Shakespeare: Absolutely

Theatre expert Gregory Doran and his actor partner Sir Antony Sher are convinced England’s greatest playwright was homosexual. The pair insist 128 of his 154 sonnets were addressed to men.

Gregory, artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, claims Solanio and Salerio in The Merchant Of Venice “are a gay couple”. While the two Antonios in Twelfth Night and The Merchant Of Venice were “absolutely gay”.

He told Winq magazine: “I get infuriated in the 21st Century when those two characters are not ”played as gay men. It feels to me to be as outrageous as a white actor playing Othello” .

 

Gregory says the sexes were changed in some editions of his sonnets because “they couldn’t afford for the national icon to be gay”. He added: “It is homophobia.

 

Daily Star.

Zzzz....

Antony Sher And Gregory Doran: English Theatre's Power Couple

“To our nephews and nieces,” says Doran, “it’s great that they regard homosexuality as... a bit boring, really.”

The Times.

How modern!

Number one in The Times 20 Power Couples Of The Arts.

How modern!

Equity: The Tangled Webs We Weave

'When Antony Sher started acting with the pioneering Gay Sweatshop theatre company in the 70s, he managed to stay in the closet. "I look back and blush," he said. "We all agreed to do it on the basis that it was stated that not all the performers were gay so you didn't know who was and who wasn't.
"Then, in the mid-80s, when I did the British premiere of Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy I still wasn't out. I was doing press interviews about this great gay play that I felt so strongly about for a specific reason and I wasn't saying it – it was an astonishing waste of energy. But that's the kind of tangle you get into if you're not out."

Alex Needham talks to Antony Sher in The Guardian on the start of a new campaign by Equity - I Won't Pretend - to support actors who come out. 
This has evolved out of a survey by the actors' union that suggested many are still closeted in their professional lives.
That so few leading actors are out seems far more farcical and tragic than the media obsession with gay footballers. 
The article concludes with a suitably Wildean paradox from Sher;
"When you see any great performer, you sort of see into that person's soul. Your sexuality is profoundly a part of who you are. I think it's very difficult to really reveal yourself in that exquisite way if you're trying to hide part of yourself."

Update: Sher and the boyfriend Greg Doran do How We Met in The Independent On Sunday.
Think I'll have to add Mr Sher to my little list of the weekend broadsheets' Favourite Gays.

Breaking: Many People Working In The Theatre Are Gay Shock!

'I was caught napping yesterday when the announcement came about the RSC’s appointment of a new artistic director — literally. I’d been up since 5.30am (my usual waking time, as it happens) and had already met three deadlines by 9am, so I did something I very rarely allow myself to do: I went back to bed [Yeah, whatever - Get on with it, love].
'By the time I woke up again around 11.22am, saw the press release and tweeted it (hence the precision with which I know what time I woke up!), the RSC was already trending on Twitter: that says something about the viral strength of Twitter as a medium for spreading news. [Gregory] Doran, of course, was the main rival to Michael Boyd getting the job last time around; and it is greatly to the credit both of Boyd in appointing him Chief Associate Director instead, and to Doran himself in staying on undaunted by the disappointment, that his turn has come now.

'His loyalty and determination have obviously finally paid off, and the top job is now his; he’s both a safe pair of hands and has truly earned it. And it coincidentally means that both of our major national theatre companies are now run by out gay men; at the National, the two Nicks (Hytner and executive director Starr) and now Doran, who is famously partnered to RSC/National leading actor Antony Sher, are amongst a wave of gay men in charge of some of the most successful venues in the country. (Doran and Sher were one of the first couples to get civil partnered back in 2005 when the legislation allowing it first became law).
'Elsewhere, of course, there was Michael Grandage, until recently at the helm of the Donmar (whose partner is Christopher Oram, who designs many of his productions); and there is also Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court; Daniel Evans at Sheffield’s Crucible; Kerry Michael at Stratford East and Timothy Sheader at the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park, to name a few.
'Of course, their sexuality is secondary to their talent, and should be as unremarkable a fact of their lives as their hair colour (or even skin colour, though as I recently wrote here, that’s sometimes a remarkable fact, too, in an industry still dominated by white artistic directors). Even so, not all artistic directors are living as openly, and it’s sad that this list cannot be comprehensive.'

