The Brooklyn Rail

There’s an increasingly antiquated term for gay people who don’t have sex: a non-practicing homosexual.

The term is politely condescending; not a slur, it acknowledges one’s sexuality while emphasizing their chastity. It’s also comical, as if part of one’s personhood can be turned on and off, like unplugging the big thing in your kitchen and calling it a non-practicing fridge. In John Irving’s novel A Prayer for Owen Meany, someone calls the closeted narrator a non-practicing homosexual behind his back. Churches have also wielded the term to ascribe virtue to gay but chaste congregants who might otherwise be damned.

Increased LGBTQ+ acceptance has made the term something of a relic, however its spirit endures in the career of openly gay star Jim Parsons. The characters Parsons has played, on stage and screen, reflect larger questions about which ones audiences can expect to have sex—and, sometimes, how fully human they are allowed to be.

Parsons is now starring as the Stage Manager in Kenny Leon’s Broadway revival of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. That casting is logical. As a multi-Emmy Award winner for The Big Bang Theory, Parsons was the highest-paid television actor for years in a row and can easily draw a crowd. He’s a familiar name in a familiar play, and like Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory, the Stage Manager is an outsider. Sheldon is straight but has a peculiar nerdiness, and the Stage Manager is a role long noted for its queer undertones.

Also logical, then, is how the casting perpetuates a theme in Parsons’s career: playing queer, nuanced characters who don’t have sex.

Few gay actors of Parsons’s stratospheric celebrity have played as many explicitly gay roles in prominent plays, films, and on TV. He’s ached with yearning in an off-Broadway production of the musical A Man of No Importance, mourned the loss of friends dying of AIDS in a Broadway revival (and HBO film version) of The Normal Heart, battled alcoholism and self-loathing in a Broadway revival (and Netflix film version) of The Boys in the Band, and made stars and controversy in the Netflix miniseries Hollywood. In award-winning turns, Parsons has richly chronicled gay life in period pieces spanning almost half a century.

It’s also a long time to have a dry spell.

There is, of course, much more to queerness than libido. Largely, Parsons’s roles do not lack complexity, just sex. That lack is also dramaturgically airtight.

As Alfie in A Man of No Importance (with a book by Terrence McNally, music by Stephen Flaherty, and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens), Parsons pines for a charming bus driver. In 1960s Catholic Ireland, however, such desire is dangerous; for being homosexual alone, one character tells Alfie he could end up in prison. “I am in prison,” Aflie responds. “I’ve been in prison all me life.” Abstinence is all but forced upon him.

In Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart, which tracks activists’ collectivizing during the 1980s AIDS crisis, Parsons, as Tommy, takes on an organizing role. “There are gonna be a lot of mommas flying into town not understanding why their sons have suddenly upped and died from pneumonia,” he says. Parsons reprised that Broadway role in Ryan Murphy’s film version for HBO; in that adaptation, Tommy watches, alone from the sidelines, as his friends dance together with stirring intimacy. Here, abstinence means survival.

Such instances of abstinence are intentional, and compelling, but when repeated across roles embodied by the same eminent actor, chastity can also connote palatability. This is an inherent part of mainstream queerness, an oxymoron unto itself: for some queer actors, less sexual means more approachable.

It’s particularly true for queer actors who are not sex symbols. (“I’ve always felt a little bit like a muppet,” Parsons joked, discussing his role in The Muppets Film with them in 2022.) This has its perks: celebrities seen through a sexual lens endure greater scrutiny. Magazines make it easy for audiences to know the romantic lives of Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, and Tom Daley. They might not know the same of Lorde, Lisa Kudrow, or Parsons.

Parsons reads as nebbish, and he’s made millions from it. But type casting enforces a binary not only of ingénue and character actor but also, more plainly, of fuckable and not fuckable.

Mainstream media does not invite audiences to see some actors as risqué, or even arousable. Sex sells, but—more finely—white, conventionally attractive people having sex sells.

