James Franco: Straight Acting Gay For Today

'Unusually for Hollywood, Franco is sanguine over speculation about his sexuality. He has a girlfriend, but has joked, after all the gay roles he has played (including Sean Penn's boyfriend in Milk), "maybe I'm just gay". Watching Howl, which is also a love story, you wonder if playing the gay Ginsberg is something only a demonstrably straight actor could risk.
"It's possible," says Franco. "I remember when Brokeback Mountain was being cast, people saying, 'Gosh, I wouldn't want to do that. A gay cowboy?' And I still get it – that's the bloggers' favourite topic, how many gay roles I've played. So it's territory where people pretend they're OK with it, but based on the amount of coverage that a straight person taking one of those roles gets, it shows that there's still a big bias. It's easier for a straight actor to play a gay role than it is maybe for an out gay person to play it; my sense is that a gay actor still feels he or she, if they came out, would be typecast and couldn't play straight roles after that. I don't know the ins and outs of Rupert Everett's story, but he certainly claims that happened to him."'

James Franco - interviewed in The Guardian - adds his two cents to the eternally gripping Straight Acting Gay/Gay Acting Straight debate.
By happenchance The Advocate has just put up an article online; "And the Gay Razzie Goes To... Forget about The Oscars. From J.Lo to Al Pacino, The Advocate looks at some of the actors who've perpetuated stereotypes and turned in terrible performances by going gay."
I'll put up the link when it fucking works!
Update: There we go...

The photo shows James Franco and Aaron Tveit in the movie Howl echoing a famous photograph of Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky.