Our Stories Aren't Costumes: Why Cishet Actors Keep Getting Queer Roles
Call Me By Your Name. The Danish Girl. Carol. The Imitation Game. Dallas Buyers Club. Milk. Brokeback Mountain. Emilia Pérez.
The list of films centred on queer and trans stories told largely without queer and trans people is long, decorated, and largely unchanged. These films collect awards. Their cishet leads give tearful speeches. And somewhere off-camera, the queer and nonbinary actors who could have played those roles who lived those roles don't get a call.
This isn't a new conversation. But it keeps needing to be had, because the industry keeps making the same choices.
The Numbers Haven't Caught Up to the Discourse
In June 2025, GLAAD released its 13th annual Studio Responsibility Index, tracking LGBTQ+ representation across 250 films from the ten largest studio distributors in 2024. The headline finding: LGBTQ-inclusive films dropped to 23.6% of all major studio releases, down from 27.3% in 2023 and a record high of 28.5% in 2022. Two years of consecutive decline.
Of the 181 LGBTQ+ characters counted across those films, nonbinary characters made up just 2% of the total. Trans characters appeared in fewer than 1% of all films tracked, just two films across 250 releases.
Thirty-seven per cent of those LGBTQ+ characters had less than one minute of screen time. Some didn't even have names.
We are still here as a footnote. Occasionally, a supporting role. Rarely the lead. And when the lead role does exist, it still frequently goes to someone who will take it off at the end of the day, like a costume to them.
The Argument Nobody Wins
The conversation about whether cishet actors should play LGBTQ+ characters tends to go one of two ways. Cishet actors say: "Acting is about transformation. A good actor can play anyone." Industry executives say nothing and keep casting the same people.
Actor Cate Blanchett, who played the queer lead in Carol, defended straight actors taking queer roles by stating she would "fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience." She went further, comparing playing a different sexual orientation to playing a character with different political views.
Let that land for a moment. A marginalised identity, one that gets people fired, evicted, assaulted, criminalised, and killed, compared to a political opinion someone can choose and change. The analogy doesn't just miss the point. It refuses to look for it.
Blanchett wasn't short on resources or platform. What she could have done with those resources was to advocate for queer actors and leverage her power to get us in the room. Instead, she argued for her own access.
And yet this is the voice the industry amplifies. Queer and nonbinary perspectives on our own casting are consistently treated as a niche grievance rather than the central conversation.
The Rarity of Accountability
Among cishet actors who have played queer roles, accountability is the exception. One of the few was Darren Criss, who played gay characters in Glee and American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace, which portrayed the real person Andrew Cunanan. He later publicly acknowledged that he didn't want to be "another straight boy taking a gay man's role," and stepped back from such casting.
It's a rare statement. It's also the floor, not the ceiling. Acknowledgement is not a repair. The question is what follows: whether people with industry access use it to open doors, or whether recognition becomes its own form of closure.
Most don't even get that far.
What "Representation" Actually Looks Like
The 2024 GLAAD data provide an internal breakdown of that 23.6% that is even more instructive. Of all LGBTQ+ characters counted, 44% were gay men and 41% were lesbians, with bisexual+, nonbinary, and trans characters making up the remainder. LGBTQ+ characters of colour hit their lowest percentage since 2019 at 36%.
The picture that emerges is a very specific version of queerness that Hollywood finds legible: white, gay or lesbian, usually in a supporting role or brief cameo, and overwhelmingly played by cishet actors. Everything else (nonbinary characters, trans characters, queer people of colour, bisexual people with any complexity, etc.) is still treated as a risk.
Nonbinary people barely exist on screen at all. When we do appear, we're frequently played by cis actors. And when nonbinary actors do get cast, they often face pressure to present in ways that read as more binary to casting directors who haven't caught up.
This is not representation. It's a curated selection of queerness that the industry has decided is commercially safe, handed to the actors it already trusts.
"Bury Your Gays" Is Still Running
The Bury Your Gays trope is where queer characters are killed off at a disproportionate rate, often to serve the emotional arc of straight characters. It is decades old and still running. The 100. The Vampire Diaries. The Walking Dead. Orange Is the New Black. Brokeback Mountain. Characters that queer audiences built genuine, searching relationships with, written out to give the straight leads something to feel.
What makes this trope particularly insidious is that it's not always malicious in intent. It can coexist with a production that genuinely considers itself progressive. A show can have queer writers in the room and still reach for this narrative shape because it's been normalised as the way queer stories end, in sacrifice, in tragedy, in service to someone else's story.
The message absorbed by queer and nonbinary audiences who grew up watching this is not subtle: we exist to be instructive to straight people. Our deaths are meaningful. Our lives are incidental.
Personal Anecdote
When you don't have language for what you are, you watch for yourself instead.
