D.E.B.S.

Finally, a dumb, campy, lesbian spy parody romantic comedy! The secret genre combination of my heart.

Basically, the D.E.B.S. are an elite international spy organization/college. They fight crime in what appears to be leftover slutty schoolgirl Halloween costumes, carry lots of guns (the bullets never hit anything), and have conversations with holograms on the regular. If you find this picture, of the D.E.B.S. on a stakeout inside a restaurant hilarious, this is the movie for you:


Star D.E.B. Amy falls in love with supervillainness Lucy Diamond, who is also the subject of her women’s studies and crime thesis. She runs off with her and, when the rest of the D.E.B.S. come to rescue her, is disgraced. Lucy escapes capture, and, with the encouragement of her straight best friend/henchman, decides to reform herself and win Amy back with a musical montage:



While it’s a coming out story, everyone gets over Amy’s lesbianism pretty quickly. The issue isn’t that she’s dating a girl, but that she’s dating someone who regularly tries to sink Australia. I hope that someday soon, ridiculous queer genre movies will be widely available, instead of just romantic comedies and tragedies, which I like, but come on, don’t you want to watch a gay action movie? Or a gay monster movie? Or a gay heist movie? (Other than Thelma and Louise?) We need a lesbian Tarantino.

Some Like it Hot (1959)

If you’ve never seen Some Like it Hot, you should go do that. I’ll wait.

If you still haven’t seen it, Some Like it Hot is a classic cross-dressing comedy. Though it's not technically a gay movie, there's a male/male relationship, and lots of blurring of gender boundaries, with a lack of gay panic that would be refreshing today, let alone in 1959.

Two down on their luck jazz musicians witness the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and go on the run, but can only find work in an all-girl’s orchestra, so they dress up as Daphne and Josephine and go to Miami. Joe/Josephine (Tony Curtis) sets about trying to seduce Marilyn Monroe, and Jerry/Dapne (Jack Lemmon) finds himself dating an elderly playboy millionaire. As the charade goes on, the Jack Lemmon becomes more absorbed in his Daphne persona, and the beta relationship progresses until gender becomes somewhat beside the point:

Jerry: Have I got things to tell you!
Joe: What happened?
Jerry: I'm engaged.
Joe: Congratulations. Who's the lucky girl?
Jerry: I am!
Joe: WHAT?!
Jerry: Osgood proposed to me! We're planning a June wedding.
Joe: What are you talking about? You can't marry Osgood.
Jerry: Why, you think he's too old for me?
Joe: Jerry, you can't be serious.
Jerry: Why not? He keeps marrying girls all the time.
Joe: But, you're not a girl! You're a guy, and, why would a guy wanna marry a guy?
Jerry: For security! Look, I know there's a problem, Joe.
Joe: I'll say there is.
Jerry: His mother - we need her approval, but I'm not worried because I don't smoke.
Joe: Jerry. There's another problem, like what are you gonna do on your honeymoon?
Jerry: We've been discussing that. He wants to go to the Riviera but I'm kinda leaning toward Niagra Falls.
Joe: My God.
Jerry: I don't expect it to last Joe. I'll tell him when the time's right.
Joe: Like when?
Jerry: Like right after the ceremony. Then we get a quick annulment, he makes a nice little settlement on me and I keep getting those alimony checks every month.
Joe: Jerry listen to me there are laws, conventions. It's just not been done.
Jerry: Joe this may be my last chance to marry a millionaire.
Joe: Oh, Jerry — Jerry, will you take my advice? Forget about the whole thing, will ya? Just keep telling yourself: you're a boy, you're a boy.
Jerry: I'm a boy.
Joe: That's the boy.
Jerry: I'm a boy. I'm a boy. I wish I were dead. I'm a boy. Boy, oh boy, am I a boy. Now, what am I gonna do about my engagement present?
Joe: What engagement present?
Jerry: Osgood gave me a bracelet.
Joe: [examining it] Hey, these are real diamonds!
Jerry: Of course they're real! What do you think? My fiance is a bum?

Director Billy Wilder couldn’t figure out how to end the film, so the actor improvised the final line as a placeholder until someone could write something better:



As if that's not enough, it was rated C for Condemned by the Catholic Decency League, and was banned in Kansas City. So you know they did something right.

Kissing Jessica Stein

“She wanted to be with someone a little more…gay, I guess is the thing.”

