On the question of homosexuality in actors

Abstract

There is a belief that a high percentage of male actors are homosexual. The specific linking of actors and homosexuality seems to have first appeared in the Elizabethan Puritan condemnations of the theater. Psychoanalytic theory has tended to further promulgate the linkage between effeminacy, homosexuality, and acting. An analysis of the relevant existing empirical literature indicates that few studies have addressed themselves to evaluating this relationship. Those studies supporting the effeminacy-actor relationship were seriously flawed both in design (e.g., use of indirect measures to infer homosexuality) and interpretation of the data. Only one study used direct measures of sexual orientation. Even though that study had methodological problems, its results indicated that the percentage of homosexuality among actors was not verifiably greater than that found in the general population. It is felt that the current belief of greater homosexuality in actors, as compared to the general population, is a product of our Puritan heritage, the actors's unconventionality, and of public flaunting of the homoerotic behavior of that portion of actors that are homosexual.