On TV, attractive queer actors playing queer roles (Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey on Fellow Travelers, Jonathan Groff and Murray Bartlett on Looking, Kit Connor and Joe Locke on Heartstopper) have character-driven, story-driving sex. It does not matter whether straight people play gay roles, but it can be lucrative: films like Brokeback Mountain, A Single Man, Call Me by Your Name, The Favourite, and Ammonite might inherently attract LGBTQ+ audiences, and casting well-known, attractive straight actors could also buoy the box office.

Where does that leave LGBTQ+ actors who are household names but not heartthrobs?

It’s conspicuous that the only play, film, or TV show Parsons is seen having gay sex in is one he produced.

Spoiler Alert—a dramedy directed by Michael Showalter from Parsons’s and his husband Todd Spiewak’s production company—is based on Michael Ausiello’s memoir about the loss of his husband to terminal cancer in 2015. Parsons portrays Michael, a self-described “hopeless romantic.” He’s wildly attracted to the wildly attractive Kit (Ben Aldridge) after they meet at a New York City gay bar. Kit, too, is smitten; they head to his apartment.

“You’re so confident. You ripped off your clothes like you’re a stripper at a bachelorette party. I’m an FFK,” Parsons says as Michael.

FFK = former fat kid. Michael wrestles with insecurities, and Kit is supportive. Slowly, they kiss. Later in the film, an under-the-sheets handjob is heavily implied. Parsons never removes his shirt in the film, but he’s still the most sexually alive version of himself audiences have seen.

Appearing as an out character for the first time in a contemporary story, Parsons navigates the ups and downs of a gay relationship—sexual stagnation, couples therapy, Grindr politics—even though it’s short lived. Kit is diagnosed with late-stage neuroendocrine cancer and passes away within a year.

Though no intercourse is seen, Parsons does play a sexually active gay man in one other story: Paula Vogel’s Mother Play. A one-act about the playwright’s alcoholic, homophobic mother and how, per the New York Times review, “people do terrible things for unterrible reasons—out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness,” Mother Play is a breathing bildungsroman documenting a version of Vogel and her brother’s upbringing, from middle school to middle age.

On Broadway, Parsons played Carl, also the name of Vogel’s brother. “I make love to men as if my life depended on it. Because it does,” he says. “The love I feel for men is sacred.”

In the play, Carl’s sex is a necessary expression of his personhood. His drive is palpable, natural as breath. A throbbing and thorny love letter to her family, Vogel’s play is also a eulogy; Carl, like his real-life counterpart, passes away from complications related to AIDS.

These two pieces in which Parsons’s gay characters have, or directly mention having, sex both end with tragedy. That in no way diminishes the three-dimensionality of these characters. Sex is a hard pill for American audiences to swallow, stories about repressed LGBTQ+ characters perform well, and Parsons is but an accomplished vehicle for them. Still, across Parsons’s body of work, the size of the platform his characters are seen on suggests that to be mainstream, to be queer, and to not be sexy is to be neutered or tragic.

The Stage Manager, a blank, is also sexless. In Our Town, he watches and comments on Emily and George’s love story without having one of his own. Nonetheless, Wilder gave him a queer edge.

“I’ve married over two hundred couples in my day,” Parsons, as the Stage Manager, says at Emily and George’s wedding. “Do I believe in it? I don’t know.”

It is a rare moment of cynicism in an otherwise wholesome play—and perhaps a subtle insertion of queerness that would not have alarmed Wilder’s 1938 audience.

Wilder, unwed and closeted, portrayed the Stage Manager in multiple productions of Our Town, on Broadway and in summer stocks, and the role may be a stand-in for the playwright. The institution of marriage may not accept him, but in his play he gets to poke fun at it.

Even as Parsons shares the Stage Manager’s uncertainty about marriage, those sitting close enough to him at the Barrymore Theatre may note a conundrum: he’s wearing his wedding ring. That gesture reflects a production empowering its actors—Deaf, Black, gay—to bring their full selves to roles traditionally portrayed by a more homogeneous ensemble. In Leon’s production, it is our town, after all.

If the Stage Manager, as a role, is a non-practicing homosexual, this one gets a little upgrade—if you’re close enough to glimpse it.