Queer Comfort Viewing: 'Surprise! You're less straight than you thought you were!' movies and series
Like all genres, queer media has a few recurring themes that are either unique to it or just less common in other media. There’s the coming out story, where the plot deals with the tension and fallout that comes with the revelation that a character doesn’t fit society’s expectations. Prejudice is also a perennial, though hardly unique to queer media. A semiregular one are characters replacing the blood relations that rejected them with a found family. Denial, being implicitly a powerful story engine, comes up all the time – so common for a while that later trends of queer stories with little to no denial came as a bit of a relief.
But, the biggie – the story thread that keeps coming up time and time again – is a lead character discovering that they weren’t as straight as they thought they were. Some of it is featured in dramas, movies and series that are far from being the sort of comfort viewing I’m focusing on here. Quite often it’s presented as a moral failing, as a symptom of a character’s decline in some way: becoming “wilder” or losing control, corruption, and occasionally even an outright signifier of villainy.
This is also a common feature to queer stories that feature teen characters, for obvious reasons. Figuring out who they are is what teens are all about. It’s kind of their main job. Pick pretty much any given teen-oriented media with queer characters, and you’ll probably find at least one of them making this kind of discovery at some point in the story.
But, this time I’m less interested in those stories and more interested in stories that feature grown-ups – at least in their early twenties, but sometimes older – who go “WTF! I’m not straight?” Some feature this realisation as a major plot point. Others, such as the competent, entertaining, but unremarkable (it’s Hallmark) Love, Classified just take a beat for the character to go “hey, this works for me! I didn’t know that about myself. Cool.” and then move on, which was refreshing. Then you have interesting oddities like the Muslim-centred I Can’t Think Straight which probably should have given the realising character more story time to process things, but instead chooses to move on and keep the pace going. (I Can’t Think Straight is a laudable attempt at making a fluffy romantic comedy in a context that only barely allowed for it in 2005 and really doesn’t twenty years later.)
Let’s start with the obvious classics.
In & Out #
Don’t know where you can find this one. My copy is an old DVD I’ve had for years. I’m sure it’s available on a streaming service somewhere.
In & Out is the story of a teacher who gets outed by one of his former students during an Oscar acceptance speech, loosely inspired by Tom Hanks own outing of his high-school drama coach during his acceptance speech. And, unlike the actor in this movie, Tom Hanks had prior permission from the coach to mention him.)
The twist is that in this movie the teacher, played by Kevin Kline, didn’t know he was gay at the time.
The story kind of doesn’t work for a modern context. It’s got a bit of a reactionary view of masculinity, and for a story about sexuality there isn’t that much sexual about it.
But, if watched as a bit of a period piece – the bigotry in it was, if anything, toned down substantially from what you’d encounter in the 90s – it’s charming and harmless, and it has a smooch between Tom Selleck and Kevin Kline, which is a plus in any movie and any context. It’s a landmark movie which almost certainly played a role in changing people’s attitudes, at least in the US. Hasn’t aged that well, but can work for a modern audience if they give it some leeway.
But I’m a Cheerleader #
The original version of this one is available on the Internet Archive and the director’s cut should be available on VOD and some streamers. My copy is an old DVD from years ago.
Natasha Lyonne, Clea DuVall, and RuPaul Charles? What’s not to love? It has a straightforward hook: a cheerleader’s parents panic when they think she’s paying too much attention to the other cheerleaders, is interested in vegetarianism, and likes listening to Melissa Etheridge – she must be a lesbian! – and send her to a conversion therapy camp, where she promptly discovers, for the first time, that, yeah, she is gay.
This is an outright parody of the idea of a conversion camp run by “ex” gays. It deeply unserious in the best possible way. Beyond being silly, wholesome fun, it’s notable for a couple of other things:
- The MPAA basically murdered it at launch by slapping a NC-17 rating, later toned down to R after edits, for a movie that was thematically PG-13 at most. This limited both the audience and distribution. Can’t let the kids see gays, I guess.
- Clea DuVall cited the reaction to this movie, in 1999, as being one of the reason why she stayed in the closet for so long.
(The 90s sucked, everybody.)
Imagine Me & You #
Don’t know if this one is on a streamer somewhere, but it was a fairly successful movie featuring Lena Heady and Piper Perabo, so if it isn’t on a streamer somewhere then somebody’s clearly dropped the ball.
Piper Perabo plays Rachel, who discovers on her wedding day that she is not straight, because once she sees Lena Headey’s character, Luce, she is pretty much immediately smitten. She just doesn’t know it yet because it had never occured to her until that point that she might find more joy and passion pursuing in the women’s side of the dating pool.
