Four Weddings and a Funeral

This is a rare example of a straight man having a gay best friend—two of them! Who have individual personalities! And never help anyone shop for anything! Oh, and they have love lives, with each other, which isn’t heavily emphasized until one of the couple dies. But he doesn’t kill himself or get murdered or die of AIDS—he has a completely banal heart attack, at a party, in his fifties, after spending his life drinking and smoking and generally having a good time. After he dies, the Hugh Grant character notes that while their group of friends had always rejected conventional settling-down, the two men had been “married all along.” There’s also this tearjerker, and notice how when the pastor describes Matthew as one of Gareth's "closest friends," he describes himself as a "splendid bugger":



But the movie doesn’t even make Matthew, the surviving member of the couple, be miserable for the rest of the film: during the “where-are-they-now” montage over the closing credits, we find out that he eventually gets married to some really hot guy. One of the nice things about this movie is that Gareth and Matthew aren’t stereotypically gay, but not in a way that seems the filmmakers are patting themselveson the backs for being so darn progressive. Their relationship provides the emotional heart of the movie, but being gay isn’t shown as anything particularly remarkable in their group of friends, and, while Matthew is the friend the Hugh Grant character repeatedly turns to for advice, it isn’t because he has any kind of gay superpowers. He’s just really levelheaded, and, as Hugh Grant points out, the only one of them to maintain a successful relationship. I could use more of this kind of gay best friend in the movies.

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.

Mean Girls

"I mean, right? She was a LESBIAN."

When Cady moves from Africa and attends her first American high school, she has no idea how to behave in "Girl World," where you need your friends' approval to buy a dress/date a boy, every compliment is a power struggle, and you can only wear a ponytail once a week. The first friends she makes are queer, or at least queer enough to be ostracized by the rest of the school. Damian, "almost too gay to function," loans her his pink shirt, has a Celine Dion poster in his room, and wears a purple tux to Spring Fling. Janis Ian, whose entry in the Burn Book just says "dyke," is named after a lesbian folk singer, is obsessed with Regina George, and also wears a purple tux to Spring Fling.

At first, Cady doesn't seem to care that her friends might be gay, and even, upon repeating Janis's joke that Damian is "almost too gay to function," wonders "is that only okay when Janis says it?" But the more time she spends with evil queen bee Regina, the more of her casual homophobia she absorbs, referring to her teacher as "totally queer" and finally accusing Janis of being, like, totally in love with her.

We find out that Janis's hatred for Regina is a result of homophobia, or, as Regina explains:


Later, Cady apologizes to Janis and Damian, and Janis refuses to let the gay rumors bother her anymore. She tells Regina, in front of the all the girls (and Damian) in their grade that she tried to ruin her life: "I am so sorry, Regina. Really, I don't know why I did all this. I guess it's probably because I've got a big LESBIAN crush on you! Suck on THAT!"

The ironic thing of course is that Janis isn't even a lesbian--she winds up with the mathlete rapper guy at the end, totally mellowed-out and apparently straight. This shows that gay rumors, like every other kind of high school rumor, are mostly not even true, and that stereotypes are not actually very useful, and that even if a girl wears a purple tux to prom and is weirdly obsessed with other girls, she is not necessarily gay. Only mean people are homophobic, and if you don’t know if you should call somebody “too gay to function,” you should probably restrain yourself. All of which is a nice message! But, Damian has a bit of Christian from Clueless syndrome, where he’s the only one who never shows any romantic interest in anyone, let alone gets a boyfriend. This, plus the fact that Janis turns out to be straight, felt a little like a bait-and-switch: they’re queer enough to be funny and make a statement, but not too queer.

He's Just Not That Into You

So you know how lots of moms, when faced with the prospect of a gay kid, will say something about how gay people have such sad lives? They should watch He’s Just Not That Into You, because those straight people are pathetic. And boring. And based on broad stereotypes. And poorly acted. And—to be honest, I fast-forwarded through a lot of the subplots, but these people are horrible. Horrible!

And I know that most romantic comedies are about upper-class straight white people, but come on, the movie is set in Baltimore, which is a predominately black city. Everyone with a romantic subplot is white. Don’t worry, though, there are lots of black characters! Like, the waiters the guy from the Mac commercials supervises! And there’s a pair of black women on a bench giving no-nonsense love advice, never to be seen again. And there’s one scene, at the tail end of a montage of young women making excuses for why men won’t call them, where African women outside their grass huts have the following conversation (in subtitles):

Woman One: I’m sure he just forgot your hut number.
Woman Two: Or was eaten by a lion.
Woman Three: You guys are awesome.

In conclusion, this movie is problematic on multiple levels.

But the level I’m concerned with centers largely around Drew Barrymore’s plot. Drew Barrymore’s character works for a local gay newspaper. Don’t worry, she’s not a lesbian. She gets a romantic subplot! The gays are all male, and flutter around her desk to give Drew Barrymore moral support with her heterosexual romantic endeavors. There are three of them, and I don’t think they have names.

There’s also this business here: