A Singular Man

Colin Firth plays a blinder as a gay English Professor in A Single Man. It's a pity though, that it almost always seems to be straight actors who portray homosexuals and lesbians on screen. I would have hoped that in this day and age we could openly accept Hollywood stars who prefer their own gender rather than keeping them shut up in the veritable closet. So, the straights play gays and the gays play straights and no one is any the wiser. One scene has George Falconer sitting on the couch opposite Jim, his partner of sixteen years, as they are both reading completely different kinds of books: George holds After Many a Summer Dies the Swan by Aldous Huxley, Jim is engrossed by Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote. It’s funny to note that before I became involved in the world of books I would hardly have noticed, let alone rushed home to find the Huxley quotation that seemed so apt on screen: "Experience is not what happens to you; it's what you do with what happens to you."