Colman Domingo’s Oscar Nomination Is Only the Second of Its Kind

Colman Domingo joined a rarefied club on Tuesday: With an Oscar nomination for his performance as the civil rights activist Bayard Rustin in “Rustin,” he became only the second openly gay man to be nominated for playing a gay character. Ian McKellen was the first, in 1999, for “Gods and Monsters” and his portrayal of James Whale, the real-life director of the iconic 1930s horror films “Frankenstein” and “Bride of Frankenstein.”

Andrew Scott was also considered a potential nominee for his heart-wrenching role as a gay screenwriter in “All of Us Strangers,” but he was not recognized.

Over the decades, many straight male actors have earned Oscar nominations for playing L.G.B.T.Q. characters, and quite a few of them won a statuette: William Hurt won in 1986 for portraying a transgender woman in “Kiss of the Spider Woman”; Tom Hanks in 1994 for his role as a lawyer dying of AIDS in “Philadelphia”; Sean Penn in 2009 for playing Harvey Milk in “Milk”; Jared Leto in 2014 for playing a transgender woman in “Dallas Buyers Club”; Rami Malek in 2019 for his turn as Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody”; and last year, Brendan Fraser for playing a 600-pound gay man in “The Whale” — to name a few.

On Tuesday, that list also grew longer with the nomination of Bradley Cooper for his role as the storied American conductor Leonard Bernstein in “Maestro.” Bernstein had relationships with both men and women, and the film focuses primarily on Bernstein’s personal life.

While there have been instances of gay or bisexual men securing nominations for playing straight characters, often these actors’ sexual orientation wasn’t public knowledge in advance: Marlon Brando, for example, who had relationships with men and women, won two Oscars, in 1955 for “On the Waterfront” and in 1973 for “The Godfather”; and Kevin Spacey won in 1996 for “The Usual Suspects” and in 2000 for “American Beauty.”

In a 2016 interview with The Guardian, McKellen addressed the imbalance, referring to the many straight men who have won for playing gay: “How clever, how clever. What about giving me one for playing a straight man?”

He noted that he himself had prepared a speech each time he was nominated and “I’ve had to put it back in my pocket twice.”

“No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar,” he went on, adding dryly, “I wonder if that is prejudice or chance.”