Before “Glee” or “Modern Family,” before Ellen came out, Wilson Cruz impacted how Americans saw gay people, and how gay teens saw themselves, as Rickie Vasquez on “My so-called Life.”







The actor and former GLAAD spokesperson now serves as Executive Producer on “Playing Gay: How America Came Out on Television” which chronicles the story of how television through the past four decades changed the way America views LGBT people.







The Swerve recently spoke with Cruz about the documentary, which is currently raising funds on Kickstarter, as well as his career and the changes he has seen over the years.









The Swerve Magazine: How did get involved with this project?





Wilson Cruz: David Bender, who is our director and writer on the documentary, actually reached out to me to be a part of the documentary, to do an interview. We ended up having lunch before we set a date for it, just to talk about the project itself. In the process of having lunch, we realized that we kind of saw the world through similar eyes and we were political junkies and lovers of television.







He asked me to come on board in a more official capacity to help get the film made, and once we do the fundraising, to be involved creatively in assembling the documentary. He comes from the political world. He used to run Roseanne's production company. I come from the advocacy world, and obviously from TV and entertainment. Between our generations, we kind of have the topic covered.







SM: On the Kickstarter page, it talks about how gay representation on TV paved the path for marriage equality. Is the Supreme Court decision the catalyst for making this film?







WC: It was a project that David had wanted to do for a long time, but now with the Supreme Court decision, it was the perfect time to look back at the elements politically and culturally that got us to where that was even possible. He and I both agree that without the stories that were told on TV, the culture in the country would not have been in a place where it could have accepted a Supreme Court decision like this.







It was the stories told through television that allowed people to know who LGBT people really are, as opposed to the lies that were being told about us by the other side. It was the personal stories, the characters that they grew to love that really helped them to understand what our relationships really are.







SM: Why do you think that there has been so much progress made with television, as opposed to film and other media?







WC: If we look back, it was actually the opposite before. Further back, we saw more happening in the film world, with films like “Philadelphia” or in the indie film world. Films became more expensive to make and became more about mass-marketing. You can see the kinds of studio films that are being made today, which are comic books, and big budget hero movies, as opposed to interpersonal relationship dramas that we saw before.







Television kind of came in and became the medium in which we told those stories. I actually think that television is better suited for it—don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more films that were interpersonal relationships—but I think there is something about the fact that you can follow a character or a relationship or a group of people through a series, and take them from a beginning through a middle and to an end in long-form that film, because of its nature, is incapable of doing.







SM: When you were growing up, what kinds of depictions did you see in media?







WC: Well, I didn't see very many. The ones that I did see didn't really reflect my experience. Up until very recently, and even still remains true for the most part, the depictions of LGBT people are white gay men. That wasn't my experience. I remember seeing Billy Crystal in “Soap” re-runs. I remember seeing Steven Carrington on “Dynasty.” “Soap” was a comedy, they took liberties with that, but they still took some chances. Steven was a tragic figure, was tortured.







The other thing I remember is Oprah covering the AIDS epidemic at one point in which she visited a small town in West Virginia, in which a community was up in arms that they had amongst them a man living with AIDS. Because of their terror of him and of the disease, really acted in an ugly way towards him. I remember two things about that: One, how terrible it must have been for him, and my heart broke for him. The other thing was Oprah being so enveloping of him, and so protective of him, and really disgusted in her own way of how he was being treated.







It was a really scary time for people my age. I was coming into my adolescence, my sexual awareness at the same time that the AIDS epidemic was at its height. There was a lot of confusion about my sexuality and whether or not it was going to kill me. So death and sex were intertwined in a way that was really frightening.







That was really the conversation that was being had on television, and those were the messages that I was receiving. That and the fact that there were no LGBT people of color that I can recall at all, so I felt invisible in many ways.







SM: So when you auditioned for Rickie Vasquez, and you first saw that character that had been written, what was that like for you?







WC: I've said this before, which is, I remember reading that script and wondering who the hell had been following me around high school, and how they knew what I had been through. I would be lying if I didn't say that in reading it that I did know how powerful it would be for all of us, for young people and specifically young LGBT people of color to be able to see themselves because I wanted that. I remember longing for that. I remember wondering why nobody looked like me, or why there was nobody that I could relate to on television.







