Kevin Spacey Could’ve Come Out When It Mattered

The most important thing to point out about Kevin Spacey right now is that his coming out as a gay man is not the story. The story is that longtime out-of-the-closet actor Anthony Rapp, who you might know from Rent or Adventures in Babysitting or his current role on Star Trek Discovery, came forward in an article on Buzzfeed last night accusing Spacey of making aggressive sexual advances on him at a party when he was 14 and Spacey was 26. Spacey responded on Twitter by claiming ignorance, claiming drunkenness, and finally by making public what has been a widely rumored but never confirmed: that he’s gay.

There are a billion things about that tweet that ought to make you incredulous as hell, among them the word choice of “I choose now to live as a gay man,” and most egregiously the fact that the tweet conflates Spacey’s homosexuality with accusations of sexually preying on underage children, a conflation which has long been a vile and damaging lie peddled by the gay community’s tormentors.

Whatever other facts emerge about Spacey, however, here’s a depressing one: Kevin Spacey is our first out A-List leading-man movie star. You can pick that sentence apart all day long, if you want to. Ian McKellen is out and proud but has never been on that hobnobbing-with-Julia-Roberts “A-List.” Neil Patrick Harris is an A-Lister but has never been a real movie star. After decades of the axiom that gay actors who come out of the closet will see their career prospects dry up, we’ve been seeing that proved wrong again and again by men like Jonathan Groff and Matt Bomer, though their stardom has been on television.

But at the movies, at the very top echelon of the business, leading men are still all uniformly straight. Publicly, at least. Spacey is the first, and he’s been forced out besides. And even that has happened now that he’s settled into supporting roles and TV shows. Spacey never came out when it mattered. He didn’t come out when he was winning two Academy Awards in the late 1990s. Not when he was headlining six movies between 1998 and 2001. Not when he was starring as Lex Luthor in the ill-fated Superman Returns for director Bryan Singer. Coming out then would’ve been gutsy and groundbreaking. Coming out now looks like a cowardly deflection.

Looking at Spacey’s career right now, in light of these allegations, is looking out upon a city that’s about to burn down to the ground. Who knows what’s going to happen to House of Cards when it comes time to begin production again. It’s tough to imagine Netflix will be all that eager to trot out a new season with its leading man accused of making advances on a minor, no matter how much of a swine Frank Underwood is on screen. At the movies it’s even more stark. Here are the three as-yet-unreleased movies listed on Spacey’s IMDb:

• All the Money in the World, directed by Ridley Scott and slated to open in six short weeks, on December 8th. In it, Spacey plays Jean Paul Getty, the richest man in the world, who refuses to pay a ransom when his grandchild is kidnapped. The film was gearing out for an awards play, with Spacey as the featured supporting actor. That campaign won’t happen now, and while you certainly could market the film around Michelle Williams alone, as the boy’s mother, the roll-out will be engulfed in controversy; it will surprise no one if this one gets taken off the 2017 calendar and pushed to next year.
• Billionaire Boys Club, based on the true-life story of an ’80s financial scam, starring a cast of exclusively hot young talent (Ansel Elgort, Taron Egerton, Jeremy Irvine). It now seems unfathomable that a film with Spacey surrounded by that cast could be released without massive controversy. Woody Allen has managed to make movies that bring to mind the accusations of sexual assault that have been levied against him, but don’t expect Spacey to be able to walk between the raindrops in quite the same way.
• Gore, in which Spacey plays the famed gay intellectual Gore Vidal, and which currently boasts the logline, “A young man spends a summer in Italy where he meets his idol, Gore Vidal, who teaches him about life, love, and politics.” According to IMDb, this is filming now.

The priority here isn’t to help Kevin Spacey weather these accusations and maintain a career, and yet even still, it is especially hard to imagine how any of these projects could be released without massive controversy. Spacey’s career is about to implode right before our eyes, and given the incredibly well-sourced accusations against him, it probably should. But when the ashes are sifted through, the lesson can’t be A-Lister Comes Out of the Closet, Career Is Ended. And if Spacey’s attempt to change the story from accusations of sexual misconduct with an underage boy to his own homosexuality do successfully shift that narrative, that’s what could happen. It shouldn’t.

Kevin Spacey’s career in Hollywood, as least as we know it, may well be over. It’s his actions, and not his gayness, that will have killed it.