'Glee's' Ryan Murphy says boycott Newsweek for its mind-blowing bigotry [Updated]

Poor, poor, pitiful Newsweek magazine. It's bad enough being a newsweekly in the Time of the Internet, where all of the news and information you used to carefully collect and analyze has already been disseminated, debated and digested long before your magazine ever hits the newsstands. It's bad enough that business is so terrible that your parent company has put you up for sale -- and is having a hard time finding any buyers.

But now the coup de grace. "Glee" creator Ryan Murphy is urging an immediate boycott of Newsweek until the magazine apologizes to all of its gay readership for what Murphy calls a "needlessly cruel and mind-blowingly bigoted piece" by Ramin Setoodeh that seems to imply that gay actors shouldn't be playing straight characters, a position that Murphy calls shocking and "blatantly homophobic," in part because Setoodeh is gay himself.

Yikes! What's happening here?

Setoodeh's piece seems to have been inspired by the fact that "Will & Grace's" now openly gay Sean Hayes had been playing a straight guy romancing Kristin Chenoweth in the Broadway revival of "Promises, Promises." Setoodeh panned his performance, saying:

"Frankly, it's weird seeing Hayes play straight. He comes off as wooden and insincere, like he's trying to hide something, which of course, he is. Even the play's most hilarious scene, when [Hayes' character] tries to pick up a drunk woman in a bar, devolves into unintentional camp. Is it funny because of all the '60s-era one-liners, or because the woman is so drunk (and clueless) that she agrees to go home with a guy we all know is gay?"

First off, let me be very clear. Setoodeh's piece isn't just weirdly homophobic. It's also nasty and bitchy, in a very Rex Reed sort of way, and intellectually dishonest. But mostly it's just plain dumb. It claims that openly gay actors still have reason to be scared, meaning they have good cause to remain in the closet, but then dings them for playing straight parts because -- wink, wink -- we know they're actually gay. So what parts are they supposed to be able to play?

That said, you also have to read the reaction in terms of score settling. Setoodeh's piece has already inspired a cutting response from Chenoweth, who basically sticks up for her costar (you can read Setoodeh's response to Chenoweth's charges here). And it seems clear that Murphy wasn't just weighing in for the good of all gay people, but because Setoodeh had taken some shots at "Glee's" also openly gay Jonathan Groff, mocking his performance on the show, saying that "in half his scenes, he scowls -- is that a substitute for being straight? When he smiles or giggles, he seems more like your average theater queen."

Murphy has every right to be offended, though I think the idea of a Newsweek boycott is way over the top, since if we really advocated a boycott every time we read something dumb or insulting from a critic in a magazine or (gasp!) a commentator on Fox News, we'd have to all go back to living in caves and scrawling crude drawings on the walls. If you boycott Newsweek for the incredible lameness of Setoodeh, then you wouldn't be able to read the wonderfully sublime political analysis of Fareed Zakaria either, which would be a huge loss.

For now, I'd say that simply heaping insults and derision on Setoodeh is reaction enough. Why boycott a magazine that seems to be doing a perfectly good job of shooting itself in the foot all by itself?

Photo: Ryan Murphy with Lea Michele at the Golden Globe Awards in January. Credit: Valerie Macon / AFP/Getty Images

[Updated: An earlier version of this story misidentified the woman in the photo with Murphy as Olivia Wilde.]

Comments

[maria tanquary]

i have already decided not ever to purchase another newsweek until that crazy bigot is fired! he is an insult to modern society. bad man bad bad bad. you should be ashamed of yourself. i know your mother must be! maria

[Larry Chandler]

Apparently Newsweek is already being boycotted by all the millions of readers and advertisers that have forced the Washington Post to put the magazine up for sale.

Setoodeh is a typical hack writer who knows the only way to get attention is to make bitchy comments about people who aren't his friends. If he (or anyone) doesn't know if an actor is gay or not, then it's unlikely he would be able to single out an inappropriate performance.

