The Five Most Intentionally Unintentional Homoerotic Films
A Seriously Random List /
Dustin Rowles
Seriously Random Lists | April 7, 2009 | Comments (49)
5. Superbad: Even as a straight man completely at ease with his sexuality, Superbad, at times, made me uncomfortable. It’s a 90 minute comedy that revolves around Jonah Hill and Michael Cera talking about their dicks. Hell, Jonah Hill is so obsessed with penis, he’s compelled to doodle them, and his fixation with being Cera’s roommate was akin to being the possessive girlfriend. But the homoeroticism in Superbad is complicated — the gay jokes are played for laughs, but the relationship between the two teenage boys is also where the film’s heart resides. It took a night of drinking and, ultimately, failure with their respective love interests to realize it, but Cera and Hill’s characters were far more into each other than they were into the girls. The alcohol just gave them the courage to admit it.
4. The Lost Boys: You’d never expected subtlety from the openly gay Joel Schumacher (who put nipples on the Bat Suit), but Lost Boys was one of the first popular films among teenagers to feature a strong, homoerotic subtext. I mean: Of course Corey Haim’s character was gay — what straight teenager in the 80s would hang a shirtless poster of Rob Lowe on his bedroom wall? He sings “I ain’t gotta man” in the bathtub, for God’s sake. Lost Boys was as much about burgeoning teen sexuality as it was vampires, and that vampirism was a glorious extended metaphor on homosexuality and be “one of us” was its rallying cry. By featuring good-looking, cool vampires —instead of old, menacing blood suckers — Lost Boys romanticized vampires, and by extension, homosexuality. Just look at Keifer Sutherland and tell me he isn’t the gayest vampire that side of Robert Pattinson? I mean, it’s right there in the title, people. They were Lost Boys in search of their sexuality.
3. Top Gun: (From TK’s review):
2. 300: Come on, let’s just admit that 300 isn’t that far removed from “The Smurfs.” Instead of 101 blue, cheery men living in Smurf Village, Zack Snyder’s film is 300 sweaty, glistening men with no shirts stabbing one another with their pointy phallic symbols. Everyone was ripped, no one wore shirts, and you could’ve dubbed the audio from a gay porn over the battle scenes and you’d never have known the difference. All that dick-swinging and faux machismo! And where the hell did they find Xerxes — it looks like they pulled him straight of a club called either Ramrod or Manhole. I’m surprised a gay bar called Thermopylae hasn’t opened up anywhere since the release of the movie. 300 not only festered with homoerotic subtext, it was probably the most popular movie among gay men in 2007. Where else could you find that many half-naked men writhing against each other on a big screen?
1. Jackass Number Two: (From our review) There’s a scene in Johnny Knoxville’s documentary, Jackass: Number Two — a gritty, urbane examination of the post-adolescent retardation of men in their late 20s/early 30s — that involves a container of horse ejaculate. I’m reluctant to disclose the details, mindful as I am about revealing the fine intricacies and schematics of the Jackass plotline, but there’s an almost undeniable hidden metaphor in that half-bottle of prostatic fluid, and what the bearded jackass (Chris Pontius) and Mr. Knoxville — who turned in a literally haunting performance as Luke Duke in Dukes of Hazzard — do with the equine spunk provides a suitable distillation of the movie as a whole, propelling the narrative undertones to another, more complex stratum. It’s probably obvious to anyone, but what the director, Jeff Tremaine is trying to essentiate with in this particular vignette is that the three leads — Knoxville, Steve-O, and Bam Margera — really, profoundly want to fuck each other. On a chair. In the backseat of a Volkswagen Bug. In a library carrel. Or against a rock. Wherever. It doesn’t really matter, just so long as there is penetration involved.
Comments
Posted by: Lindsay at April 7, 2009 2:11 PM
Some friends and I were watching Top Gun this weekend and felt the same way