You scan every film, every show, every background character for something that feels close. Not a mirror (you've given up on mirrors), just a flicker of recognition. A character who holds their gender loosely. Who doesn't settle comfortably into the categories everyone else seems to occupy without thinking about it? Who exists in the space between, without explanation or apology.
You get very good at reading for subtext. You learn to find yourself in queer-coded villains, in androgynous side characters, in the friend who never quite fits. You make do. You're used to making do.
And then sometimes you find a character who feels real—not coded. Actual. A non-binary character named as such, or a trans character with interiority, or a queer person whose desire isn't treated as a problem to be resolved. You feel something settle in your chest that you didn't realise had been suspended.
You go looking for the actor. You always go looking.
And almost every time, you find out they went home and took it off.
They're straight. They're cis. They sat in the makeup chair and inhabited your experience like a method exercise, collected the awards, the praise, and the think-pieces about their bravery and their range, and then they returned to a life where none of it applied to them. They got to be interesting. We've got to be grateful.
That's the thing nobody talks about clearly enough: the asymmetry of who carries the risk. For the actor, it's a role—potentially a career-defining one. For the community whose story is being told, it is a history of survival, of violence, of fighting for the right to exist in a world that has spent centuries trying to erase you. One of those things is a performance. The other is a life.
Nonbinary people are particularly erased in this exchange. We don't just lose roles, we lose the proof that we exist. When nonbinary characters appear on screen and are played by binary cis actors, the message absorbed by every nonbinary person watching is: your story is interesting enough to tell, but not interesting enough to tell authentically. You can be the subject. You cannot be the speaker.
I spent years searching for myself in a medium that was deciding, without consulting me, that I wasn't worth the casting call.
The Business of Borrowed Identity
Let's be precise about what's actually happening when a cishet actor takes a queer or trans role. It is not simply a creative choice. It is an economic transaction in which someone with significant privilege of wealth, industry access, an established career, and the protection of a normative identity, temporarily adopts the aesthetics of marginalisation, performs them for profit, and is then celebrated by the same industry that actively excludes the people whose lives they were mining.
The awards economy makes this explicit. Since the Academy began recognising LGBTQ+ stories in earnest, over 52 Oscar nominations have gone to cishet actors playing LGBTQ+ characters. LGBTQ+ actors playing any role, queer or not, have received a fraction of that same recognition. The message is not subtle: we are worth portraying, but not worth rewarding. We are interesting enough to be material. Not credible enough to be storytellers.
When anyone pushes back on this, the response is almost always the same: But didn't they do a good job? Isn't it still powerful to see these stories on screen?
This is the logic of crumbs. It asks marginalised people to be grateful for the floor-level version of representation, because at least it's something. It papers over the question of who profits, who gets the credit, who builds a career on the experience, and who remains locked out of the industry entirely. A story told about us, by people who don't share our experience, filtered through the aesthetic choices of people who get to return to their lives once the cameras stop, that is not representation. It is a performance of representation. And we are not obligated to applaud it.
Pop Culture Is Queer Culture (So Where Is the Credit?)
Here is a thing that is true and rarely said clearly enough: queer culture is not a niche. It is the foundation of significant portions of what mainstream culture consumes, celebrates, and profits from.
Ballroom. Voguing. The language that became internet vernacular — slay, serve, reading, shade, no tea no shade — all of it originated in Black and Latinx queer and trans communities who were fighting for survival while creating the cultural vocabulary that the mainstream would later strip of its context and monetise. The aesthetics that define fashion, music, television, and nightlife have deep queer roots. Drag has been a cultural export for decades. Camp is an entire aesthetic language.
And yet the people who originated pop culture, Black queer and trans artists, trans women of colour specifically, are largely absent from the visibility and economic reward that the culture they built generates. They are not on magazine covers. They are not the ones collecting the awards. They are not the ones being cast in the films about their own communities. They are the source, and they are treated as peripheral to the story of their own creation.
This is not a coincidence. It is a structure. The mainstream borrows from the margins, removes the original creators from the narrative, and then casts a white cis actor to perform the sanitised version back to a mainstream audience. The community gets aesthetic credit. The individual artists get nothing. And the cycle is held in place by an industry that has decided which version of queerness is commercially legible and which version is too confronting to centre.
Timothée Chalamet plays gay in Call Me By Your Name. When photographed in a gender non-conforming fashion, he receives praise for his artistic range. Billy Porter, an out, Black, queer man who has spent decades doing the actual work, called this out directly, noting that Chalamet gets celebrated for fashion choices that queer people of colour invented and have been penalised for. Chalamet returns home to Kylie Jenner. Porter continues doing the work. One of them gets the next blockbuster. It is not Porter.
This is not a criticism of any one actor. It is a description of the system. When the mainstream rewards the simulation of queerness more than queerness itself, it is making a choice about whose presence it finds acceptable and whose it finds merely useful.
You Wouldn't Accept This Argument Elsewhere
There is a comparison that cishet defenders of this casting practice consistently refuse to make, because making it honestly ends the argument.
