Everything we can't stop loving, hating, and thinking about this week in pop culture. |
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Fire Island Is the Gayest Thing Ever This Week |
It is still marginally—OK, very—shocking to see gay people on a screen. But to see only gay people? Well, you could bowl me over with the meager force of a barely audible Ariana Grande whisper-sing, it's so surprising. Don't tell Marjorie Taylor Greene about Fire Island. She might release a video about banning movies, no screens—hell, maybe even fires and islands—forever. The new film, which premiered Friday on Hulu just in time to kick off Pride Month, begins with the patent dismissal of "hetero nonsense." Finally, a political cause to get behind. Farewell football! Pour one out for the end of craft beers. You had a good run, couples walking so slow it's astonishing you're making any forward progress while holding hands on a small sidewalk so that nobody can get around you. The utopia has arrived: Never having to find out who, exactly, Jack Harlow is or what a Post Malone song actually sounds like. |
Those are the superficial perks of the world created in Fire Island, which was written by and stars Joel Kim Booster. It's about a group of gay friends who convene every summer for a week on the titular mecca, the New York City-adjacent beachside destination the LGBTQ community flocks to in droves each year once Speedo weather arrives. In an opening voice-over, Booster's character, Noah, refers to Fire Island as a "sacred place." It's where he and his friends, including Bowen Yang's Howie and Matt Rogers' Luke, fortify their friendship bond into family. It's where they can feel free to be unabashedly gay—to hook up, to be flamboyant, to talk in their own vernacular, and to make references to Cherry Jones without ever having to explain themselves or, worse, who the esteemed character actress is. Truly, the only character I saw in the film who might be heterosexual was a woman who worked at the grocery store, where patrons peruse the aisles for $11 boxes of Cheez-Its in nothing but thong bathing suits and sandals. Fire Island is a Very Gay Movie. Finally! An emotional climax takes place during a karaoke rendition of "Sometimes" by Britney Spears performed in three-part harmony. Marisa Tomei's courtroom monologue from My Cousin Vinny is performed verbatim by two characters as if they are reciting religious text at church. It's called cinema, and I feel seen. All of this is what makes Fire Island so beautiful. It's also what, for some, will make it so annoying. I'm not talking about homophobes who can't fathom the idea of gays running amok on an island. There's actually a strange tension that will inevitably snap once more people see the film and the—pardon my use of the world's worst word—discourse arrives. As with every major piece of gay content, there will be those who will cringe at the depiction of casual sex, drug use, and other things that they think may not represent the community favorably, or that it leans into unsavory cliches about promiscuity, or that it doesn't represent whatever particular identity of the queer experience the person complaining identifies with. On the flip side, there will be those who might find it too pandering to a mainstream audience. They might argue that it's too eager to over-explain gay colloquialism or behavior to a "straight" or uninitiated audience. Or, even, that its storytelling, particularly when it comes to love and romance, is disappointingly conventional. All of those points are fair and all of those points are exhausting. Their arrival is so expected that the door is already open to usher them in, where they can be discussed alongside the "kink at Pride" and "corporations exploiting Pride Month for profit" debates until the cacophony gets the party shut down. The question is whether to give them credence, or to let the movie be what it is: Gay, slight, and fun! The "hetero nonsense" that Noah is scoffing at in the film's opening is actually the idea that happiness is found in marriage, or at least monogamy and a long-term relationship. Fire Island is a twist on Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, set among the different classes of friend groups who co-exist at the vacation destination for the week. There are lines like "the monogamy-industrial complex rears its ugly head," as characters like Noah treasure their independence and think power and hotness translates into casual sex and being untied. (A modern, horny twist on Elizabeth Bennett.) But then there's Howie, who craves the meaningfulness of a deep partnership and wants the rom-com kind of love that Noah thinks is only for the straights. Both of these ideas are challenged as the movie unfolds, hitting the beats we're all familiar with after so many Austen adaptations over the years—just, in this case, unfolding at underwear parties and amidst drama over a sex tape that was filmed while someone was incapacitated on the party drug 'G.' What Fire Island can't seem to figure out, though, is whether it's rejecting those Austen ideas of romance, subverting them, or, in its own way, embracing them. |
Noah's Elizabeth Bennett has his Mr. Darcy in Conrad Ricamora's Will. Their characters are heinous to each other. (Stepping in for a little bit of film criticism here: Almost too heinous. It's really unpleasant and almost not believable, even understanding that's the point of this well-trodden character dynamic.) But you know how Pride and Prejudice ends, so you know the journey that we're going to be going on here. The magic, then, is in the gayness of it all. There are really interesting conversations touching on ideas of shame, internalized homophobia, and sex that will be so refreshing to many people, particularly in the context of modern romantic expectations. There is also a focus on sex that might be isolating. Sex is an incredibly important part of gay culture. Except when it isn't at all. Which is some of the time. Or, rather, never. Except it always is. Only, not when it isn't. There are as many gay men who are terrified of Fire Island and its reputation as there are those who count down the days each year until their pilgrimage. But that isn't this story, and that should be the fascinating question that this movie might answer. Will we actually, and finally, let a gay story just be the one single story that it is, and not demand that it be every gay story, all at once?
The bottom line is that Fire Island is perfectly nice and easy to watch, with a strong enough sense of itself to put a line like "can I trade someone a Crest White Strip for a PrEP" into a romantic comedy. So for that, at least, we're grateful.
