As an adolescent, I was extremely into independent cinema and especially into any independent cinema about the gays (and yet for some reason still thought that I was straight? Hilarious.). So, yes, I absolutely saw The Birdcage when it came out in theaters. I also saw La Cage aux Folles, the French film that it is reprising, tho which I saw first has been lost to the annals of time.
What I did not care about as an adolescent, on the other hand, was The Oprah Winfrey Show, or really any of the afternoon talk shows. So it was only this morning that I learned about the time that Nathan Lane and Robin Williams went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to talk about The Birdcage and Oprah kinda tap danced around “Well will this movie make people think that you, Nathan, might be… gay?” right before Williams jumped in and diverted the conversation to something completely different. Apparently, Lane was on Sunday Today earlier this week fondly reminiscing about this moment, about how Williams knew that Lane — who was out to friends and family — was not ready to make his gayness a topic of national conversation and threw himself into the convo to spare his friend and co-star any awkwardness. (You can see the original Oprah clip and the more recent Sunday Today clip edited together in this tweet.)
I don’t really have much to say about what Williams did aside from the fact that it was very sweet. But what I do think is interesting is that starring in The Birdcage was enough to make people — because surely it was not just Oprah raising the question — wonder about Lane’s sexuality, while Williams was given a complete and total pass.
I want to be clear on something here so I don’t get myself into trouble: as far as I know, Robin Williams was a heterosexual man. He was married three times, always to women. I have never heard any rumors that suggest he might have been queer. Aside from the fact that he apparently told people his pug was gay and played a couple of queer characters (in addition to The Birdcage, he starred in Boulevard as a married man finally exploring his queer sexuality and… I mean do we count Mrs. Doubtfire? I don’t really, but… maybe?), there is no reason to believe he was anything other than an enthusiastic queer ally and good friend.
And yet.
It should not be lost on any of us that literally everything I just said could also be the biography of a bisexual man. Plenty of bi men only publicly have female partners, plenty of bi men primarily express their queerness through allyship and art and jokes about animals being gay. And the fact that none of this means Williams was bi, yet also doesn’t mean that Williams was straight, is kind of my point here: that bisexuality is, as many others have said, a threat because it upends the surety of identity. No one wanted to ask — to even think — that Williams might be bi, because to probe that question would be to open up an entire Pandora’s box of ambiguity, to open up a world where anyone could be bi, even avowed monosexuals: how do they know if they simply haven’t realized it yet?
The exact specifics of Williams’s sexuality do not matter to me one way or the other: it’s information that died with him, it’s information that truly only matters to the people who were lucky enough to love and be loved by him. But the fact that Williams did not have to worry about probing questions about his sex life, his identity, the way that Lane did, simply because he had a wife — that is what intrigues me. You could say, sure, that it’s a privilege: that Williams could rest easy knowing he could play a gay role without having to be asked whether he himself was a little light in the loafers. And yet as many of us intimately know, there is a numbness, a deadening, that comes with the knowledge that no one will ever wonder, no one will ever question, no one will ever ask.
A bird in a birdcage is fully visible. It can see the world, and be seen by it as well. It is not trapped in a closet, hidden away in the dark, unable to ever see the sun. And yet the bird in the birdcage is not free. The bird in the birdcage cannot fully outstretch its wings, cannot know the precious joy of fully uninhibited flight.
The birdcage is a metaphor. We are the birds.
Thanks for this. As a bi man who shares most of the biographical points you mention about Williams, though with fewer wives, I appreciate the insight and comment. Since becoming public about my bisexuality over the course of the past few years (which is to say, public if asked or if it feels pertinent for me to volunteer the information I guess?) I've had a lot of thoughts about being assumed straight and how that gives me the privilege of avoiding most of the negative stigma and social knock-on effects associated with visible queerness, but also raises questions about honest presentation and access to solidarity, etc. It's a big tangle but I appreciate each new angle you bring on it!