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Supposedly, we are living in gay-friendly times. A U.S. Vice-President has an openly gay daughter. Men playing beloved ABC doctors can publicly confirm their homosexuality and no one is especially dismayed (or surprised, really). Lesbians host daytime talk shows in nearly every time slot -- some opposite one another, if you believe those rumours about Oprah. Once confined to San Francisco, ancient Rome, and Eton, now gay is all around, no need to fake it! Weeeeeell...unless you and your partner want to adopt a child (in some states), marry each other (in most states), or serve openly in the military, or lead a Boy Scout troop. Fine: there have been some gay gains, but we're not exactly living in a rainbow-striped Homotopia. Perhaps our collective confusion over exactly how much progress has been made is the reason for a current entertainment trendlet: the not-gay guy. That is, the guy who is coded gay but is married (to a woman) and may be the last to know which way he actually swings. There's one in The History Boys, there's one on The Class (apparently), there will be one in Big Day, and there's at least one in every film co-starring Ty Burrell.

We first became aware of Burrell in the fantastic 2004 remake of Dawn Of The Dead. Burrell's Steve was one of a ragtag group of uninfected survivors of an apparently worldwide epidemic of zombie-ism, each survivor embodying an average of one characteristic: the power-mad security guard, the practical nurse, the large black guy, the dog lover, the smaller black guy. Steve was the sarcastic, urbane sophisticate with the slight but noticeable lisp: the guy, in other words, who was coded gay as surely as old Uncle Arthur was back on Bewitched. But Steve was also kind of a coward, and because having only one gay character in a movie and then have that character turn out to ruin things for everyone else doesn't tend to go over well (as anyone associated with Basic Instinct could tell you, if any of them were still in the entertainment industry), the filmmakers made sure to demonstrate how not-gay Steve actually was: we got a flash of him having sex with the blonde woman (whose one characteristic was that she seemed like she might be kind of slutty) in the midst of a survivors' montage, as well as a few shots of him over the closing credits, frolicking with some random bimbos on his yacht. Problem solved! Steve could still be a coward, but no one would be protesting the movie, with the possible exception of George Romero, who was apparently pretty pissed about the remake. (The zombies didn't come off so well, of course, but they aren't represented by any anti-defamation advocacy groups. Yet!)

Burrell went on from Dead to play a somewhat fey magazine ad salesman in In Good Company, a suspiciously effeminate cowboy in Down In The Valley, and a sarcastic, urbane doctor -- who, again, may be overcompensating just slightly by dating super-hot women, and lots of them -- on the short-lived sitcom Out Of Practice. And although the IMDb says that Burrell is married to a woman and we always believe everything the IMDb tells us (except how to spell many fictional characters' names and just about every male actor's height), we must not have been the only ones to have found Burrell pinging our 'dar, since last year's Friends With Money found him playing a straight, married guy that everyone thinks is gay, other than his wife. Who's not named Liza, but might as well be.

Burrell's current Fur finds him...playing a straight, married guy. In fact, his Allan is married to the film's protagonist, Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman). The plot of the highly fictionalized pseudo-biopic covers Diane's evolution from a demure helpmeet to her photographer husband to a chronicler of freaks and weirdos, so it would be fitting if it turned out that her husband were hiding a secret as remarkable (and, in the '60s, monstrous and scary) as the extremely hirsute neighbour who becomes her photographic subject and muse. However, it's more likely that Allan is, like, a serial womanizer or something, because Ty Burrell characters are not gay. Just like Liberace.