From what I read (I have not seen the show) the romantic chemistry of the two leads is nonexistent. That is not unique to a show when one of the actors is gay.

All of this is irrelevant. Actors can be gay, straight or simply miscast. To draw conclusions from this is pointless and pointy-headed.

So boycott Newsweek or not. It too shall pass (as, I hope, will Setoodeh).

[Marc Eastman]

This entire section here is mindless, and makes me wonder if you actually read the article in question

"Setoodeh's piece isn't just weirdly homophobic. It's also nasty and bitchy, in a very Rex Reed sort of way, and intellectually dishonest. But mostly it's just plain dumb. It claims that openly gay actors still have reason to be scared, meaning they have good cause to remain in the closet, but then dings them for playing straight parts because -- wink, wink -- we know they're actually gay. So what parts are they supposed to be able to play?"

It isn't even homophobic for a start. He's gay himself. "Intellectually dishonest?" What is that even supposed to mean in this case?

It claims that openly gay actors have reason to be scared, and they do, or the idea is at least worth asking about, because the audiences may not show up.

He "dings" them, looking at a particular instance, not because we know their sexual orientation before they ever show up, but because often we suspect it when we start watching them whether we knew it or not.

[Mike Boehm]

A similar controversy broke out among theater critics during the 1960s over whether a gay playwright, Edward Albee, was capable of portraying a heterosexual couple, George and Martha in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Given the play's continued appeal over nearly a half century (Mike Nichols' film version with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton is almost exactly faithful to the play), it seems that time has delivered a verdict of "yes."

Here's an interesting assessment of that fracas, from a 2002 edition of the University of Kansas' "Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism."
https://journals.ku.edu/index.php/jdtc/article/viewFile/3398/3327

[Weighing in out in CA]

Did Jake Gillenhall and Heath Ledger come across as wooden when they played homosexuals in Brokeback Mountain? Did Hillary Swank come across as not believable in Boys Don't Cry?" Why is it that this becomes a gay issue? Perhaps it's the actual talent of an actor, gay or straight, that needs to be examined.

[Bryan Galt]

This argument is almost comical in many ways. Why would anyone waste their time getting upset about gay men/women that PORTRAY FICTIONAL CHARACTERS.

Yes everyone, people on TV and in the movies get paid to fake it. So what difference does it make who is playing the fake person?

Only in America...

[C Boyer]

Then people could boycott the boycott. And others can boycott that boycott.

Aside from that problem, another big problem seems that nobody's sexuality/orientation is any longer sexy. All people do is talk/blog/debate about it.

[Jeff K.]

Sean Hayes was "in the closet?" When was that?

[alceste]

[...] boycott Newsweek for its mind-blowing bigotry [...]

"mind-blowing" ! Whose mind? This such a no-scandal, LA Times pathetically trying to make an issue from it. Who cares about "Glee"? How long will this crap be on air? Who will see ever again the collection of buffoons that make for the Glee cast? Glee is over before registering even in the, alas, perceptions-impaired pop-culture. And even with Goldstein's steadfast efforts, the reality will be the same: investors alert - audiences perceive that gay actors generally fail to connect with women on screen, no matter who "authentic" they try to be, so one of the motors of a picture is kaput from starters. Crappy as it was Love Story, Perez Hilton would have made it worst - Goldstein sez no - hehehehe -

[Emile Zola]

I beg to differ. How many times put white men to play indians and the result was not the best. I have stopped watching How I met your mother, because seeing a homosexual playing a womanizer is like watching little girls playing with Barbie. It just comes out double phony and to hard to take. Why would Ryan Murphy think that Rock Hudson hid his sexual preferences for so many years? Self-preservation and Hollywood, like it or not, hasn't changed that much. I'll bet that we won't see Ellen playing straight lady with a handsome man, because I don't think people would see that movie. Case dismissed. Go get a life, Ryan!