In the new movie Bros, there’s one (hilarious) line from Billy Eichner’s character, Bobby, that I keep turning over in my head.
Bobby is a 40-year-old man who (thematic spoiler alert) learns, to paraphrase Drag Race, how to love himself so that others can love him. (I guess this is a good time to share that of course there are going to be some references to the dialogue in the movie.)
Early in the movie, there’s a scene at the house of Bobby’s friends, a straight couple. They’re sitting in the kids’ playroom talking about how times have changed when it comes to people’s views on LGBTQ+ people. The woman shares that many of the kids in her child’s class are non-binary.
“It’s different now,” Bobby spits out. “We had AIDS; they have Glee.”
I was a kid in the late 80s through the early millennium, young enough to have missed the height of the AIDS epidemic — when so many people lost their friends and family in a world that refused to move — yet old enough to know that it was occurring. As a kid, the culture taught us to associate it with something sinister and undesirable – being gay. Between headlines and movies and everyday conversation, it was impossible in a child’s brain to divorce the disease from the humanity.
I still remember my friend Josh looking at rusted pieces of metal on the playground in first grade (1991) and saying, “touching those needles is how people get AIDS.” I didn’t know what AIDS was, but I knew it was something to do with men who I didn’t want to associate with. I had no idea what giant rusted metal had to do with it, but I figured it was best to not ask questions. Tuck it away in my mind and never, ever touch or talk about rusted metal.
This is how we survived – pay attention to the clues, trust no one, be invisible. As I got older, high school and college required constant monitoring of the performance to ensure questions never broke the surface.
I graduated college in 2007; Glee came out in 2009. This means (stay with me now) that the graduating class of 2022 was nine years old when it premiered, following them through junior high and high school. I watched part the first season, loving the camp and the joy and the Amy Winehouse. I dropped off when it felt over-the-top, with storylines about suicide and drug use and, well, being gay. Perhaps it wasn’t for me, as I was already too far gone in the internalized homophobia that “Bros” explores.
Indeed, it’s that storyline that feels very real in “Bros”, the piece that makes it fresh outside of the purposely applied running-down-the-sidewalk and will-they-or-won’t-they rom com clichés. It’s clear from the first scene of the movie that Bobby has some processing to do. The whiplash from don’t-ask-don’t-tell (be invisible and you’ll be fine) to love-is-love (be visible! You are fine!) is very real. We as queer people are still trying to figure out how to behave at the party in our own clothes, after we were told for so many years we weren’t up to dress code.
That can be painful. There are times when I look at people not much younger than me with jealousy of things I did not have. A kid – well, a man – from my hometown won a Tony (a Tony!) last year for acting. I was floored that someone from my town would even have access to theater training. When I visit home now, though, as an adult, I look at the theater company on Main Street, the summer stock place by the beach, the theater space by the university, the theater department at the university itself, from which that Tony Award winning actor graduated. It’s all there – it’s just now much more celebrated to access and embrace it. In 2022, we’re into “telling stories,” not adhering to a script, which is what I felt like I had to do only a few years ago.
Perhaps 2009, when Glee premiered, was a year of transition. It’s also the year “The Hangover” was released, which, during the first few lines of the movie, we hear the word faggot. It’s in a hospital scene, over the intercom, a page for “Dr. Faggot”. It’s a joke; audiences in theaters laughed. Or, I assume as much. I’ve never seen The Hangover. But this was a reference in “Bros”, an example of the way we showed up in most entertainment not so long ago, and how it stays with us.
I don’t have to have seen the movie to get that. We all absorbed these messages. By 2009 I was out, fumbling through Boston and starting to unwind everything I had taught myself. (I still, by the way, avoid touching rusted metal; it’s a long journey.) Had it been a few years prior, I probably would have seen “The Hangover” in theaters, like I did “Wedding Crashers”, invited there by a handsome out guy a year ahead of me in college. I sat in the theater, eyes forward, hands folded in my lap. If only it had been a different time. I could have grabbed his hand. Or admitted to being at the theater on a date in the first place. As Jake Wesley Rogers sings as the credits roll for “Bros”, hindsight is 20/20. What I was reminded of during the movie (while laughing - it’s very funny) is that we have to process what we taught ourselves in the past; otherwise, we’re doomed to stay there in the future.