Nathan Lane (Roy Cohn) and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett (Belize) in Angels In America. This even has its own internet neologism: queer-baiting, practiced by the likes of James Franco and Nick Jonas, who in their half-hearted outreach to the gay community have generally been received with indifference. Garfield is clearly not ignorant of the magnitude of the undertaking – and what the play has meant to queer folks for the last quarter-century – which ought not to be discredited by an unfortunate soundbite.īut Garfield’s just the latest in a long line of entertainers who have playfully floated the possibility that they fall somewhere in the middle of the Kinsey scale, as if queerness is a dress one tries on for size. Angels in America, of course, is a two-part epic that chronicles the lives of several gay men as they navigate Reagan’s America and the Aids epidemic. Garfield added that when he was offered the role, he felt he had no right to play gay in one of the 20th century’s single most important works of LGBT art.
Put in context, though, it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. When Garfield’s comments made their way on to Twitter, they were widely derided as silly and vacuous.
