Jelle Florizoone: Is It Weird to Play Gay?

When Belgian actor Jelle Florizoone starred in the gay-teen-angst North Sea Texas (2011), the media went wild with questions:  "What's it like to play a gay guy?  How weird was it?  How disgusting was it?"

I hate interviews like that.
1. They assume that every other role is easy to play.  You want a secret agent?  A Martian?  A talking frog?  Not a problem.  But gay people are so bizarre that it's almost impossible for an actor to get into their characters, and so disgusting that it's a pain for him to even try.



2. They assume that teenagers must necessarily be heterosexual.  Same old story: no gay juveniles can possibly exist.

I don't know if Florizoone -- now a member of the boy band 5th Avenue -- is gay in real life or not, but he certainly doesn't think that gay roles are "weird" or particularly difficult.

After North Sea Texas, he starred in the short Headlong (2012), about a teenage ballet dancer stuck in a hotel room in a distant city, lost and alone until he falls "headlong" for a boy.

Even his starring role in the Flemish children's program ROX (2011-) doesn't strike me as heterosexist.  It's about three secret agents: the dashing Xavier (Jeremy Vandoorne, left), the glamorous Olivia (Jana Geurts), and the brainy Rick (Jelle).   Plus their magical talking car, ROX.

You can see it on youtube.  I've gone through a few episodes; even without speaking Dutch, it's not hard to follow the plot. And I don't see Rick getting involved in any hetero-romances.

The Wonderful Adventures of Nils: A Boy and His Goose

Remember Leda in Greek mythology and the Yeats poem, who had a thing for swans?

14-year old Nils Holgersson had a thing for geese.

The star of The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1906) and The Further Adventures of Nils (1907) by gay Swedish novelist Selma Lagerlof, Nils is a bad boy who torments animals, until he shrinks down to their size.  He and a domestic goose named Morton join a pack of wild geese and fly off to Lapland.

The other geese, especially cranky matriarch Akka, disapprove of the two outsiders, but Nils and Akka prove to be valuable allies during the dangerous and difficult journey.

Finally Nils matures enough to return to human form.  He is now a man, but he no longer understands the language of the geese, and he must abandon his friends (picture by Taya Strizhakova).

There's a lot of gay symbolism in the "queer" boy trying to fit in.

The books were envisioned as school texts: Nils visits every province of Sweden, and hears about their geography and economic output.  But kids -- and adults -- loved them.  They are still best-sellers in Sweden.

Nils has been immortalized in a dozen statues, on a postage stamp, and on the back of the 20 krona bill.  There have been five film versions of his adventures, in Russian, Swedish, Japanese, and German.

The 2011 German tv version starring Justus Kammerer unfortunately gives Nils a heterosexist reason for wanting to become a "real boy" again: he's got a girlfriend back home.

Otherwise Nils is wonderfully free of the girl-craziness that besets most other adolescents in children's literature.