Suddenly, I was afraid that being identified as gay would rob me of an opportunity in the entertainment business I was struggling to be part of.
When I was chosen Man of the Year I had only just come out. 'I felt it was a career move, but I had mixed feelings about it. 'It was a job, a part I played,' said Shafer. The big gimmick of 'Man of the Year' is that Shafer had to pretend to be straight. With a couple of exceptions, Shafer hired actors to play key characters. And they won't talk about me now, either.' Playgirl magazine editors have de clined to comment on the film. But officially the magazine doesn't talk about its gay readers. The women who work at the magazine know that. 'I'm guessing at least 25 percent of readers are gay men. 'Playgirl has a huge gay readership,' said Oklahoma-born Shafer. But the fact remains that Shafer, who is handsome and muscular - his current day job is as Richard Dreyfuss' personal trainer - was chosen as a sex object by a magazine aimed at women. 'Man of the Year,' now playing at the Lumiere, purposely blurs truth and fiction. 'Gay men are so often portrayed as drag queens or killers but hardly ever as the guy next door.' 'Making a comedy, a satire of the media, I hoped to set up a point of view we don't see in a lot of gay- themed films from Hollywood,' Shafer said.