The Stage. 
And on that bombshell...

Fagburn: Celebrity Gossip Special

The Sunday broadsheets are lightly sprinkled with the magical stardust of interviews with gayer celebs today.
The Sunday Times serves up Zachary Quinto; "Quietly impressive as Spock in Star Trek, Zachary Quinto on making a bang as the first openly gay American movie star".
Natch Mr Quinto talks about coming out - “I didn’t tell anybody I was going to do it. I didn’t tell my agent, I didn’t tell my business partners, I didn’t tell my publicists..." - and the Hollywood closet.
The Sunday Times' Tom Shone writes;

'Despite its public avowals of liberalism, Hollywood’s history with homosexuality has been frightful. One thinks of the blackmailing of Rock Hudson, the hounding of Tab Hunter, the alcoholic demise of Montgomery Clift. Straight actors such as Tom Hanks, Sean Penn and Colin Firth win praise and awards for the “bravery” needed to play gay, as long as the char­acter ends up in the dumpster — Vito Russo’s book The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, features a “necrology” of gay characters’ on-screen deaths — but woe betide the gay actor within a mile radius of heart-throb status who decides to come out.
“The torment those people feel — and I know it because I’ve seen it, I know it in people — is so heavy, so painful,” Quinto says. “Things need to change. This is just bullshit at a certain point. I’m not going to live my life based on fear of other people’s judgments. If somebody doesn’t want to work with me because I’m gay, then I don’t want to work with them anyway.” Still, one can’t help wondering about mainstream audiences — the soda-sucking multiplexers and burping mall rats. I ask if his decision, or the factors that weighed into it, might have been different had he been playing Kirk, rather than Spock...'

Just between you, me and the bedbugs, Fagburn thinks Mr Shone's last two sentences there are snobbish and quite, quite daft.
Antony Sher was interviewed by The Observer; "I was gay. Jewish. A white South African," he says. "And for different reasons, I was ashamed of all those things." As a result, he suggests, the actors he most admired were those who best masked themselves on stage: "Olivier, Peter Sellers, Alec Guinness."
Mr Sher said something rather similar to The Guardian last year.
Incidentally, the actor he most admires these days is Judi Dench - go figure.
Edmund White told Observer readers This Much I Know.
Ed's turned into the gay Norman Mailer, really; the grand old man of letters, desperate to tell the world that old age has not withered his all-conquering libido.
And boy, girls, does Ed like to drop names; "Some of the best advice I've been given is from Truman Capote..."
Mr White's top - namedropping, self-mythologising, possibly made-up - showbiz anecdote; "Competition among writers is a strange thing. Years ago, Gore Vidal was with Johnathan Burnham from Chatto at the River Café and they used to have these big tall bottles of olive oil on the table. He mistook one for wine, poured himself a glass and drank it. He spluttered it all out and said to Jonathan: 'You saw that and you didn't stop me. You want me to die so your writer Edward White will be King Fag!'"
Gripping stuff all round, I'm sure you'll agree.

Thought For The Day: Antony Sher

"My own search for Gellburg [the character he plays in Arthur Miller's Broken Glass] benefited enormously from an identity crisis I had as a young man. I wasn't open about being gay, I kept stumm about being Jewish, and I was ashamed of being a white South African. I ended up in so many closets I didn't know which key was which. Those early attempts to flee from being Antony Sher were useful when it came to being Gellburg, a man uncomfortable in his own skin..."

Anthony Sher writing in The Guardian.
Gellburg is a Jew living in Brooklyn in the 30s "uneasy with his own Jewishness."

• Broken Glass is at The Tricycle Theatre, London.