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Actually, Top Gun: Maverick Is the Gayest Thing This Week |
Last weekend, I made a gay pilgrimage of my own. I took my sad little self to the nearby Alamo Drafthouse, chowed down on some mozzarella sticks, and delighted in the sequel to one of the gayest films of all time, Top Gun. Top Gun: Maverick is a perfect film. No notes. Tom Cruise? Weirdest fucking movie star in the world, but damn great in this movie. The action sequences? My normally uninterested ass was living for them. Jennifer Connelly? Never been better! And the gayness? Through the roof. Off the charts. Shooting for Mach 9 but feeling a little brazen and pushing it to Mach 10 instead. |
I speak confidently on behalf of a sizable segment of the population when I say that, when one thinks of the 1986 film Top Gun, the first thing that comes to mind is not a person in a fighter jet. It is of glistening biceps being flexed during a game of shirtless beach volleyball. The scene is legendary. To some, it's aged into a pop-culture joke. To the more enlightened, it is hallowed. As one of my favorite writers Dave Holmes recently wrote in Esquire, "The Top Gun volleyball scene isn't homoerotic. It is homosexual." "If you were a certain kind of teenage boy in 1986, the beach volleyball scene in Top Gun spoke directly to you," he went on. "And what it said was: 'You're gay now. Good luck.'" From personal experience, I can say that is a truth that extends to no matter when you first saw it. But it wasn't just the volleyball scene. (Though it was a lot the volleyball scene.)
It was Tom Cruise being so impossibly handsome. It was him having a perfect, yet attainable haircut. We love a good film haircut! It was fashion iconography—those aviators! It was sexual camp. Try and tell me whoever decided to set a love scene to "Take My Breath Away" while sheer linen curtains billow in the background was not a gay. And it was homoeroticism in overdrive between the pilots. As we all know, there is nothing gayer in this world than straight men. Every interaction between these characters lived up to that truth.
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That's a lot for Top Gun: Maverick to live up to, and it delivered. It delivered a proud successor to the volleyball scene with the shirtless football game, played in the surf at twilight, canonically the gayest time of the day. It gave us shirtless 59-year-old Tom Cruise, looking better than ever, as part of that game—grace notes of Daddy on top of an already homoerotic scene. The score of the film is a constant tease of a Lady Gaga power ballad, which finally explodes at the end as the audience has just been moved to tears. The major plot involves generational trauma, and, let's face it, there's nothing gayer than that.
All of this is to say, if you want to be an ally this Pride Month, go see Top Gun: Maverick.
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No, This Music Video Is the Gayest Thing This Week |
Some say it's awful the way that brands and corporations parachute into activism for the 30 days of Pride Month, put some rainbow flags on things, and Hoover up the queer dollars before ignoring the community for the next 11 months. After experiencing "Taste So Good (The Cann Song)" and its music video this week, I say to brands: Never stop. The description alone on this video is already legendary. "For #PrideMonth, queer-owned brand Cann, in partnership with Weedmaps, brought together trailblazing LGBTQ+ artists, advocates and allies for an iconic music video celebrating queer love, inclusivity and cannabis." That is certainly a collection of words! But three of them are more important than the rest—"iconic music video"—a tease that this 100 percent lives up to. |
I don't know what in the name of Judy Garland is happening, but somehow the cannabis beverage company Cann managed an absolutely absurd assemblage of celebrities including Gus Kenworthy, Kornbread from RuPaul's Drag Race, Sarah Michelle Gellar (?), and Patricia Arquette (?!?!?) to don latex bodysuits and perform choreography while singing along to a dance track that extols the virtues of this drink. This is what Pride means to me. |
Wrong, This Video Is the Gayest Thing This Week |
In the original video from last year, she played a character who was a butter shop owner running a special deal "if you can prove that you're queer." Her shop also started selling candles. "Wouldn't a candle be nice for gay stuff? In the bedroom, or just hanging out! We wouldn't…" Her shop has been making butter since 1945, she says, "And we've been accepting all people since…the last four months. So yeah, we're gagging for you to take a taste of Cecily's Butter Shop." As a gift to us all, Stalter released a sequel to the video this week, once again opening, iconically, with "Hi gay!" "On a scale from normal sex to ass play, we're more lesbian than ever," Cecily asserts. "We think that gay people are OK. At least for the next 30 days."
Relish in the pitch-perfect video here.
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Just Kidding. The Gayest Thing This Week Is This. |
This is a magazine cover, friends. It is such a troll. Give it a Pulitzer. A Nobel. A special Tony Award. I want it on a tote bag. I want it on a T-shirt. I want it framed over my bed, and also screen-printed onto my duvet cover. I want to carry wallet-sized versions of it around with me to hand out like parents do with their kids' school photos. This is all I'm living for this week, and possibly forever. Anyway, Happy Pride Month. |
The Boys: They're back in town! (Fri. on Amazon) Floor Is Lava: We are in the Golden Age of prestige television. (Fri. on Netflix) Ms. Marvel: A Marvel series that I am actually interested in. Miracles happen. (Wed. on Disney+) P-Valley: I maintain that more people would watch if it retained its original name, Pussy Valley. (Fri. on Starz) |
The Real Housewives of Dubai: Turns out it was a snooze! Eiffel: About the forbidden passion that inspired the Eiffel Tower. Lol. (Fri. in theaters) |
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