When I first saw the trailer for Billy Eichner’s uncompromisingly gay romantic comedy Brothers, I was at a movie theater in rural Michigan. My partner and I were visiting my parents in a small town where every other yard proudly displays a “Trump” sign even though former President Donald Trump has been out of office for two years. If the brothers The trailer ended — with a shot of Eichner passionately making out with a handsome guy in Central Park — with an elderly white woman in the audience shouting, her voice dripping with contempt, “No thank you!”
We laughed at the absurdity of this woman being insulted by a rom-com from the Billy on the street Guy. Wow, people in the Midwest really are homophobic bigots! How quaint! How ridiculous! Thank god we lived in New York City, right? We made fun of this lady for the rest of the trip. I was often the one who would tease them and pound that dead horse of an inside joke in the ground. But I couldn’t stop thinking about her. Deep down, my feelings were hurt. i am weird I like to see queer stories on screen. I know how hard it is for queer storytellers to convince the people with the money – like the big studio behind it brothers, Universal – that audiences won’t react exactly the way this woman reacted when confronted with our existence. But I’m optimistic. Because 2022 was a year of mainstream, gay romance movies, and that’s a good thing, regardless of whether those movies were financial hits or not.
In addition to brothers2022 saw the release of two more gay rom-coms from major studios: fire island (from Searchlight, a subsidiary of Disney) and Spoiler alert (from Focus Features, a subsidiary of Universal). All three films are more or less formulaic romances with straight counterparts. brothers is a Judd Apatow production about a commitment phobia falling in love, similar to Apatow’s train wreck. fire island is a modern retelling of Lovers’ Enemies. pride and prejudice. and Spoiler alert is a rom-com-turned-sugar-cancer drama that could easily be the plot of a Nicolas Sparks novel. But all three films have also taken the trouble to add flavor to the queer experience, rather than simply telling a pure love story starring two men.
brothersin particular, made a point of not making the exact film that way Eichner’s character in brothers tells his podcast listeners that he was asked to write, “Rom-Com about a gay couple – something a straight guy might even like and watch with his girlfriend!” Eichner’s response to this producer’s pitch: “Our friendships are different, our sex life is different, our relationships are different.” brothers proves this thesis by immersing Eichner’s character Bobby in his identity as a gay man. His job is gay, his friends are gay, his hobbies are gay, and his sex life is very, explicitly gay. Bobby says he hates movies “where two guys are about to go on a date and suddenly the camera conveniently pulls away,” so brothers does the opposite with a wide, lingering shot of Bobby getting a blowjob from two other guys.
fire islandthough not quite as cheerfully explicit as Brothers, is also a film by queer people for queer people. It’s about a very specific queer experience – a group of young, poor gay men who make an annual trip to New York’s Fire Island – and was based on writer Joel Kim Booster’s story of how he and his peers attended the famous gay beach vacation. Stern Bowen Yang. spoiler alarm is a similarly specific queer story in that it was adapted from Michael Ausiello’s memoir about the last year he spent with his wife, Kit Cowan, following Cowan’s cancer diagnosis. It’s a bit cleaner than the first two films, but it’s impressive to see Parsons – an actor loved by Central America as the nerdy, edgy and very straight guy Sheldon The big Bang Theory– embrace his identity as a gay man on screen. (Parsons has been married to director Todd Spiewak since 2017.)
All three films mentioned above were warmly received by critics, but that’s not really what Hollywood cares about. Hulu doesn’t release streaming dates, but it does, loudly Streaming aggregator Reelgood, fire island was the sixth most streamed movie in the week it was released, which isn’t bad. Spoiler alert‘s promising limited release numbers followed by one disappointingly broad expansion last weekend, but it could be that these numbers will increase during the holiday season. But it was brothers, the most famous from the biggest studio, who became the face of history to whet the audience’s appetite for gay romance. With a domestic opening weekend of $4.8 million brothers was declared a “bomb”, a “flop” and all those other dreaded words diversity and meeting set headlines.
Eichner was quoted – and then criticized – for blaming “straight‘ for the less than desirable turnout. Experts fired back, pointing out that the lack of star power, marketing, and general appetite for romantic comedy was also likely a factor. But after years of being told he was too gay for mainstream audiences, you can understand why Eichner would feel that way. He said so in an interview with CBS Sunday morningwhen asked why it took so long for one of the big five Hollywood studios to endorse a gay rom-com, he said: “The real answer to that is that the world, including Hollywood, has been very homophobic. In a way, Hollywood has led the charge in terms of LGBTQ issues and representation. And yet, underneath all of that, I think there was always a fear that ‘mainstream audiences’ weren’t necessarily ready for this type of film.”
Minority filmmakers are constantly told by Hollywood that their stories are a “risk” and that box office disappointments “prove” the risk wasn’t worth it. Eichner was under this pressure. And had brothers existed in a vacuum this year, its box office success might be the nail in the coffin for the big gay studio romances of the next five years. But next to it fire island and Spoiler alert, brothers became part of a larger Hollywood trend towards gay romance. It’s a trend that’s expected to continue in 2023, with a line-up of promising queer films at this year’s Sundance, which can be purchased by studios looking for content. And the more gay novels Hollywood comes out with, the better chance those studios have of making one of those movies big.
Maybe the producers are right, which Eichner alludes to in his CBS interview. Maybe the “mainstream” (read: straight, white, conservative) audience in 2022 wasn’t ready to see Eichner snogging on a picnic blanket, or Joel Kim Booster sucking off a guy in the back room of the Blue Whale Club, or Jim Parsons screams that he needs a hospital bed for his husband. But there will always be a homophobic woman at the cinema in rural Michigan. But maybe if there were such films brothers, fire island, and Spoiler alert Each year she will learn to keep her offensive comments to herself. It’s just up to Hollywood to keep the ball rolling.