Melrose Place‘s Doug Savant recalls why he evaded questions regarding his sexuality while playing gay character Matt Fielding on the ’90s sudsy teen drama, saying he “felt a responsibility” to not distance himself from his on-screen portrayal.
“I think the most shocking revelation was when the call is coming from inside the house,” Savant began telling former co-stars — wife Laura Leighton, Courtney Thorne-Smith, and Daphne Zuniga — on the Still The Place podcast about what it was like playing a gay character as a straight man amid a television landscape still lacking diversity.
The Desperate Housewives star recounted an instance with a publicist working at the Pat Kingsley-founded PMK, who repped executive producer Aaron Spelling, in which he said she did not understand the gravity of the representation. “I had said to Sam, our publicist, ‘Do you care to talk about how we’re going to handle this going forward, that there was a gay character? I knew it was exceptional, and I thought people would be interested. And she goes, ‘Well, no, it’s not a big deal. You’re an actor, you’re just playing a character.’ And I said, ‘Oh, clearly she doesn’t get it.’”
On press tours, Savant said he made a personal choice to not address his sexuality publicly, alleging that Spelling, network Fox and creator Darren Star were not fans of the decision, resulting in an office meeting with executives, Kingsley and Star. “‘We don’t see why it’s a big deal, why you just wouldn’t say, ‘Well, it shouldn’t matter, but I’m heterosexual,’” he explained. “I said ‘No.’ I was not going to make my living playing a gay man, but then say, ‘Oh, but I would never be associated with that. This isn’t me.’”
As Savant noted, his character was among the first LGBTQ+ characters on TV, following a scant list of queer characters that existed in the ’80s. The Teen Wolf actor said he was encouraged to reveal he was straight as “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. And I thought that was morally reprehensible and I said, ‘You may not prostitute my personal life for the benefit of our show because you think it’s somehow more politically correct.’”
The Godzilla actor said he was asked “in every conceivable way” what his sexuality was, questioning the assumption of being straight as the default. When asked how he was similar to Matt, he would say: “‘Well, we’re the same height and we both have a sense of humor.’”
He added further, “I felt a responsibility to it at the time. Will Smith was about to come out in the John Guare Six Degrees of Separation [film] — the character’s gay and he came out at the time, ‘Well, I would never kiss a guy on-screen and I would never do this’ [he later admitted his refusal to kiss a man, as written in the script, was “immature”] — he distanced himself, every actor that had done this. I just couldn’t morally bring myself to say, ‘Every week, I’m going to come to work and I’m going to play this character, but that I should distance myself from it.’ My intention with Matt was to say he is your son, he is your brother, he is your friend. He is every man, he’s your neighbor. He’s a regular guy who happens to be gay.”
While Savant said Matt was received in a “mostly positive” manner and that he still receives appreciation from queer fans who looked up to the character, he added, “What became painfully evident was not any one character was going to represent the diversity of an entire community. So to think Matt Fielding, as a lone gay character, could shoulder the entire community’s representation — it was an impossible task. And now, we see a much greater diversity of gay characters, and aren’t we all glad that we’re here?”
To their credit, Savant said Spelling, Star and Fox “should be applauded” for proceeding with Matt as a character in the face of letter campaigning orchestrated by the Christian Coalition and Moral Majority calling for advertising boycotts of the show.
