The Springtime of Gay Pop Culture

Still, Knock is remarkable for being one example of a post-Bros rash of mainstream pop culture that is focused on queer people, specifically gay men. After feeling underfed for so long, the sheer breadth of the current spread is worth taking in. What a marvel. The white whale of a piece of pop culture that neatly and virtuously represents a group in its entirety remains elusive, by definition, but the more truth is attempted, the higher the chances of achieving something, anything that seems lifelike.

In some ways, the bullshit that you put up with for love and sex is culture itself; this is true not just of homophobic hegemony but of gay culture, which has as many minuses as pluses.

While Knock hinged the future of civilization on an agonizing decision imposed on a gay couple, a much more moving depiction of gay life at the end of the world materialized out of thin air on last week’s The Last of Us, in a kind of side-quest episode that spent most of its time focused on gay couple Bill (Nick Offerman) and Frank (Murray Bartlett), who happened upon each other as civilization shut down. Its narrative thrust (and source of poignance) lies in showing something that is still too rare to see gay people doing on screen: surviving. Though their story is ultimately tragic, Bill, a survivalist, finally finds in Frank something actually worth living for until the very end. The episode, titled “Long, Long Time” (after the Linda Ronstadt song), practically dared viewers not to relate to an extremely pure depiction of love worth braving the apocalypse for.

Like the armageddon-themed gay story that closed out last week, the one that opened it also suggested that right/left divisions are less rigid than they might seem. We have more in common than that which divides us, “Long, Long Time” and Knock posited. For one thing: guns. While, obviously, there are gays who own guns, gun ownership is so politicized that depicting it can never be matter of fact. The problem with representing the underrepresented is that narrative decisions can come across as tactics, not truth, and putting guns in the hands of gay characters seems like a suspicious way to forge a bridge from the right to the ostensible left.

Guns aside, “Long, Long Time” adhered to a template of many a great contemporary gay story—like Andrew Haigh’s Weekend, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Tropical Malady, Francis Lee’s God’s Own Country, and of course Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, it found love in a decontextualized place. These stories captivate because they replicate the feeling that nothing else matters besides love by placing their characters in environments that are otherwise desolate—the relationship is represented as a refuge from harsh realities. You don’t have to be in the middle of nowhere with your man to feel this, either. In some ways, the bullshit that you put up with for love and sex is culture itself; this is true not just of homophobic hegemony but of gay culture, which has as many minuses as pluses. MTV’s new reality show The Real Friends of WeHo—a series that says, “Real Housewives, but make it gay men”—is all culture, a little love, and no sex. From its announcement, it was controversial, particularly among gay men. After its premiere, a video showed the hosts of a viewing party for its lead-in, RuPaul’s Drag Race (still in many ways the single most relevant depiction of gay life), turning it off to the cheers of the attending crowd. The knee-jerk disdain was itself a trope—Logo’s short-lived and little-watched Fire Island faced much the same reaction in 2017.

If the truth hurts, Real Friends is a real pain in the ass. I’ve witnessed a lot of gay men carrying themselves like Real Housewives, simultaneously hand-wringing over and delighting in drama, and comparing their adult experiences to high school. The falseness is real, and Real Friends, which gathers some influencers, stylist Brad Goreski, and gays with skin-care lines, captures it. Refreshingly, there’s barely a discernible fourth wall—the cast talks openly about how their personal brands might benefit or suffer from doing the show. When Goreski’s husband asks if he’s going to eat a burger at an imminent party, Goreski candidly answers, “No. On camera? Eccch.” During an argument, Jaymes Vaughan (who openly admits to being cast on the show because he’s the husband of Jonathan Bennett, of Mean Girls fame) tells influencer Joey Zauzig: “I know you’re trying to play your part to do the TV show ‘cause you wanna be the star of this and that’s fine. I don’t care about that stuff. I care about us as human beings.” At last, someone who is here to make friends—or at least wants us to believe that.

While I wouldn’t begrudge anyone who took one look at this show and hung his head in shame for his culture, I don’t think the problem with Real Friends is one of optics. The show lays bare a lot of what’s annoying about hanging out with a group of gay men, specifically a status-obsessed subset who care less about exchanging ideas and more about social intricacies. No, the problem with Real Friends is that its plotting is as deathly dull as a bathhouse during a biblical flood. Still, in an Eichner-esque move, cast member Todrick Hall responded to the backlash in a series of handwritten letters (the first in fonts that varied page to page, which was distractingly confusing) that were then photographed and posted on his Instagram. “We fight for representation then fight against it when we get it, because it doesn’t come in the form we’d hoped,” read part of the first one, which bemoaned gays’ negative response by reporting that “the call was coming from inside the house.” Maybe if everything gay got a Real Friends response, Hall’s words would hold more water, but a more practical reading of this situation is that savvy gays spotted a dud and dragged it. They were right. Too bad, so sad.

I’m fairly certain that no one was screaming out for DILF and twink sexual representation, and yet OUTTv’s newly launched Love Island-esque For the Love of DILFs has been met with an ecstatic response. The Stormy Daniels-hosted reality show attempts to find love, or maybe just hot sex, between older, beefy guys and younger, smooth ones (referred to on the show as “himbos,” but really they’re just twinks), and it, too, breaks the fourth wall to comment on the ridiculousness of the scenario, mostly via a wisecracking, omniscient narrator who says things like, “Here are some reality TV establishing shots of our multimillion dollar mansion,” and, “Whoever said gay men are vapid and sex-crazed are about to be proven…somewhat correct.” Through the absurdity, the show manages to portray a convincing spark between many of its contestants—they make their initial connections when the himbos select the DILF’s underwear (presented anonymously) that most appeals to them. “Can I smell ‘em?” asks one himbo, which is both hilarious and a valid way of ferreting out potential chemistry.

through a panoply of options, there’s a much greater chance of the broadcasting of truth.

There’s a lot of life in For the Love of DILFs’ multivalence—it works on several levels, firing many cylinders. Like everything else mentioned in this piece, it was clearly in the works before Bros; perhaps we have not yet felt the effect of Bros’ flop. But at least in its wake, these examples of gay-centered media are taking some of the pressure off. This comes from without the community, too—Beyoncé’s Renaissance paid explicit tribute to the Black, queer creators of disco and house music, a conversation that hasn’t often been able to compete with the steady thump coming from straight white artists. And there’s more on the horizon that will help clarify how far we have (or haven’t) come: Of an Age by You Won’t Be Alone director Goran Stolevski is yet another intimate two-hander along the lines of Brokeback and its ilk. The casual intertwining of sex and culture, a reality rarely nailed in media, was very well achieved in Sebastian Silva’s Sundance film Rotting in the Sun.

I point this current crop of queer-themed media out not as proof that we’ve somehow achieved enough—clearly, we haven’t, when the focus is still on cis gay (and often white) men. No matter how diverse representation becomes, it will always need to be more diverse. But through a panoply of options, there’s a much greater chance of the broadcasting of truth. Some of these truths, like those in the tacky Real Friends of Weho, may be hard to look at. Others are made easier by the sheer aplomb of their vessel, like For the Love of DILFs, which takes gay sex seriously by showing how silly many of us look in its pursuit. And for all of Knock at the Cabin’s unsavory messaging, at least it and the third episode of The Last of Us envision gay people lasting long enough to make it to the end of the world. That is representation we have been so lacking, ridiculously enough.