Andrew Scott is right – it’s time to retire the phrase ‘openly gay’

Andrew Scott is capable of many things but giving a dull interview seems not to be among them. Last year, he was splendidly decrying the tyranny of the standing ovation in modern theatre (“I strongly believe that if people don’t feel like standing up, they shouldn’t”). Now, in one of those cosy Hollywood Reporter roundtable discussions which proliferate during awards season, he has challenged a piece of outdated rhetoric from an era when queerness was synonymous with shame.

The moment arose when the moderator Scott Feinberg singled out Scott, who stars in Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers as a screenwriter magically reunited with the parents who died when he was 12, and Colman Domingo, who plays Martin Luther King’s advisor Bayard Rustin in the Netflix biopic Rustin, as “openly gay actors playing openly gay characters who are at the centre of important films”. The remark was intended as a way in to a discussion about representation, though at no point did he refer to the other performers present (Robert Downey Jr, Paul Giamatti, Mark Ruffalo and Jeffrey Wright) as “openly heterosexual”.

“I’m going to make a pitch for getting rid of the phrase ‘openly gay,’” said Scott, steering the conversation in a more illuminating direction. “It’s an expression that you only ever hear in the media. You’re never at a party and you say, ‘This is my openly gay friend…’” Why, he wondered, is “openly” always attached to that adjective? “We don’t say you’re ‘openly Irish.’ We don’t say you’re ‘openly left-handed’…There’s something in it that’s a little near ‘shamelessly.’ ‘You’re open about it?’ You know what I’m saying?” He proposed that “it’s time to just sort of park it.”

The phrase has its historical uses – one of the remarkable things about Rustin is precisely that he was out at a time, pre-Stonewall, when it was hazardous to be so. But it would be hard to disagree that the phrase is outdated today. It’s a hangover from that all-too-recent time when there were no queer voices in the media, with the result that any LGBT-related stories were reported from a straight and typically homophobic perspective. “There is no freedom of the press in this country for homosexuals,” wrote Andrew Lumsden, then the editor of Gay News, in 1982. “Apply a simple test: who can you think of who writes for the quality or popular press, whenever it would be relevant, as an out gay? If people cannot be open about their homosexual viewpoint to the same degree that heterosexual writers are about their viewpoint, then a significant section of opinion finds no expression in Britain’s ‘free press’ and that press is not free.”

The barrage and belligerence of the UK media’s homophobia is difficult to exaggerate but it can be sampled in the online database compiled by Terry Sanderson, who died in 2022. For 25 years, his Mediawatch column in Gay Times monitored the reporting of LGBT-related stories and issues across the British press, when homophobia was not merely commonplace but the very ink in which Fleet Street dipped its quills. The mere use of the phrase “openly gay” was scarcely a concern when brazen bigotry was so prevalent in the rendering of fact and opinion alike.

No one who witnessed the hysterical reporting last year of the stories about TV presenter Phillip Schofield could possibly argue that those homophobic ghosts have been laid to rest. Just as Jordan Peele’s satirical horror film Get Out demonstrated that liberalism and the Obama presidency provided a fig-leaf for racism rather than eradicating it, so the plethora of rainbow flags on the average high street is a handy distraction from society’s continued insistence on judging queer sexuality by harsher standards. Schofield’s relationship with a young man he had mentored was, in the presenter’s words, “unwise but not illegal”; reactions in the press and on social media, however, indicated that middle-aged gay men (as opposed to the youthful Heartstopper variety) will only be tolerated if they don’t enjoy active sex lives. Compare that to the treatment of David Bowie, whose penchant for sleeping with underage girls hasn’t dulled his lustre. Nor did it stop the Royal Mail in 2017 from issuing a set of commemorative stamps in his honour.

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It’s understandable that when we hear “openly gay” now it drags us back to that era of shame which, as All of Us Strangers eloquently demonstrates, is still so close to the surface for many people. (The film is also useful in reminding audiences that there was pride back then as well as bigotry: The Power of Love by Frankie Goes to Hollywood dominates the soundtrack.) Far better than banning the phrase – as if that were even possible – would be to allow it to die a natural death, wilting under the scrutiny of its irrelevance in much the same way that “ethnic minority” is at last giving way to the factually correct “global majority”. Let those who choose to say “openly gay” go ahead and say it, so the rest of us can point out the error. As Ben Jonson put it: “Language most shows a man, speak that I may see thee.” Yasss, diva!