In reading that, I felt: A. as a viewer, I was elated that it could possibly be on TV, and then B. as an actor and performer, I wanted nothing more that to be the person who was allowed to play him. To this day—I've been very, very fortunate in my career, and I am so grateful for everything—but I don't ever remember wanting anything more than that. Not to say that I won't, I wanted “Rent” pretty badly, that happened too. But I knew that power of that, and I also felt like I could do it in the responsible way, and that I could lend some authenticity to it. I worked really hard, and I fought for it.







SM: The most notable arc in Rickie's story was when he was kicked out of his home. That had also happened to you. What was it like to play something that traumatic, which had recently happened to you?







WC: It was really hard, I'm not going to lie to you. I don't think I had completely dealt with all of my own feelings about it. At the time of filming those couple of episodes, my father and I had not reconciled. I had a lot of anger about it, and yet some real determination to overcome it and move beyond it, and I think that some of that came out in the performance. There was something about Rickie in that episode, yes he got beat up and it was really sad, but there was something also about self-determination in that performance for me. “Yeah, this happened to me, but I'm going to be OK no matter what. I can take care of myself.”









I was feeling a lot of that at that time, so a lot of that seeped into it. As an actor, it's really hard to do. A lot of people say, “Oh, it must be easier to play roles that are closer to your personality.” In my view, in my experience, it's actually a lot harder. I love putting on a character, disappearing into it, and becoming someone else for a while. That's fun for me.





It felt really vulnerable and naked to go through that again. I was young, I was 20 years old. I wasn't even legal to drink yet. I don't think I really had dealt with a lot of it yet, so looking back on it, I'm surprised that I got through it. At the same time, it was really cathartic, and I think I can say that about the whole series. The experience was really incredibly cathartic to go through those experiences again and then to just leave them there on stage and walk away. There was something therapeutic about it.







SM: As you said, you had never seen a gay person of color on screen before, and you were one of the few young gay people out there. What kind of response did you get from gay teens at that time, or after?







WC: Interestingly enough, the response I did get was through letters. Real letters, this was before email. We would get mail that would come to us through the network, and a lot of my mail was anonymous from young people who were grateful for the show, and for me on the show, and felt safe in telling me their own experiences because it was anonymous, and it was faceless. And there was somebody who they knew was willing to hear it without judgment.







I've told this story a lot. I received a letter once from a boy who wrote to me from the South or the Midwest; I'm not exactly sure where, but I have it here somewhere. He said that before the show started airing, he was seriously considering killing himself, and how grateful he was to see me on the show, and that I had friends, and people who loved me. At the end of the letter where he says thank you and tells me that he's decided not to kill himself, you could literally see the tears that fell off of his face onto the page, and smeared the ink from his pen. To me, that was it. That was worth all of it. That was the whole point of the experience. To me, he represented all of the people who weren't able to pick up the pen and write that.







From that moment on, I felt like, “OK, this is what I'm supposed to be doing, and I hope that the rest of my career, if I'm so lucky, that I can affect people this way.” I've been telling that story for decades now, and it never fails to break me down.







The other part of it is that, I would go out with other actors on the show, and they would always have young kids our own age come up to them and say, “Oh my god, I love your character. I love this. I love that.” That didn't really happen to me until I started going out, say to gay clubs, when I was in my late 20s. I realized that those kids weren't coming up to me because they were scared to come up to me because of what it might have said about them.







That generation of LGBT kids weren't able to tell me how they felt until they were adults and saw me out. I didn't really hear it until six or seven years later, and that was really fascinating. You wouldn't see young people come up to me with their parents like the actors did, and say, “I love your character” or “I'm just like you.” I wouldn't hear that. Nobody was going to say that in front of their parents at 14.







SM: A couple of years later, Ellen DeGeneres came out on national TV. How have you seen things change in the time after that?







WC: At first, it was incremental. It's like a pebble falling off of a hill; it starts off slow, and once it gains speed, it just goes at full velocity. I feel like the years between '95 and let's say '97, “Are we going to see anyone else?” We were still talking about glass closets with Ellen and Rosie and even Melissa Etheridge. There were people that we knew were gay, but they hadn't come out yet. But then we finally start to see people come out. Once we started to see that, we started to see it more on television.







Then you get to the 2000s, and you have shows like “Glee,” “The Fosters” or “Modern Family” that really started to change not only how we saw television, but the way that we saw ourselves and our families. They still have huge ratings that they're receiving, and they were juggernauts from the beginning. I think part of that is because people were hungry for that; the culture was begging to be seen.







