The straight actor took the role seriously in a time when he was the only major gay character on television, explaining why he refused to come out publicly as straight throughout his run on the hit Fox sudser.
Doug Savant was a straight man playing a gay man on television, which wasn’t exactly unprecedented. Nevertheless, the Melrose Place star made the decision at the time to not come out publicly as straight, despite public interest and media scrutiny.
“I was asked, in every conceivable way, whether I was straight or gay. And I would then say, ‘Well, it’s interesting, just that that’s the assumption,” Savant said on the latest Still the Place podcast with costars Laura Leighton (also his wife), Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Daphne Zuniga. “No one asked [Andrew Shue], ‘You’re playing Billy, does that mean you’re straight?'”
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He added, per Entertainment Weekly, that when they’d try to sidestep a direct question by asking him something like, “What do you have in common with the character?’ I’d say, ‘Well, we’re the same height and we both have a sense of humor.'”
Savant said he had a feeling that his sexuality would matter when he first landed the role of Matt Fielding, which he would portray across six of the Beverly Hill, 90210 spinoff’s seven seasons in the 1990s, but that his publicist didn’t get the significance.
According to Savant, when he asked how about how to handle the sexuality issue, his publicist told him, “Well, no, it’s not a big deal. You’re an actor, you’re just playing a character.” His thoughts on that were, “Oh, clearly she doesn’t get it.”
The media did quickly get it, though, which didn’t surprise Savant at all, who noted that he was the only gay character on TV at the time. “We had Billy Crystal [in Soap in the late ’70s and early ’80s], we were about to have Mitchell Anderson on Party of Five, and Bill Brochtrup, a friend of mine, on NYPD Blue. But at the time, [Matt] was the only one,” he said. “So there was an enormous amount of interest.”
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EW noted that Savant did miss a few, including Al Corley’s character on Dynasty, and Wilzon Cruz’ groundbreaking role as the first queer character played by a queer actor on My So-Called Life. But the fact that he wasn’t far off shows just how low representation had been to this point.
It was because of this that Savant said on the podcast he pushed back when he was finally called into the offices of MP creator Darren Star and the PR team where they encouraged him to go ahead and publicly come out as a heterosexual.
Savant explained the reason for his refusal, saying, “I was not going to make my living playing a gay man, but then say, ‘Oh, I would never be associated with that.'”
The way he interpreted them wanting him to come out as straight was that they believed “it would be somehow more palatable to the American public if they could avail themselves of the reality that I was actually a straight man.”
“I thought that was morally reprehensible,” he said. “I just couldn’t morally bring myself to say, ‘I’m going to come to work and I’m going to play this character, but I should distance myself from it.'”
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In fact, he said that he was setting out every day in his job to do just the opposite of that. “My intention with Matt was to say he is your son, he is your brother, he is your friend,” he explained. “He is every man, he’s your neighbor. He’s a regular guy who happens to be gay.”
While he was able to portray a gay character in the 1990s on television, it wasn’t as LGBTQIA+ characters are seen today. He was able to avoid many of the worst stereotypes of gay characters on TV, but Matt never got a love scene, or even kissed another man on camera.
The closest the show got was a planned same-sex kiss for an episode in 1994, but EW notes the episode backed out of showing it at the last minute, instead cutting away for a reaction shot from another character to insinuate the kiss without showing it.
Clearly, there was a lot of work to be done yet, which is why Savant was so adamant about not muddying the waters of this gay character so many viewers had embraced with his actual sexuality for fear it would diminish Matt and what he might represent for people.
You can check out Matt’s full appearance with his Melrose Place costars below.
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