Kissing Jessica Stein is about a straight lady who dates a girl, dreads having sex with her, and then dumps her for her ex-boyfriend, but I still pretty much liked it. Helen decides to try dating women, and places an ad in the paper, which Jessica answers on a lark. The part of the movie dealing with Jessica’s anxiety about anyone finding out she’s with Helen, and overcoming her initial repulsion to lesbian sex, stressed me out a lot. I mean, I don’t have the greatest taste in girlfriends, but if you have to actively work to overcome your partner’s disgust with the idea of touching you, you could maybe do just a little bit better. Especially if you look like Helen.

But Jessica’s many neuroses, and her panic about bisexuality, are presented as symptoms of her perfectionism and anxiety about life in general. She’s picky about everything, and decides to go out with Helen because she’s ruled out the entire male gender, and then realizes that the emotional fulfillment she and Helen share isn’t enough to make up for the lack of sex Helen wants. What Jessica wants is a best friend to cuddle with and keep her from being lonely, and Helen wants to be in love.

Helen’s bisexuality is treated with surprising decency: she goes out with Jessica as an experiment, and decides she likes women as well as men, without any of the hand-wringing and self-flagellation Jessica goes through. She decides what she wants and then gets on with it, and at the end of the film, when she and Jessica have broken up, is still dating both men and women. She and her two gay male friends have a series of conversations that seem to be intended to answer lesbian complaints about the plot of the movie, including one where her friend compares having a lesbian relationship on a whim to wearing blackface, to which Helen responds, “Oh, come on, that’s a bad comparison. People are born black,” and her friend says, “Exactly!” The movie seems to be suggesting that sexual orientation is less set than many people are comfortable with, including, I guess, me—maybe because that scenario of your girlfriend dating you on a whim and then leaving you for a boy because it turns out she doesn’t like having sex with you, but really likes the emotional support, is terrifying. Which is the source of a lot of biphobia, and wrong, and not so much a problem with bisexuality as people making mistakes with what they want, but Jessica Stein is kind of a nightmare scenario.

There are a lot of things I really liked about Kissing Jessica Stein. The acting is great, and the dialogue is witty. Jessica’s relationship with her family is lovely. This scene with her mother, right after Helen dumps her for not coming out, has the most emotional depth in the entire film:

Mom: You okay?

Jessica: Uh, I don’t know. No.

Mom: What is it, Jess?

Jessica: It’s just sometimes I tihnk I’m gonna be alone forever…You can jump in any time.

Mom: You’re my love, you know that? My beloved. But sometimes I worry for you.

Jessica: I worry for me too.

Mom: Sweetheart. I will never forget when you were in the fifth grade, and you were so excited when you got the lead in the play. Do you remember that? Really Rosie.

Jessica: Really Rosie. Yeah, I remember.

Mom: And you came home after the first day of rehearsal, and you turned to me, and you said, ‘Mommy, I’m not gonna do it. I quit.’ Just like that. I turned to you and I said, ‘Jessie, Jessie my love, why?’ And you said, ‘Because my costar isn’t good enough. And if my costar isn’t good enough, then the play won’t be good enough. And I don’t want to be part of any play that isn’t good enough.’ And I thought to myself, ‘Oy. This child will suffer. How this child will suffer.’ And then they gave it to the meskite with the glasses.

Jessica: Tess Greenblatt.

Mom: Right.

Jessica: God, she was terrible.

Mom: Right. And you would have been great. And you didn’t get to do it. You had to sit there and watch terrible Tess do it with that guy you thought wasn’t good enough, who was actually quite excellent, wasn’t he? And you know? I always thought that you would have been so much happier doing that play, even if it was just okay. Even if it was great, just not the best ever. And maybe, just maybe, it would have been the best ever. You never know. Jessie?

Jessica: Yeah?

Mom: I think she’s a very nice girl.

If all the relationships were this well-crafted, I’d be thrilled with it, but the movie is unfortunately poorly paced an the characters aren’t terribly fleshed out. We cover huge spans of time in minutes, jumping from Helen being embraced by Jessica’s family to them moving in together to Helen complaining that they never have sex to them breaking up because of lack of said sex. It’s a mess, and we don’t really see why Helen is attracted to Jessica in the first place, or why Jessica and her boyfriend would make a good couple, which, for me, makes it a bit of a failure as a romantic comedy.

Clueless

"He does dress better than I do. What would I bring to the relationship?"

When I was ten, I used to watch Clueless all the time on TV. I thought it was totally awesome then, and now that I understand all the jokes, I like it even more. Besides introducing me to Jane Austen, Clueless was the first time I encountered the gay best friend archetype.

