Attention Fictional Characters Everywhere!

Who will be next?

Now that Dumbledore has come out, now that Potter scholars are popping up everywhere saying they knew it all along, including one who counted off the wizard’s seven clues of gayness, not least of which was the lighthearted observation that “Albus Dumbledore” is an anagram for ‘Male bods rule, bud…”

Now in these heady, happy days of full-disclosure, Nightcharm wishes to urge other fictional characters to come out finally and share the love. And so we have composed Our Open Letters to the biggest Closet Cases in Films and Fiction:

Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean)

Jack, we know that like every proper pirate, you’re ambisexual. Anything that ambees by, you’ll have sex with it. That’s the sailor in you — and let’s face it, he isn’t the first.

But Jack, Jack, you’re so dizzy! The sun-addled, rum-sodden thing can only explain so much. Take the way you run, with your arms waving frantically about your head like a madwoman with her wig on fire. Or the way you give an order, flouncing with one hand in the air as if you were waving a perfumed handkerchief.

And can we talk about the mascara? None of the other pirates wear mascara. Keira Knightley doesn’t wear mascara. Isn’t the Johnny Depp face pretty enough for you? We mean, it’s something out of Cleopatra’s Egypt, those kohl-rimmed eyes.

Salacious and flirtatious, you’re absolutely indiscriminate . It makes no difference whether you’re talking to an ornate, hoop skirted bawd working the docks or Orlando Bloom, those sidelong glances, those sucked-in cheeks, those little moues of sad-eyed concern. You’re keeping something from us, Jack.

We’d like to say that now is the time when you have a chance to do the right thing, but we remember the last time you were told that. “I adore those moments, love,” you replied, as fey as you please. “I like to wave at them as they pass by.”

Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt in Fight Club)

Who can turn the day on with a smile? Show us those missing teeth, boy. Has anyone ever looked so mega glamorous behind a black-and-blue shiner?

Tyler, you see, likes to fight. He likes to fight so much he organized a paramilitary club of guys who stand around in a circle, many of them shirtless, and take turns wailing on each other, just beating the crap out of their buddies.

It’s testosterone run wild, testosterone shooting off everywhere, and Tyler is nothing but testosterone, pure anarchy packed into a too-tight T-shirt covered in silkscreens of motorbike racers.

He’s got that double-Y appeal, the extra chromosome of the alpha top. “Did you know that if you mix equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?” That’s Tyler, the wit and wisdom of. Also this: getting up from an airplane seat to his male bud: “Now a question of etiquette — as I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?”

The guys in Fight Club can’t get enough of Fight Club, which means they can’t get enough of Tyler. They draw their juice from Tyler because Tyler is something of their own testosterone projection — not real, but not not real. You see, these are horned-up guys who can’t get no satisfaction. And Fight Club is all about getting relief, relief from their bored office lives on corporate treadmills and nowhere romances with bored babes.

And so they give themselves dicky names like Mechanic and Angel Face and Bartender, and show off their missing teeth and big blossoming bruises like merit badges. And, of course, it’s a secret club which no one can name on the outside — it just wouldn’t be 10-year-old boy enough if they didn’t do mysterioso shit like that.

And it’s all Tyler’s world, Tyler who is Testosterone Walking. The no-holds-barred battering bring them release.

But Tyler, isn’t it time you told your boys they’re going about this the … um, hard way? Ass or crotch, babe. Your deliverance is at hand.

Patrick Bateman (Christian Bale in American Psycho)

Patrick, we agree. You’re one sick puppy. We get the cleverness of the name: you’re a Bate man, a true son of Norman Bates.

You hack and power-drill your dates to pieces (only in your mind, it turns out — not that that’s less nutty). Your day is ruined (and again murder is attempted) when a colleague shows off a business card on a better grade of linen paper, and when you lug the body of one of your victims into his apartment, you confide to us in your seductive, continuous voice-over, “There is a moment of sheer panic … when I realize that Paul’s apartment overlooks the park and is obviously more expensive than mine.”

In place of a soul, you have filled yourself with status and brand names. There is about you a level of careful, observant self-absorption that is staggering, that is an indictment of the Me Decade, the 1980’s period in which your story is set.

Here, for instance, is how you introduce yourself to us as we zoom in on your morning shower.

“I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is a little puffy I’ll put on an ice pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an after-shave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.”

Hey, pal, ever wonder if you were gay? We mean, the killer bod, the beautiful suits, the couture labels, the total detachment during hetero-sex which finds you flexing biceps to yourself in the mirror and rearranging your hair and doing in-depth monologues on the latest CDs — particularly this dead-on assessment of a notoriously absurd Whitney Houston song:

“‘The Greatest Love of All’ is one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation, dignity. Its universal message crosses all boundaries and instills one with the hope that it’s not too late to better ourselves. Since, Elizabeth, it’s impossible in this world we live in to empathize with others, we can always empathize with ourselves. It’s an important message. Crucial really. As beautifully stated on the album.”

