Should straight people play gay characters? Kurt Blankschaen and I discuss

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About the Author

Jimmy Alfonso Licon is a philosophy professor at Arizona State University working on ignorance, ethics, cooperation and God. Before that, he taught at University of Maryland, Georgetown, and Towson University. He loves classic rock and Western, movies, and combat sports. He lives with his wife, a prosecutor, and family at the foot of the Superstition Mountains. He also abides.

I recently sat down with Kurt Blankschaen (Philosophy, Daemen University) to talk about his new paper, co-authored with Travis Timmerman (Philosophy, Seton Hall University), in the Journal of Moral Philosophy (‘Acting Out’), on whether straight actors may permissibly play queer characters. It is one of those questions that looks trivial—just hire the best actor—until you realize that the public conversation is tangled up in worries about representation, lived experience, and online pressure campaigns that can force young performers to out themselves before they are ready.

What I wanted to understand, and what we worked through over the course of the conversation, is why this debate got so moralized so quickly. Kurt and Travis argue that the real philosophical pressure point isn’t Who has the right identity? but What makes a portrayal good? Their distinction between performer authenticity and character authenticity is doing the real work here. You can have the “right” identity and still give a crappy performance. You can lack the lived experience but, through preparation, consultation, and craft, portray a character with real depth. Acting is a skill, not an autobiographical disclosure.

If you insist that only queer actors can play queer characters, you get three bad results: you risk outing closeted performers; you shrink the available talent pool to the point of absurdity once intersectionality enters the picture; and you block actors, whether straight or queer, from roles they’d otherwise excel at. Because Hollywood is already a brutal, low-probability career lottery, the idea that “missing out on a part” is a distinct moral harm is less compelling here than it would be in ordinary employment contexts. But it still matters when people are treated unfairly, regardless of their sexuality.

Finally, I also pressed Kurt on cases like obesity, disability, conservative Christians, and other groups that either lack media sympathy or are represented through caricature. Why do some identities get treated as inviolable while others get ignored or mocked? There is no neat answer. History and politics shape which groups we treat as requiring authenticity, and those patterns aren’t always consistent.

An overall great conversation!

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