Cher, our heroine, pursues Christian, the dreamiest boy in all of Beverly Hills, using tricks straight out of Cosmo (“Sometimes you have to show a little skin. This reminds boys of being naked, and then they think of sex.”). Christian dresses like a grown-up, calls her “dollface,” listens to Billie Holiday, is knowledgeable about modern art, and brings Spartacus to movie night, and flees from Cher’s advances like a cheetah on fire. Cher is, of course, clueless about Christian’s homosexuality:

Murray: Your man Christian is a cake boy!
Cher, Dionne: A what?
Murray: He's a disco-dancing, Oscar Wilde reading, Streissand ticket holding friend of Dorothy, know what I'm saying?
Cher: Uh-uh, no way, not even!
Murray: Yes even, he's gay!
Dionne: He does like to shop, Cher. And the boy can dress.

When Cher realizes that Christian is not a viable boyfriend prospect, they become shopping buddies.

Christian fits the gay best friend movie mold pretty well. Cultured, a little bitchy, sweet to straight girls—and there’s nothing inherently wrong with having one of Cher’s many romantic mishaps involve an obviously, stereotypically, gay guy. The part that makes Christian, and characters like Christian, problematic, is that they never get a date, ever. Their love lives are never given the same attention as the straight friends in movies. Christian’s not even at the final wedding scene, where all the major characters are paired off: Cher with Josh, Dionne with Murray, Tai with Travis, and even the minor villains, Amber and Elton. There’s not any room in the movie for him actually being gay, just jokes about it.

But I'm a Cheerleader

But I’m a Cheerleader stars Natasha Lyonne as Megan, a wholesome, slightly dim, and big-hearted cheerleader. Megan’s friends, parents, and an out-of-drag RuPaul hold an intervention for her lesbianism. Though Megan insists that she’s not a lesbian (“I’m not a pervert. I go to church, I get good grades, I’m a cheerleader!”), they send her to True Directions, a halfway-house for gay kids on the path to heterosexual bliss. Once there, the kids are dressed in baby blue (for boys) and pink (for girls). After Megan has an epiphany about her own homosexuality in a group therapy session, she finds that the other kids are friendly, and just as committed to curing themselves as she is. The only exception is Graham, a surly lesbian played by Clea DuVall, who’s only at True Directions so her rich parents will pay for college. But I’m A Cheerleader is like the world’s funniest women’s studies project, satirizing gender construction and homophobia. The kids are split into groups for lessons on how to properly express their genders, including modeling wedding dresses, changing diapers, and vacuuming for the girls, and chopping wood for the boys. My personal favorite part is a group therapy session where the kids are ordered to find the roots of their homosexuality, which include “My mother got married in pants,” “Too many locker-room showers with the team,” “All-girl boarding school,” and “I was born in France.”

Most of the gay male characters (a teenage wrestler being the one exception) are pretty feminine, but so are most of the girls. Halfway through, there’s an example of how stereotypes are not just limiting, but inaccurate, when Jan, a butch, softball-playing, buzz cut-sporting girl has an epiphany during a group therapy session:

Jan: I’m a heterosexual.

Mike: Not yet, honey, but you’re almost there. And don’t speak out of turn.

Jan: No, no, I’ve never been gay.

(Kids scoff)

Mike: Jan, remember, uh, you molested. Just take a look at yourself.

Jan: I mean, everybody thinks I'm this big dyke because... cause I wear baggy pants, I play softball, and... and I'm not as pretty as other girls but that doesn't make me gay. I mean, I like guys. I can't help it. I just want a big fat wiener up my...

Andre: Amen, sister.

Jan: I quit

(Runs from the room)

Mike: Who the hell is she trying to fool?

This movie is really fun, in a campy, John Waters kind of way. Megan and Graham have good chemistry, and the big dramatic romantic scene involves Megan declaring her love for Graham with a cheer routine. So I give it an A+ as teen movies go.

When I looked up some info about the making of But I’m a Cheerleader (as one does), I read an interview with director Jamie Babbit, where she said that she originally wanted Rosario Dawson to play Megan, but the producers insisted on going with someone who was more “all-American,” which…maybe she and Alice Wu should hang out sometime? I appreciate that sometimes, you have to make sacrifices to get a movie made at all, and Babbit clearly felt bad about it, but when Babbit said she tried to fill the cast with more people of color, I couldn’t help but think that that’s the same kind of the same logic that keeps gay actors busy helping straight girls find love in romantic comedies.

I also highly recommend the documentary on the MPAA, This Picture is Not Yet Rated, in which Babbit appears and explains that she had to cut a masturbation scene by about thirty seconds in order to lose an NC-17 rating. This was the same year that American Pie came out, which taught me that straight boys fucking pies can be seen by 17-year-olds, but you have to be 21 to see a fully-clothed lesbian touch herself, which I actually think would have made a lot of money.