Jesse Monteagudo: This Review was originally published in Gay Today (2/24/03). It is reprinted with permission from www.gaytoday.badpuppy.com online. Jesse Monteagudo is a freelance writer and gay book lover who lives in South Florida with his life partner. He can be reached at jessemonteagudo@aol.com.
Out actor Craig Chester is best known for starring in a string of independent films with one-word titles: Swoon, Grief and Frisk. He also played Fred Hughes in I Shot Handy Warhol and best friend Terry in Kiss Me, Guido. Realizing that Hollywood doesn't care much for openly-gay, “art film” actors – even one who was nominated for a prestigious Spirit Award – Chester took a hiatus from acting to write screen plays. He also wrote this book, a delightfully witty memoir of a gay actor's life from the Bible Belt to Tinsel Town.
Why the Long Face? refers to Chester's experience with “Long Face Syndrome”, a disfiguring jaw malady that made the teenaged Chester look “like a Picasso sock puppet with pimples”. A series of surgeries left young Chester with his jaws wired shut and his head “swollen to massive, inhumane proportions”. (“He looks like a Mr. Potato Head!,” shrieked a female cousin.) While on a liquid diet, “I was made to sit at the dinner table, almost nightly, and watch in contempt as my father, mother, and sister gorged themselves on pot roast, chicken and dumplings, and sloppy joes.” Happily, Chester survived this ordeal to become rather handsome, if unconventional.
Growing up in a born-again Christian family, Chester spent his boyhood attending Christian summer camp (“Kidshwitz”), trying to speak in tongues, and awaiting the Rapture. Chester didn't mind, “because I was gay and could use my devotion to Christian chastity as a cloaking device for my utter lack of interest in screwing girls.” One especially devout boy was later discovered by Chester “in a Dallas bathhouse, getting gangbanged bareback by four musclemen, a poppers bottle shoved up his nose”. Craig's contribution to the holy cause was joining a girl friend in “Spreadin' It!”; “an outreach program that went to the homes of poor sinners whose main transgression was coming to our church, filling out an information card, and giving us their home address. . . . Melissa and I had doors slammed in our faces constantly, which was fine by me because I was secretly terrified by the idea of actually saving someone for Jesus,” he admits.
Chester's “first professional theatrical experience” was in a production of AIDS: The Musical!, performed in “a makeshift stage set in the back storage room of the Dallas AIDS Resource Center.” In spite of the play, members of the mostly-gay cast “were fucking each other, passing themselves around like a taco salad at a church picnic” and refusing to use condoms. Chester's God-fearing parents “sat quietly as their only son sang songs about eating ass while wearing nothing but a towel. . . . At the end of ‘Rimming at the Baths,' the choreography required me to drop my towel briefly and expose my bare butt to the crowd as I bent forward suggestively.” Chester was grateful that “Linda and Cecil drove into the gay ghetto of Dallas to pay ten dollars to see me in, basically, a gay strip show set to cabaret music.”
Since then Chester's parents became accepting of their son's career and his sexual orientation, going so far as to treat as part of the family a succession of boyfriends that Craig, alas, could not keep for long. Still, they wish that their son would break into commercial TV or movies, instead of appearing in a string of low-budget indies that are only shown in urban art houses. When Swoon made Chester almost a household word, his entire clan headed for Dallas to see the film. (“Hi! We're the star's family”.) Inside the theater the family “sat, horrified at the images that unfolded. Black-and-white cinematography, men kissing – Craig kissing men – artsy-fartsy music and editing, and no happy ending. They left the theater and drove home in silence”. When Chester was nominated for Best Actor at the Spirit Awards – the indies' answer to the Oscars – Mom Chester flew in for the occasion. (Chester didn't win.)
Due to Chester's habit of playing unsavory gay characters, he was never on good terms with the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. “I am one of a handful of actors in American cinema who are openly gay . . . yet I have never, not once, been invited to a GLAAD function, even though I have worked almost exclusively in gay cinema. The reason is because I have not made many films in my ten-year career that fit the ‘positive role model' requirement to garnish a GLAAD stamp of approval”.
Chester would “often lose gay roles to straight actors, because I am not ‘gay' enough”, whatever that means. That Chester has time to write a book speaks volumes about Hollywood's inability to appreciate original talent when they see it. Of course, if Hollywood had given Chester the kinds of roles that he deserves he wouldn't have had the time to write Why the Long Face?
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