I mean, it’s not that I’ve never watched anything Zachary Quinto has done. I did watch the first new Star Trek movie, even if I didn’t like it, and he was God once on an episode of Joan of Arcadia. He was on an episode of Crossing Jordan and one of CSI where his character is so minor that, even using the exhaustively detailed episode summaries available on IMDb I still don’t know what his character had to do with the plot or even which plot he was involved in. I’ve meant to watch NOS482, being a fan of the King family as I am, but I haven’t gotten around to it. I never watched Heroes, even though you’d think it would have been my jam, because by the time I was going to get around to it, it had become clear that no, I wouldn’t like it.

There’s a lot of talk these days about the Death Of The Movie Star, and part of it is that there’s so much out there. I was explaining to my partner yesterday my own tendency to just watch YouTube videos in part because I’m worried that any child-free time will be interrupted by the children’s needs and that there are things I’m just not going to watch with them around. NOS482 definitely falls into that, as would American Horror Story. It’s also true that there are just so many more options for viewing than there were when I was a kid that you basically don’t get Must-See TV anymore.

All of which meant that Zachary Quinto wasn’t much on my own radar even at the height of his popularity. I don’t remember what I was watching when Heroes was on the air—Crossing Jordan, for one—but whatever it was, it wasn’t Heroes, and the stars of that show were not stars that hit for me in the same way. The media landscape is so fractured that there’s stars that are big to me that other people are unfamiliar with and vice versa. Everyone these days has their own pantheon, their own constellations if you will, and there’s less crossover than there was in the ‘80s, when even people who didn’t watch Dallas were discussing Who Shot JR.

It’s also true that it’s not the only thing that’s hurt Zachary Quinto’s career. In October 2011, he came out. A fourteen-year-old child was the victim of bullying for being bisexual and hanged himself. Quinto had already been an outspoken ally of the community, and he decided that it was extremely important that he demonstrate to kids that it was possible to be gay, out, open, and successful. Unfortunately, Hollywood doesn’t always agree, and he hasn’t gotten the kind of roles the dual successes of Nu-Trek and Heroes should have opened for him.

Not that he’s sleeping on a career, mind you. He’s acting on the stage, historically less concerned about such things. He’s producing. He’s doing voicework—he did Lex Luthor, which I would imagine he was very good at. And there is NOS482, I’m going to watch it one of these days, I swear. He’s narrated for NOVA, that great sink of “you’ll never be sure if anyone’s numbers on this are accurate.” It’s just that, yeah, it remains disappointingly true that being gay, out, and open in Hollywood has a regrettable tendency to mean that you’re not going to be as successful as you should be. Even in a niche entertainment landscape like the one we have now.

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