They were a catalyst for the conversation that needed to be had, about how our families were changing and the way that we felt about LGBT people was changing. These shows gave people permission to be OK with their families and to love their families and to talk about it publicly and have a reference point. “My kid is like those kids on 'Glee'” or “My family is like that family on 'Modern Family' or 'The Fosters'.”







I think that the networks started to see success with storylines, and when they saw how successful they were, they wanted to have more success. I can't believe that it happened with LGBT people before it happened with people of color in general, but we're seeing it now with “Empire” and “Black-ish.” The networks are like, “Oh my god, there is money to be had with diversity! What a concept.” They are slow in coming around, but when coming around they see dollar signs, and that's what makes them change.







SM: Moving beyond the mainstream, to specialized cable networks, and shows you've been a part of, did you ever imagine that there would be a show like “Noah's Arc?”









WC: If you were to tell me today in 2015 that somebody was going to make a show that was all black and Latino gay men, I'd be like, “You're high!” And when it was my friend Patrik-Ian Polk who came to me in 2005, and said, “I'm going to make this series for Logo,” and I was like, “Yeah! Let's do that.”





He wanted those four best friends to be African-American. I was like, “Yes girl, do all of that. Go there.” We had lunch one day and he was like, “I want to bring you on to be one of the boyfriends, but I want you to be a doctor and I want you to be HIV-positive” and my head exploded. I was like, “So do we start tomorrow? When do we start?” I knew exactly who that person was.







I knew that that show was larger than life. My idea for Junito was that he was the modern-day Prince Charming, he for me was the boyfriend everyone wanted. Including the fact that he was HIV-positive because I think that there was something about the lessons learned by becoming HIV-positive that made him better, that made him more aware of himself and more grateful for the love in his life. That made him even more of a Prince Charming.







I long for another “Noah's Arc.” I loved those relationships. As much as it was about sex and relationships, it was more about friendship and the families that we create for ourselves. It's not an original idea, it kind kind of came out of “Sex & The City,” that's what they did, that's “Golden Girls.” I've seen that over and over in our community.







SM: Has the way you've been viewed over time by the industry changed over time as attitudes have changed?







WC: I don't know who said it, but I believe it to be true, “It's none of by business what anyone else thinks of me.” My business is to go to work and do as best a job as I can possibly do. Do I think that my being openly gay hurt my career? No, I don't think it hurt my career any more than being openly Puerto Rican hurt my career. Let's be honest, there are a limited amount opportunities for Latino actors, at least when I was coming up. I think there's more now than in the early to mid-90s. I don't know which one was worse (laughs).







I do know this; my work was better as an openly gay actor than if I had not been open because I'm not that great of an actor who can act on top of acting. That's a lot of fricking work. I have to act like I'm straight to then put on a character on top? That's too many layers, even for me. I got to really pull from me, and from my own experience and not deny any of it, and just do the work.







Did I deal with ignorant people? Absolutely, but I talk to my straight actor friends, they deal with a lot of ignorances as well. We all have something we have to deal with. Or as I like to look at it, something that makes us special. Whatever makes me special helps me get a certain job, whatever makes somebody else special helps them get that job.







SM: I saw on Twitter, you were talking about comicbooks naming Sunspot as your favorite character, and wanting to play the original White Tiger. Are you a comic fan?







WC: Yes and no. Here's the funny thing, I became a comicbook fan while I was the national spokesperson at GLAAD because the entertainment staff were huge on these comic books. I was like, “What's the big deal?” They were the ones who educated me on the fact that the comicbook world has been more advanced in LGBT representation than all other media, and I was shocked to find that out. They told me about Hector Ayala, the White Tiger. I was like, “Please tell me more about that. Why aren't I playing him?” If the studios are going to make these comic book movies, there's an opportunity for me. I work on this body every fricking day, so let's make some money off of it.



SM: What else do you have on your plate right now?







WC: I just started a recurring role on a new series for NBC that's coming out mid-season called “Heartbreaker.” We were supposed to be on in the fall, but our lead actress Melissa George is preggers, and she's going to go have her baby. So we're doing four episodes now and then we're going to take a long hiatus and let her go have her puppy, and we'll come back at the beginning of the year and make more.







I get to play a very fun character who is kind of the Vonda Shepard of the show. I basically perform in every episode I'm in at a club that the hospital staff hangs out in. So I'm kind of like the Greek Chorus. I play the boyfriend of one of the main characters, and there are some surprises, to say the least. I was just recording the first song. It's going to be fun.







More information about “Playing Gay” can be found at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playinggay/playing-gay

