In this gay holiday setting, there’s barely even a straight person to be shocked by the hilariously naughty dialogue (“Why would you say hello to someone you don’t want to fuck?”), the cruising through the Meat Rack or the dark-room mishaps. In Andrew Ahn’s Fire Island – a rom-com written by Joel Kim Booster, and starring Booster himself along with Bowen Yang, Conrad Ricamora, Matt Rogers and Margaret Cho – there is no homophobia in sight. Trick, a 1999 romp with Tori Spelling, Christian Campbell and John Paul Pitoc, is noteworthy because it broke this formula: the rom-com obstacle was simply the two guys finding a place to be alone together.
Straight people’s falling-in-love was interrupted by careers or misunderstandings or an ex or whatever, but gay love was always “forbidden love.” The lead would meet a cute guy, but then they had to hide or abandon their love because nobody would ever accept it. “Okay, if there’s no dick in the movie, can I have as many butts as I want?”…īack in the 1990s, when gay cinema was starting to go mainstream, my friends and I would complain that what kept lovers apart in these films – the plot’s main engine – was always homophobia.
