to who is involved. Gay or straight--or confused, in the case of Percy--is not the issue."

Percy is Percy Corcoran, the loner McKellen plays in Maggie Greenwald's neo western The Ballad of Little Jo, a Fine Line release opening nationally in August. The title character is Josephine, fallen child of a good New England family who shears her hair and lives out the rest of her born days as a man. When sweet looking Jo first arrives in the West in cowboy drag, Percy saves her from a kind of early American fagbashing when a group of roughnecks mistake her for a "dude." He takes the kid under his wing, but the tutelage ends with a lesson on abuse when Percy beats up a woman who refuses him fellatio. "He's probably confused about his sexuality," says McKellen. "That's the gloss that I brought to the character. I wouldn't be surprised if Percy's difficulty with women suggests he was probably gay without realizing it."

Beyond Jo's cosmetic transgression--cross dressing to survive--the film delivers an oddly conservative and joyless vision of gender bending, as Jo eventually sets up a household with all the traps of a traditional nuclear family. An Asian man acts as her "wife," replacing rather than exploding the role Jo escaped. In what becomes a drivenly heterosexual movie, McKellen's Percy indeed seems a troubled and troubling closet case. The actor's fluid performance couples a subtext of man boy love with a violent misogyny, and without a fuller exploration of sexual roles in the film, he risks being seen as a sort of a bad monster of queerness.

But McKellen won't condemn Percy so easily. "If you are suggesting that there are no deeply unhappy people who bring unhappiness to other people, I would disagree with you," he says. "If Jo's story shows that the world at large is confused about people's sexuality, particularly when you have a central character who is disguised as a man but is a woman, Percy's confusion seems to be all of a piece."

Questions of portraying sexual identity also cropped up during the filming of this fall's Six Degrees of Separation, in which McKellen has a supporting role as an art dealer. Although sexual ambiguity, if not straight up homosexuality, is an important component of the pivotal character in John Guare's play, actor Will Smith finally refused to kiss a man on camera. Star of NBC's Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Smith told New York magazine that his TV fans wouldn't be able to separate the actor from the movie character. McKellen says he wishes he'd been on the set at the time, to shed some light. "Why would one expect a man of 23 and a black man to be as involved as you and I in these issues? His response shows that he's a victim of society's ignorance."

McKellen recognizes how carefully most actors guard their public image, noting that many closeted gay and lesbian performers he has talked to about coming out fear they would become the symbol of a movement. "Any gay or lesbian who comes out is performing a political act, but it's also a highly personal act. I wouldn't want to be thought of as just a gay actor. But don't misunderstand me. I'm totally in favor of everybody coming out. Nothing would make the world better."

Combining his own acting and activism, McKellen joined the cast of HBO's And the Band Played On, playing Bill Kraus, a liaison between Congress and San Francisco's lesbians and gay men. A good deal of press has gone to conflicts over the political bent of the final cut, but the actor chose to talk about the project rather than the production controversy.

"And the Band Played On doesn't avoid strong criticisms of Reagan and the Reagan years," he asserts. "Its most striking quality is that it's very critical of everyone who lived through .that period: seniors in government as well as the medical researchers, and gays right in the middle of it.

"Everyone who gets involved in presenting themselves to the world is likely to look for allies," he says. "As a group, you want to present a united front, then you print a T shirt. Some people have their own. I tend to wear the ones that other people do."

BETH COLEMAN