There are gay movies like Pariah and Desert Hearts that are painful, transformative works of art; there are gay movies like Imagine Me & You and But I’m A Cheerleader and The Incredibly True Adventures of 2 Girls in Love that are flawed or occasionally cheesy but still delightful; and then there are gay movies like Latter Days and Kissing Jessica Stein and Were The World Mine that are so bad that you have no choice but to embrace them to your bosom like a beloved but erring child. They are all worth watching. They are all worth loving. (Except for Chasing Amy. That is a bridge too far, and someday I will make Kevin Smith loudly and shiveringly sorry for it.)
As we mentioned the other day, Nicole and Mallory are joining with the ladies of Autostraddle to virtually watch bad gay movies together and then talk about them with a degree of intensity equalled only by the intense love depicted by said bad gay movies. We started with Lost and Delirious, which was The Most Fun, and features both a young Jessica Paré (Canadian) and a toddler Emily VanCamp (Canadian) and some Americans, like Piper Perabo, being AMAZING. You’ll read all our thoughts on it soon enough. (FALCONS.)
We have some other bad gay movies in mind, but why not open it up for discussion and suggestion: what should we be watching together? What are your favorite bad gay movies, the ones you rewatch when it’s raining and you’re a little sick and you don’t care about thematic coherence so much as you just want to see some cheesy gay love? (Mallory here. Which leads me to my next question: where is the gay Pride & Prejudice? I don’t just mean a version of Pride & Prejudice where Elizabeth is a lesbian, because some genius woman already wrote that, but where is the universal lesbian love story that college freshman will swoon over in their dorms for generations to come? Someone write that, or else I’ll have to.)
NOTE¹: We say these are bad gay movies with love. Just because they are bad does not mean they didn’t have a huge emotional impact on you, or weren’t meaningful, or weren’t made with great care. They’re just kind of bad, and we watch them and say WHAT! OMG. WHY DID SHE DO THAT TO HER BANGS, WHY IS THIS IN SLOW-MO, WHY WOULD ANY HUMAN PERSON SAY THAT EVER.
NOTE²: Nicole is not queer enough to feel comfortable identifying as such, but she tries way, way too hard to gain the approval of gay women, and she appreciates that they let her watch movies with them while she stares awkwardly at them with an intense and unwieldy admiration, for they are the pinnacle of human evolution and should be in charge of everyone else.
NOTE³: Mallory finds this deeply charming. Straight and bi women are great, and should watch lesbian movies all the time.
