what i find ridiculous is people thinking that because it's 2024 the world is super accepting and gay actors should have a much easier time landing gigs, especially big main character blockbuster gigs.
there's like 200 countries in the world and only about 30 with legalized same sex marriage. and marriage equality is literally only the tip of the iceberg, because it doesn't mean shit if the country hasn't passed any other laws to protect the lgbt community. not to mention countries with lgbt laws are still faced with plenty of opposition.
there's still countries that demand any movie that has any form of lgbt representation for it to either be censored or fully removed or they won't show the movie.
studio execs don't just think about what the liberal american audience wants to see. they gotta think what the conservative american audience want to see and what the audiences outside the u.s want to see. and those execs are, for the most part, old people, and a lot of them still have the mindset that a gay man can't lure in a female audience as a heartthrob and can't lure in a male audience as someone they aspire to be.
this type of discussion has been ongoing for like a decade and hardly anything has changed. and in another decade, maybe things will be slightly better, but it'll still be the same. so it's just the same conversation over and over again
