James Corden denounced for doing "gayface" in the Netflix movie of the Broadway show "The Prom."

Gone are the days when a nongay actor won praise for playing a gay person. I guess this is like the way they don't stage "Othello" with a white actor in dark makeup and that old-time performance would be called "blackface." A nongay actor playing gay is doing "gayface." 

But what's the gay equivalent of dark makeup? Arguably, it's worse than a white actor putting on dark makeup to play a black person, which is mimicking an objective, outward trait. It's an affectation of stereotypical gestures and speech patterns and so forth. 

What do you need to do to read as gay? Has the answer become just don't do it?

I'm reading "James Corden Under Fire For ‘The Prom’ Performance: 'The Worst Gayface in a Long, Long Time'" (Decider). Here's the trailer. Corden is the actor playing a fat gay man. I don't think he's in what might be called "fatface" (that is, he's actually fat and not wearing a fat suit, I believe).

 

Here's the Vanity Fair review by Richard Lawson: "James Corden Should Have Been Banned from The Prom/Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman are merely wasted in Netflix’s Broadway musical adaptation—but Corden's performance is insulting." 

Corden, who is straight, is so bad in The Prom—somehow both appalling and terminally bland—that it had me thinking maybe the hardliners were right along. Forget the whole case-by-case thing: No more straight actors playing gay men until the sins of The Prom are properly atoned for. [The director, Ryan] Murphy, a gay man, has led some straight actors into fertile gay territory before.... But Corden, flitting and lisping around in the most uninspired of caricatures, misses all potential for nuance, and thus never finds even a hint of truth in the role. And this is in a movie that’s supposed to be about empowering queer people!

It's hard to believe that the era of straight actors playing gay people is over. Look at all the actors who have in very recent years won awards for doing just that. Maybe the problem is the stereotypical gay character. It's one thing for Rami Malek, a straight man, to play Freddie Mercury, a gay man — a grand narrative about a specific person — but quite something else to have a generic gay guy clowning for cheap laughs.