I like to call the Jackass group the gayest straight guys you’ll ever see
No cause it could have been the most toxic hyper-masculinity fest but its just... not? Its socioculturally kind of fascinating because its so different from everything else at that time, like it came out of skate culture but also gay icon Rip Taylor shows up in every movie until he passes away?
Beyond that, what they're engaging in is very clearly kink. Regardless of whether or not its sexual, it's kink. They consent to hurting and humiliating each other and after they all laugh together?
Chris Pontius is also almost always wearing nothing but a thong and none of the other guys seem uncomfortable with that? They don't seem to be guarding themselves against accusations of homoeroticism and by bringing actual gay people (like Rip and John Waters) as friends they're explicitly accepting queer people in their fandom.
These were a bunch of (at least assumed) straight men openly embracing VISIBLY gay men in the early 2000's, which is actually pretty radical. Like it was not something that would get you any sort of cred at that time, if anything it was the opposite of what anyone would think their audience wanted. It was all 'no-homo' at that time, and these guys were shocking each others balls and putting stuff up each others asses on tv, without ever once pausing to posture their straightness. And as a result it's super unsurprising to me that they now have a lot of queer fans!
I think in a lot of ways Jackass is doing what John Waters does with his filmography, so it makes complete sense that he would make friends with Knoxville. They're both doing this kind of pushing of the boundaries of what is "respectable" or comfortable for a mainstream audience to watch is (at least according to Waters) a fundamentally queer way of making media. It rejects hetero-normative cultural standards about what should be seen on tv, stuff that gets talked down and rejected not because its doing any real harm (to anyone who isn't consenting) but because straight men are disturbed by seeing other men put their dicks in danger and brand their friends asses.
Actual quote from Steve-o: "We always thought it was funny to force a heterosexual MTV generation to deal with all of our thongs and homoerotic humor."
I'm not trying to say here that they're all actually queer or that Jackass is some sort of humanitarian creation, but I don't think they get the credit they deserve for the queerness of the media they created, and they definitely don't get credited for what I think is a pretty positive kind of masculinity in a time when that was far from the norm.