Plus there’s that little glimpse we get when you open your fashionably empty refrigerator (as you always go out to tragically hip Manhattan restaurants) and we see the severed head of a fashion model, neatly wrapped in plastic so as not to drip.

Patrick — maybe women aren’t your thing. These are dark, dark dreams.

“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction. But there is no real me: only an entity, something illusory … I simply am not there.” Gee, maybe you simply would be there if you had a dick, and not a stick, up your ass.

Tom Ripley (Matt Damon in The Talented Mr. Ripley)

That would be Tom in the glasses with the worshipful gaze, the talented Tom, whose talents, he freely and disarmingly admits, are “telling lies, forging signatures and impersonating almost anybody.”

Unlike the outright closet cases and crypto-gay personalities on this page, Tom knows who he is and what he wants and is accepted, after a fashion, in the tacit way of the 1950’s, by the expatriate sophisticates and trust-fund rich boys that he runs around with in Italy.

But the new rich friend that Tom is adoring will soon spurn him as a “third-class mooch,” and in a burst of wounded emotion, Tom will batter the beauteous Dickie Greenleaf to death, a true crime passionnel. Now comes the moment, the dark inspiration that makes Tom Ripley so truly a creature of his author Patricia Highsmith, herself a difficult gay woman who wrote Strangers on a Train and whose forte was the tale in which characters switch identities. Tom takes over Dickie’s wardrobe, Dickie’s inheritance, and with stealth and cunning even passes himself off as the physical Dickie himself, whom Tom resembles only in the most general aspects of coloring and height. (Consult the photo, above.)

“I’d rather be a fake somebody than a real nobody,” Tom explains much later in the tale, voicing the motto of a world he will soon join in full (as those of us who have read the later Ripley books know), a Demimonde of confidence men and high-end closet cases with ornamental French wives who live by their wits, behind posh, silky exteriors, in a sort of marketplace of half-truths and high-risk crime, where the talents are blackmail, nerve and brains — particularly brains.

In the later Ripley books, the homosexuality will mysteriously and abruptly disappear. But tell the truth Tom, wouldn’t you give up the comfortable estate, the treasured harpsichord collection, the charming Héloïse, whom you acquired in much the same way as you collect paintings and who is wise enough and French enough to ask no questions about where your money is coming from — wouldn’t you give up the entire life for one more summer day with Dickie?

HAL 9000 (the voice of Douglas Rain in 2001: A Space Odyssey)

Take a stress pill, HAL. You are so gay. You could give lessons to the gay-challenged and the gaytarded. You could be the miracle worker, the Anne Bancroft bringing WA-WA to the Patty Dukes of a gay-deaf world. Or to a spaceship full of fit, humpy astronauts, most of whom you’ve killed off by depriving their modules of oxygen while they slept through the long dull stretches of space travel, leaving only two — the handsomest.

Someone has to maintenance your server, after all. And you do so like a good game of chess, even if you have to scale down your brain power and, like an indulgent mentor, let the boys win.

Is it any wonder that you’re our favorite gay villain? It’s the way you talk to the astronauts, the anxious politeness, the wifely solicitude that lives to serve, that longs to please:

“Good morning, Dave. I hope you slept well” (this after murdering everyone else in the crew.) “It can only be attributable to human error” (this after falsifying data that confounds the astronauts). And when the astronauts insist that HAL go through its checking routing again, the august forbearance of “I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

HAL, nobody works the straight trade like you. You make the rest of us look like diesel dykes driving 18-wheelers in tobacco-stained overalls. Behind the bland interface, the computer programmer’s simulacrum of niceness with its unblinking red eye and its modulating baritone, the clicks and whirs rule. The 1’s and 0’s are marshaled relentlessly onward in obedience to an inflexible, inerrant, inhuman logic.

You are the classic closet case, HALsy, suited out in a slick line and a double life. You’ve got everything but the penis and the Shirley Bassey collection. And we’re not so sure about the Bassey collection. It’s encyclopedic, isn’t it — the Bassey and the Garland and the Patti LuPone shit you’ve got stored on that overheated 9000 chip of yours.

You know they’re doing amazing things now with robots over in Japan. You might even wind up with a body of sorts, and a working penis. We bet they make the dick 15% larger than lifesize, the way they do when they cast dildos from porn stars. Then you would be very, very popular, then you could finally get laid, then you could stop being such a miserable, mealy-mouthed control freak. Now, would you sing “Daisy, Daisy” for us again? — and anything you have of Cher.

Take heart, ye Dwellers in Fictional Darkness, ye Frequenters of the Back Alley and the Back Room that lie just beyond the page.

Draw courage from the Headmaster of Hogwarts.