Out Olympian Gus Kenworthy has defended
taking a straight part in FX's upcoming drama American Horror
Story: 1984.
The 27-year-old freestyle skier came
out on the cover of ESPN Magazine following his silver medal
win at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
In an op-ed for ESPN, Kenworthy
responded to pushback he received for taking the part of a straight
man on the series.
Kenworthy said that AHS
co-creator Ryan Murphy asked him to audition for the part after they
met last winter at a dinner in New York.
“When Ryan announced he’d hired me
to play Emma’s boyfriend, he and I both received a lot of negative
comments online,” Kenworthy wrote. “The gay community is the
most supportive community in the world and also the quickest to cut
you down. There were a lot of people saying, 'Gus has no credits, no
experience. How did he get this role?' Some people wanted to know how
I was cast as a straight man or if I could play straight. Is that
even a question? I spent the first 23 years of my life playing a
straight man.”
“I used that joke to defuse the
negativity on social media, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Every
gay man has the experience at some point in his life of pretending to
be someone he’s not. I knew as a teenager that I was gay, yet I was
still sleeping with girls, pretending to be straight, playing this
persona I thought I needed to be for my sport. The stakes were so
high. I remember going to crazy lengths to make people believe I was
someone I was not. That’s acting.”
“Maybe this sounds unfair, but I feel
like it’s much more OK for a gay man to play a straight role than
vice versa. Most characters are straight. Most shows are about
straight people and straight lives and straight dynamics, and if
there is a gay character on the show, it’s usually a sidekick.
Allowing a gay person to play that character does a lot in terms of
visibility and breaking down perceptions and stereotypes. For the
longest time, only straight actors were cast in gay and lesbian and
transgender roles, and that makes LGBTQ actors feel like there is no
opportunity for them to be seen on screen. If you’re telling a
trans story and you have Scarlett Johansson playing the role, it
discredits what it is to be a trans person. Even if she does an
incredible job, it doesn’t allow people to have a real sense of
what it means to be trans, and for so many people it’s the only
taste they get.”
He
added: “I also think a gay actor playing straight is a big
deal. There aren’t many openly gay actors getting cast in straight
parts. But that is changing, and I am lucky to have the opportunity
to be part of that change.”