supplemental post 3 - NPH and RockHudson

I thought our comparison of Neil Patrick Harris to Rock Hudson was particularly interesting today, and although his character Barney on How I Met Your Mother is straight there are a lot of similarities between Barney and a typical homosexual man. Although Harris does not have the same manly physique as Hudson (Hudson seems to be more of the American masculine standard, standing tall, dark, and handsome), he still is a very attractive man with a good physique. He dresses very well, always wearing suits, which may also be attributed to a homosexual male’s stereotypical interest in fashionable clothing.
His womanizer attitude, as strange as it seems, can also be linked to the image of Hudson and homosexuality. Hudson, specifically in Pillow Talk, plays characters who seem to be very popular with women, but who do not actually commit to any particular woman. Harris is the same way; although he has a different woman falling for him every night, he refuses to make any sort of commitment to them. He doesn’t just refuse to commit—he is completely against any time of commitment. For both Hudson and Harris, this can be seen as a look into their actual personas because clearly neither of them would be interested in starting a relationship with women. The fact that they lack an interest in commitment alludes to the fact that they are homosexual, while the women that flock to them distract from that fact.
Another interesting element of Barney’s persona is his obsession with suits. Homosexual men are often stereotyped to have a strong interest in fashion and dressing well. In the 100th episode of How I Met Your Mother, Barney becomes determined to conquer a woman who hates his suits, leaving him to decide if sleeping with this girl is worth giving up his suit collection. After thinking about it momentarily, he sings that “nothing suits me like a suit” and decides that being dressed well is more important than this girl. Barney sings, “to score a ten would be just fine, but I’d rather be dressed to the nine,” meaning that he is putting his own self image as a fashion conscious man in front of sleeping with a beautiful woman. As he sings and dances in a very theatrical manner, the spectators are reminded again that Harris is a homosexual man and his character plays along with that.