The stakes of the story should be sky-high. Beyond the obvious issue that Rachel just got married, she and Luce are implied to be coming from different classes. Even in the “New Labour” UK of 2005, that would have been likely to cause substantial issues even if the relationship wasn’t a queer one.
But that isn’t what this movie is about. It aspires to be gentle comfort viewing and is not ashamed of it, so the stakes are moderated and toned down at every turn. Even the jilted husband takes getting dumped for a hot florist quite well. The story follows the formula of easygoing romantic comedy right down to the final chase to the airport.
It’s not a great movie, but it’s one of the more re-watchable movies you can find. The casting is absolutely perfect.
Kyss Mig #
Don’t know where this one is available internationally, but it’s worth seeking out.
Like Imagine Me & You, this movie features a character who has just committed to a straight relationship (an engagement this time, not a wedding) who then realises that she’s been shopping in the wrong aisle, so to speak.
This one’s Swedish and at each point where the British Imagine Me & You tones things down, ratchets down the stakes, or resorts to tropes, this movie reaches for more naturalistic and realistic storytelling. Instead of meeting at a wedding, it’s at a party after one of the characters just got engaged. The characters’ mom and dad are getting married, further complicating everything. Instead of the partners being surprisingly okay with the whole “she’s running off with another woman” thing (Matthew Goode’s character in Imagine Me & You seriously needs to grow a spine), these are both in relationships and both of their partners react with a much more realistic anger. It’s also implied that, rather than “OMG! I’m queer!” being a realisation, it’s something born instead of denial, which fits in with the overall theme of more naturalistic storytelling.
Typical for Nordic filmmaking, there’s more sex and nudity in this one than in the more staid British take.
Kyss Mig is probably a better movie than Imagine Me & You overall, although the latter movie’s casting is hard to beat (Anthony Head!) and the toned down stakes make it great comfort viewing.
Honourable mention: the Thai GL series Show Me Love #
This one’s on YouTube.
Not to be confused with Fucking Åmål, which was cowardly renamed Show Me Love when distributed internationally.
Provided you aren’t annoyed by the fact that the characters in this series are competing in a beauty pageant, this one is a very easy watch. The details of how this particular pageant works are thankfully left vague enough that I still had no idea what the overall rules were once I’d finished watching the entire thing. It has low stakes throughout and pretty much every time there’s an opportunity to raise the story stakes, the makers opt instead for character building, which works well for what they were trying to accomplish.
For example, early in the series we find out that the lead’s brother needs money to go to college and instead of using that to ratchet up the stakes (she needs to win to get her brother into college!) it instead becomes motivation: she decides to join the pageant, which she’s otherwise completely uninterested in, because she’ll get paid in advance and this gives her the money her brother needs. Character, not stakes.
The series begins with a friendship developing between Meena, said lead with the college-going brother, and Cherene, who is her aunt’s neighbour and an experienced hand at whatever industry this is that does this sort of pageant thing. (Like I wrote above, they thankfully don’t hammer you with detail on how any of this works, you just get the explanations you need to follow the plot.) Cherene needs somebody to compete in the pageant with her because somebody dropped out, so Meena gets roped into it to fill the ranks. Slowly (and I mean slowly, this is very much a slow burn) over the series a romance blossoms between the two and in episode 5 (out of nine) we get the scene which is the reason why I’m including the series in this list: Meena is on the net on her phone trying to find answers to the question “I have a crush on my same-sex friend, what do I do?” while lying in bed with said friend.
They pushed their beds together purely to make platonic hangouts easier or something.
Very much one of those movie or series couples that are the last to figure things out.
The series generally keeps the stakes manageable throughout. Meena tells Cherene about her feelings pretty much as soon as she can – they make it clear early on that the pageant has rules about relationships, so she pretty much has to wait until the competition is over – and then the drama switches for an episode or so to Cherene working through some issues and building up the courage to reply properly, with Meena both being firm but patient with her. There’s never really any doubt about how things will turn out.
It’s an uneven series where the acting is of a varying quality and writing that could do with several coats polish. When I began watching it I fully expected it to be completely forgettable, but in the end it had a kindness to it that sits with me. It has drama – you can’t have a pageant story without drama – but none of it come even close to the hyper-ratcheted melodramatic stakes of a Chao Planoy drama, for example. It’s all very manageable.
It’s not a masterpiece, but we need more stories that leave you with a feeling of kindness. For that it deserves a mention.