It’s 2:45am PST, I’m sick and can’t sleep and felt compelled to write. As you may or may not know, I’m a lurker. A lurker is someone who goes through comment threads but rarely engages. I don’t have the time nor energy for that… But I had some thoughts, and I wanted to get them off my chest.
A film called Bros came out over the weekend and there is a LOT of discourse within the gay community regarding it flopping at the box office. Being the person I am, I can’t help but notice what is being said… and by whom. To put it bluntly, I am noticing a lot of white gays telling people what they should be doing to support the community. That’s a problem for me…
The main argument I’m seeing is, we need to support THIS film if we expect to get more films with more diversity. That’s a bad faith argument. In the year of 2022, we already know the myth of needing a white lead for a film to be successful is a fallacy. Look at films like Girls Trip or Crazy Rich Asians. Look at Black Panther. It also feels like a bad faith argument. What ultimately drove me to write this, and it has been building up, was a queer creator saying shaming other queer creators/writers/actors for not showing up to support this film (in his defense, he lumped QaF and Bros together in a post, which I wouldn’t have done…) I interpret that as, let us through the door, and we’ll help you through after. It’s giving trickle down economics, and I don’t like that.
Around 2007, I started watching a lot of gay movies. Pretty much anything I could find, I’d watch. There were SO many movies about white gays. Then there was Queer As Folk, you’d see a black person every blue moon, but also a story of white gays. I never saw people that looked like me, until I stumbled upon Noah’s Arc. I’m sure if I searched more, I’d find more gay content with black and people of color, but the fact that I can go to a streaming service and look in the gay & lesbian category and be SWARMED with stories about white men with chiseled bodies says enough for me. If feels like the “community” is always supposed to gather to support the “mainstream” gay content, while the rest of us are told to wait our turn.
It reminds me of The Devil Wears Prada, when Miranda gives Nigels job to Jacqueline to save her own, and he sits there and tells himself one day she’ll repay him. I don’t want to be a Nigel waiting for that day to come.
Not to mention, why are we putting all of the onius on the gay community. Why are we not thinking, how could we have marketed this film better? How could we have made the film better, to draw in a larger audience? Overall, it just seems like an odd take, but I’m seeing a lot of it.
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