You would not cast a white actor to play a Black American historical figure and call it artistic freedom. You would not tell a disabled actor that their story being told by an able-bodied actor is still powerful, so they should be grateful. These arguments have been made. They have not stood. The critical consensus has shifted, however slowly, toward the recognition that authentic representation matters, that lived experience carries something that cannot be fully replicated by craft alone, and that bypassing the very community whose story is being told is itself a form of harm.
The LGBTQ+ community makes the same argument and is told it doesn't apply. Actors can play anyone, we're told. Sexuality and gender aren't like race. The comparison doesn't hold.
Except it does. What makes it feel different is that queerness and transness are still understood, in too many corners of the industry, as characteristics rather than identities. As aesthetic choices rather than lived experiences embedded in history, trauma, violence, and survival. If you see our identities as costumes, things that can be put on and taken off, then of course you see no problem with an actor putting them on. But our identities are not costumes. They are the accumulation of everything that has happened to us for being who we are. No amount of preparation, research, or craft gives someone access to that if they have never lived inside it.
There is also something that rarely gets named: the reason the industry prefers cishet actors in queer roles is precisely that they are safer. A cis straight actor playing a gay character is a novelty that the mainstream can celebrate without discomfort. An actual gay actor playing a gay character confronts the audience with the reality of the person. It asks something more of them. And Hollywood has consistently decided that its mainstream audience should not be asked to confront too much.
What they are really saying, when they cast this way, is: your story is interesting. You are too much.
The Confrontation They Don't Want to Have
Watching a cishet actor play a queer or trans character is safe. It is a story about us, delivered by someone who is not us, filtered through an industry that controls exactly how much reality the audience is asked to absorb. The emotional experience is contained. The audience can feel moved by the suffering, inspired by the resilience, and walk out into a world where the actual people who live these experiences remain largely invisible.
There's a name for this mechanism, and it doesn't originate in queer cinema. Call it the “Blind Side effect”.
The Blind Side, the 2009 film adaptation of Michael Oher's life, was received as heartwarming, won Sandra Bullock an Oscar, and was later revealed, partly through Oher's own account, to be a story that had been significantly reshaped to centre the white family who took him in rather than Michael himself. His background served as context for the audience to absorb and sympathise with, while the narrative energy focused on the family's generosity. The film let white audiences feel moved without asking them to sit with any discomfort about the structural conditions that shaped Michael's life in the first place; conditions they were part of, and which the film had no interest in interrogating. The "heartwarming" response was only possible because the story had been arranged so that the audience never had to see themselves in it as architects of harm. They only had to see themselves as capable of kindness.
When Michael Oher later raised concerns about how his life had been framed, those concerns were largely dismissed or ignored. The film had already won. The narrative had been set.
This is the same dynamic at work when Hollywood tells queer and trans stories through cishet actors and creators. The audience experiences the emotional arc of suffering, resilience, and the love story without confronting the actual person. They can feel progressive for watching. They do not have to reckon with their own role in creating the world that made the story necessary.
Watching an actually queer, actually trans, actually nonbinary person tell their own story is different. It is confronting. Not because we are difficult, but because our presence makes the cost of our marginalisation visible in a way that cannot be managed by casting. When a trans actor plays a trans character, the audience is asked to sit with the reality that the person on screen has had to navigate a world that treats them as a problem to be solved. The audience cannot maintain the comfortable distance of watching someone simulate an experience. They are watching the experience itself, and the person having it is right there, asking to be seen.
That is what the industry is actually avoiding. Not a bad casting decision. A reckoning. Timothée Chalamet playing gay is a story. An out gay actor playing gay is a mirror. One lets the industry feel progressive. The other asks it to sit with what it has built and who it has kept out of the room while building it.
We are not too confronting. We are exactly as confronting as the truth of our lives requires us to be. That discomfort belongs to the people who created the conditions for it. It is not ours to manage by staying out of our own stories.
What Actually Needs to Change
The question of whether cishet actors should play queer and trans roles is not actually a complex one when you strip away the industry's self-interest.
Of course, the people whose lives are being portrayed should be the ones portraying them. Of course, the communities whose culture underpins mainstream entertainment should be the ones receiving its rewards. Of course, authentic storytelling requires authentic storytellers not just in the lead role, but writing the script, directing the scene, and editing the cut.
What makes it feel complex is the infrastructure of privilege that benefits from keeping it unresolved. The actors who build careers on borrowed identity. The studios that prefer the sanitised version. The award shows that celebrate the performance of marginalisation over the people who actually live it. The audiences who want the feeling of a queer story without the discomfort of a queer presence.
We are not here to be material. We are not here to make straight audiences feel something. We are not here to provide emotional texture to someone else's career.
These are our stories. The history in them is ours. The survival in them is ours. The culture that makes them worth telling is ours.
It's past time the industry stopped treating that as a casting inconvenience and started treating it as the point.
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