Just thinking about Bros (2022). Spoilers ahead.
Thinking about how it got such a bad rap supposedly bc Billy Eichner is insufferable. Super delightful (sarcasm) given that he plays a character who can’t shut up about LGBT+ social issues. He can very easily be read as autistic with a social justice special interest. He literally cannot stop himself. He is too intense and it’s too much for most people. He’s been kicked to the curb about a million times. And apparently an audience just can’t relate to a character like that. Ouch.
But I have to wonder if its lack of popularity ALSO has to do with the themes.
I feel like today we’re expected to feel that being gay is “normal” and embrace it wholly and completely.
I wonder if a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea that people could be gay, and out, and even vocally proudly out, and still struggle with their identity.
Like, “What do you mean it’s not fixed?”
In the movie, Bobby leans in as hard as he can to being gay and femme and visible and camp and vocal. And he STILL fears that his femininity makes him undesirable to other gay men. Like, “pretend to be more masc” kind of afraid. Which is, in a way, going back in the closet for him DESPITE THE FACT that he does it when flirting with ANOTHER MAN.
And then Aaron. His real dream is to open a chocolate shop and make teeny tiny chocolates, but he’s so afraid that will make him be perceived as a [slur]. The wrong kind of gay. TOO gay. He’s also ashamed of the radical way Bobby talks about sexuality. He asks Bobby to tone it down for his parents. Ouch. And Bobby tries, and fails, and Bobby gets rejected for it. For being “too much.” But really it’s also Aaron rejecting himself.
And you don’t get the sense (at least I didn’t) that these journeys are ever going to be finished for them. But they keep TRYING.
Idrk. It was one of the first times I felt Seen in a piece of canon media about gay people. And people hated it so vehemently. And then I come on here and listen to people champion media that doesn’t deal with those sharp edges at all (some of which I love, don’t get me wrong). But you hear people imply that type of media is inherently better than old school queercoding. Or that media where characters have a complicated relationship with their sexuality are problematic, outdated, or just not interesting.
And it really makes me wonder.
It seems like many of y’all are uncomfortable with the idea that some people are not confident and free in their sexualities. That coming out of the closet and learning to accept yourself might be a lifelong or permanently incomplete process for some people.
And I really don’t know whether it’s because people get uncomfortable with that sort of retrospection—maybe reminded of their own loose ends. Or because people genuinely don’t relate at all… in which case, I have to assume they’re abandoning a whole lot of people who do. I certainly feel left behind by these attitudes. Bros came out and I thought I’d finally have a way to discuss feelings I’d never been able to surface before. And instead I was shut out. No one watched it. Or they hated it and refused to discuss it.
It’s funny. This is completely anecdotal but I told one friend of mine–older–that Bros was about “all the ways a person can be out but still in the closet” and she went “oh wow. that’s rough yeah.” And I told another friend who lives in a place covered in rainbows where it’s genuinely normal to be LGBT+ the same thing and she (perfectly genuinely) asked, “what does that mean?”
