It's not easy playing gay. (notes from a blond).

My friend the openly gay actor was bitching over his sugar-free, fat-free, flour-free, and flavor-flee chocolate mousse: "I've played so many gay parts, people are beginning to think I'm straight." Well, that is a hazard of the profession. A gay actor can't play very many gay parts; otherwise people will forget he's an actor and just assume he's one of those gay people who show up and let themselves be filmed and fool everyone into thinking they're acting. Whereas straight actors really have to work at it to get to the core of the homosexual (when we all know that leaving a phone number would get them to quite a few cores at warp speed).

Being gay is apparently so incredibly different from being straight that straight actors who attempt it are routinely showered with praise and glittering prizes. "It's worth it," my friend the openly straight actor told me the next day over the exact same chocolate mousse, "even though you sometimes have to do a lot of dry-humping with some other guy. Girls you don't know look at you as a challenge," he joked. I think.

Actors of all sexual persuasions are always searching for The Truth of a character. Once they find this truth, they can then make us believe that whatever they are pretending is happening actually is happening. They ask us to deposit our feelings about and knowledge of them as people at the box office with our money. This is sometimes difficult to do, as many times these are precisely the reasons we are drawn to them. Nevertheless, we are expected to enter into this compact with them: Everything they're doing is make-believe, but it all comes from truth. No wonder people pig out on junk food when they go to the movies.

Sometimes, actors are asking us a lot. I once had a boozy conversation with the great Colleen Dewhurst, then president of Actors' Equity, who felt strongly that Laurence Olivier should never have been allowed to play Othello. "So by your reckoning," I told her, trying not to fall forward onto the table, "you should only be allowed to play big Irish drunks."

"Touche!" she laughed and ordered us another round, which I paid for. But her point never has gone away. It is, of course, what keeps so many gay actors in the closet. They don't want to tamper with our fantasies of them.

Actually, the fantasy thing also works in reverse--as I'm reminded this awards season, when at least two good straight actors played gay parts and I just didn't believe them because I simply couldn't buy them as gay people. I've never known anyone remotely like Dennis Quaid in Far From Heaven. If I did, I'd be married to him. I've known plenty of gay men trapped in straight marriages, but never anybody whose sexuality was as big a surprise as that of this all-American '50s quarterback with no trace of body language. The straitjacketed approach Todd Haynes took to the material prevented us from ever really knowing this guy and how he wound up this way. Likewise, Ed Harris acted up a storm in The Hours as a poet dying of AIDS, and I understood his anguish, but I never felt I was in a room with a gay man. Being told that a character is gay is not the same as knowing he is.

It's an intangible thing that maybe some gifted straight actors can't get--although I think Tom Hanks got it in Philadelphia. Or maybe the task is harder for straight actors. After all, when gay actors play straight parts, they are assuming an identity that so many gay people have had to assume in some part of their real lives. At the very least, this has got to be excellent training for finding the truth of any character. When straight actors play gay, they have to place themselves in a world and a mind totally alien to them. That kind of truth is very difficult to communicate unless they have the prop of a lisp or drag or some other instant emblem of faggitude. I understand why they're drawn to the challenge, but sometimes I wonder if it wouldn't just be easier on all of us to hide the burnt cork when Homer Simpson decides to try Othello.