Willie Garson with Sarah Jessica Parker during a scene from 'Sex and the City' HBO / Europa Press
There was a time when when folkloric women were going to perform on TV, the first question that the contracting party asked the representative party was: "Are you wearing a fagot?"
It was a quick way to know if they needed a valet or if they came home covered thanks to the service of a homosexual man.
Carrie Bradshaw also wore a fag, Stanford Blatch, played by the recently deceased Willie Garson.
Of course, he was neither the first nor the last to embody a woman's best gay friend in fiction.
Not even the one with more prominence, that there is Will of
Will and Grace
.
But the drift of his character explains very well the fine line that separates the archetype from the cliché.
MORE INFORMATION
Actor Willie Garson, known for his role in 'Sex and the City', dies
Sex is back in New York
Stanford never stopped being a secondary to Carrie's service. His few plots were so commonplace - he dated Marcus, a Broadway dancer whom he left after discovering he had been a hustler - that in the end, in that second
Sex and the City movie
that we all wanted to forget, he ended up turned into a cartoon: she married Anthony,
Charlotte's
fag carry
, and her former nemesis, in a ceremony that even featured Liza Minelli.
Garson has shot sequences for
And Just Like That…
, the sequel to
Sex and the City
that will be released in 2021, but we don't know more.
Today, when sexual diversity is almost imperative on TV, Stanford can seem like an antique.
It is not.
Not only does he beat many of the gay characters that come out of Ryan Murphy's empire by hand, but he is also a warning of something no one is safe from: how easy it is to end up becoming a parody when one plays to the secondary of his own history.
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