What ‘Bros’ Means for the Future of Mainstream LGBTQ+ Representation
by Ian Carlos Crawford
Bros is a fun, light-hearted gay romcom produced by Judd Apatow, written by Billy Eichner and Nicholas Stoller that stars Eichner and Luke Macfarlane.
I was inclined to start this piece by qualifying my love for Bros and do a little negging on my own behalf because that’s the extremely online thing to do — prepare for the negative, annoying reactions by saying you don’t love the thing you’re talking about that much. But all that matters is Bros is a fun, queer movie with a diverse cast and y’all should give it a shot before deciding it’s “not the queer experience” or problematic or whatever.
It’s worth your time if, for nothing else, being a really funny gay movie. Straight people get approximately 7897 different movies about their experience. We don’t get many starring queer folks. I love Fire island, Call me By Your Name, and Love, Simon — but none of those movies are my gay experience and neither was Bros and that’s perfectly okay!
We, as gay people, get to choose our family but also enjoy things that are not 100% talking to our expereinces. We spent most of our lives only having straight content to consume that we didn’t overly relate to, so why can’t gay content be consumed the same way?
Bros tells the story of an anxious, extremely online, successful yet perpetually single podcaster named Bobby (Billy Eichner) who is helping to open the first LGBTQ+ museum in NYC and meets a nice muscle gay Aaron (Luke Macfarlane). It has a great supporting cast of characters like Henry (Guy Branum), Angela (TS Madison), Cherry (Dot-Marie Jones), Robert (Jim Rash), and Debra Messing playing herself. The cast, Messing aside, is almost exclusively queer — which is a big deal! Casting openly queer actors in almost every role, including the straight ones is something we don’t see too often!
I also could relate to the Billy’s character Bobby — not because of being rich and tall and dating an extremely hot, fit man but because he couldn’t seem to shut up or stop getting in his own way (and had a podcast, I have two, so I win the sad olympics). His character wasn’t supposed to be some manic pixie dream gay who just can’t seem to find love and that was what I appreciated most about the movie. But if we’re being honest, the stuff I related to most was the meeting for the museum where everyone would argue. It was like Twitter put into a movie. The board of directors had folks all across the spectrum and they could not get along. The museum board was almost parodying the backlash to the movie. The museum stuff also gave us the most relatable scene of the entire film — TS Madison’s Angela shouting over everyone else that she wishes we could all just have a quiet room for everyone to shut up.
Unfortunately, Bros did not perform well at the box office. Billy Eichner went on Twitter to address the underperformance, in now deleted tweets, blaming a big part on homophobia. Folks immediately pushed back online. It turned into folks blaming everything but homophobia on the movie underperforming — blaming the marketing, the romcom genre being dead, and Eichner himself. Meanwhile, my friend I asked to see it with texted me, semi-jokingly, asking if we’d get hate crimed seeing that movie at one of our local theaters in the suburbs of New Jersey.
I think queer folks who live in more liberal areas or bigger cities forget that homophobia is still absolutely rampant. It was something I’d forgotten about living in NYC for ten years, until I had to move back to the suburbs where I grew up and suddenly felt too gay to go to go anywhere and feel comfortable. I even had a straight friend from NYC DM me to talk about Bros and say how stupid he thought it was to blame homophobia because “no one cares” if it’s gay or not, they care if it’s good — and I had to politely correct him. While Eichner might’ve been missing the mark a little with his tweets, he later clarified at the New Yorker Film Festival, “Homophobia is a bigger problem than as it pertains to this silly rom-com we made, you know what I mean? But do I think it’s a factor? Yes. I think in certain parts of the country, it probably was a factor. There’s a lot of factors to it. To open this movie, in this many theaters, a rom-com in 2022 — there are rom-coms with mega-stars, which struggle at the box office, and a lot of the biggest comedy stars are taking their movies to streaming. And for good reason! That seems to be where people want to watch these movies.”
The discourse on social media of course quickly delved into rejoicing in the underperformance — with posts like “name a gay movie more groundbreaking than Bros” (where folks were replying with movies about straight women going through it or jokey gay porn pics) to “this movie is problematic and here’s why” (from folks who hadn’t even seen it) to “queer people don’t want romcoms” (this queer person does). If you survived the Looking or Love, Simon discourse then the Bros discourse felt almost copy and paste. No one tears apart queer media, not even homophobes, the way queer folks do. Even jokingly, why do we tend to elevate and love straight stories more than queer ones? Why are stories with Cate Blanchett or Nicole Kidman playing a straight women crying into a glass of wine or cigarette more beloved than a queer story written by queer person starring queer folks?
I fall victim to this too — I prefer stories where a killer in a costume is calling up his victims to ask their favorite scary movie or ones where a ragtag team of superheroes all come together in the end to fight a Big Bad, and those movies for the most part pretend queer folks don’t exist at all. Only recently has genre starting branching out with queer characters.
Guy Branum, who starred in and co-produced Bros, had a really great tweet thread about the movie and the discourse. He said, “In talking about how cruelly @billyeichner , white, cis, rich, hot- or not-hot-enough-to-be-a-movie-star (depending on who’s tweeting) demanded the queer community support his movie, a thing that is rarely mentioned is the rest of the cast. When @nicholasstoller and @JuddApatow gave Billy the chance to write and star in a film, they were working from an established game plan Judd had used to help build the careers of @amyschumer @kumailn @Sethrogen and others. In making films like “Trainwreck” or “The Big Sick”… newer comic voices were surrounded by established famous movie stars like Holly Hunter, Marissa Tomei, and Tilda Swinton. But Billy asked for his movie to not surround him with famous movie stars, but with out LGBTQ+ performers.” He went on to discuss how how much Eichner championed the queer cast and why such a diverse queer cast is realy important — and he’s right.
Straight folks get 800 Transformer and Marvel movies, yet queer folks have gotten maybe a handful of big studio movies with queer characters where no one dies. We deserve a light-hearted romcom the same way straight folks do. And we can want better without tearing down what we get — I’d personally love a gay movie starring a nerdy Puerto Rican who had to move back in with parents in NJ after a particularly bad breakup (hi, it me). But social media doesn’t allow for nuance. There’s queer media that I personally don’t like and that’s okay! But I still never want queer media to fail nor do I rejoice in the failure — so go see Bros (or don’t) and decide for yourself if you love it or hate it. But don’t pile on the social media hate for something that is harmless fun.
About the Author:
Ian Carlos Crawford grew up in southern New Jersey and has an MFA in non-fiction writing. His writing has appeared on sites like BuzzFeed, NewNowNext, Junkee, and other random corners of the internet. He currently hosts a queer Buffy and Marvel focused pop culture podcast called Slayerfest 98 and co-hosts a horror podcast called My Bloody Judy. Follow him on Twitter @ianxcarlos!
