the closet actor who plays progressive monster

People can hardly even maintain a conversation across political or cultural lines. At the same time, our polarization is worse than ever. Since the election of Donald Trump, it’s seemed that belief in conspiracy theories is on the rise. Fake happy endings do a disservice to their truth.The “birthers,” “Pizzagate,” anti-vaxxers. In trying to make a quick fix, Murphy & Co end up creepily airbrushing history, silencing the struggles of so many who fell by the wayside because of their gender, skin colour, or sexuality, and still do today. Hollywood wasn’t, and still isn’t, a bastion of progressive politics. Famously polyamorous, hemming Hudson into a monogamous relationship is a surreal form of slut-shaming by Murphy. Hudson was outed by sometime fling and Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin as the Giant star lay dying from complications related to HIV/AIDS. A wooden Jake Picking is heinously miscast, and a blossoming romance with fictional African-American writer Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope), edging into the open, erases the cruelty of Hudson’s enforced life in the closet for the sake of his career. An all-American pin-up, he famously lit up a room, secretly sleeping with many men behind the scenes. Photo: Netflixīut the most mind-boggling mishandling is the bizarre treatment of Rock Hudson. Michelle Krusiec plays Anna May Wong, who is considered the US’ first Chinese-American movie star. Racy material for sure, sadly Hollywood is a strangely chaste affair. He claims Katharine Hepburn, Rock Hudson, Cary Grant and Vivien Leigh as clients. Murphy explored the struggle of queer and non-white dancers in Pose, and delivered razor camp Hollywood savagery in the magnificent Feud, pitting Jessica Lange’s Joan Crawford against Susan Sarandon’s Bette Davis.ĭrawing inspiration from the wild stories of one Scotty Bowers’ eye-popping memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars and doco Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood was promising too.Ĭlaiming to be the most well-connected pimp in history, Bowers ran a gas station as a front for his fix-up business, connecting stars and studio bigwigs with whatever pumped their engine.

“I wanted to give some people who were dealt a terrible hand by Hollywood a happy ending,” he told the New York Post.Ī commendable goal on paper, he and co-creator Ian Brennan have history. Which is why Ryan Murphy’s well-intentioned Netflix drama Hollywood, a rewrite of the Golden Age, winds up feeling misguided. These secret struggles offer prime dramatic material. Director Ryan Murphy “wanted to give some people who were dealt a terrible hand by Hollywood a happy ending”.

The closet actor who plays progressive monster