We're Gonna Need a Lot More Toaster Ovens

This week in Germany 185 actors staged a mass coming out in a public statement of visibility in order to inspire more diversity in the entertainment industry. In a statement the actors said:

“We’re here and there are a whole lot of us! We are actors who identify as lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, inter and non-binary, amongst many other things.

Until now, we haven’t been able to be open about our private lives without fearing professional consequences. All too often, many of us have been cautioned – be it by managers, casting agents, colleagues, producers, editors, directors, etc. – to keep quiet about our sexual orientations and gender identities to avoid jeopardizing our careers. We are putting an end to this – once and for all!

Until now, we’ve been told that if we revealed certain facets of our identities, namely our sexual and gender identities, we would suddenly lose the ability to portray certain characters and relationships. As if the knowledge of who we are in our private lives would somehow invalidate our ability to convincingly embody roles for the audience. Nothing could be further from the truth.

We are actors. We don’t have to be the characters we portray. We act as if – that is the very quintessence of our job. We play wives and fathers, lovers and politicians, heroes and creeps. And often enough, characters whose ideas we’d never agree with. That’s why we can play murderers without having murdered anyone. We can save lives without having studied medicine. We can play people with sexual identities different from the ones we live out.

And, by the way, this is something we’ve been doing for a very long time, the entire time, in fact, because it is the nature of our profession.”

Bravo to all those who stepped forward and came out, and let’s see this happen all over the world.

DW