For the past few months — ever since Billy Eichner had a hissyfit about Bros not doing numbers at the box office — I’ve had this little joke about how I felt legally obligated to watch the movie at some point, about how I worried that if I didn’t watch eventually, Billy Eichner was going to show up at my house and scream at me. I needed to do my duty to the broader LGBTQ community by watching Bros, you know? The first gay rom com starring openly gay actors that was released by a major studio (a distinction that feels very “my book is Amazon’s number one listing in food/comedy/self help/divorce/Jewish!” if you ask me).
Anyway. I felt like the movie was probably going to be bad — the trailer did not really compel me — but I had this legal obligation to watch it and so this past Saturday I fired up Peacock and pressed play. I should probably note here that before I did any of this I ate an edible, which managed to hit me about halfway through the film’s nearly 2 hour run time (why was it so long, why did this movie need to be longer than 90 minutes), which mostly served to make the whole thing more surreal.
(I promise that this essay is going to talk about bisexuality at some point. Bear with me.)
The major thing for me about Bros is that I do not find Billy Eichner charming as a romantic lead. I liked him quite a bit in Friends From College (a show co-created by the ::cough::straight::cough::* director and co-writer of Bros, Nicholas Stoller), but in Friends From College he’s playing a straight man amidst a group of absolutely terrible people, not, you know, a supposedly endearing romantic lead who I am supposed to be rooting for despite his insecurities (which in this case mostly seem to be worrying that he’s too nebbishy and visibly gay to be attractive to the jocks he’s interested in? Not the most compelling premise to me, personally, but sure, it’s a movie!). I think that was what fundamentally made the movie a pan for me, I simply could not get invested in Eichner or care, at all, about whether or not he found love. That’s a pretty big problem when you’re watching a rom com!
But. The whole thing about Bros was that it was supposed to be about more than just Eichner, right? It was supposed to be a movie that celebrates the whole gosh darn LGBTQ+ community! That was the other part of Eichner’s pitch: that his character’s job is creating an LGBTQ+ history museum, and several scenes from the movie are set during the museum planning sessions, where the whole hecking rainbow is represented! We’ve got Miss Lawrence and TS Madison and Eve Lindley representing the T contingent! Dot-Marie Jones is there on behalf of all lesbians! Jim Rash shows up for the bisexuals, which is actually kind of weird because Jim Rash is gay and Billy Eichner repeatedly notes throughout the movie that straight people playing gay is basically the worst kind of homophobia that exists but apparently gay people play bi is… fine?
And I gotta say, it’s these scenes at the LGBTQ+ Museum — the scenes that are supposedly a love letter to the whole queer community in all our messiness — that made me hate Bros even more. If you’ve watched the trailer you have already gotten the general gist of how these scenes unfold: Jim Rash complains that no one is talking about Bi Awareness Week. Dot-Marie Jones counters that no one remembered Lesbian History Month. Jim Rash complains that lesbians get a whole month while bisexuals only get a week. Someone jokes about Caitlyn Jenner being a “trans terrorist.” And so on and so forth. Jim Rash’s entire MO is advocating for bi visibility in the form of a “Hall of Bisexuals” (ugh) filled with animatronic bisexuals from history (double ugh), because according to this movie, the main thing that bisexuals have contributed to LGBTQ+ is arguments about whether people who have been long dead were gay or bi** (Eichner, on his part, seems strongly convinced that both Abraham Lincoln and Freddie Mercury were gay and anyone who suggests they might have been bi is just doing work for the hetero agenda, which, no comment).
(NB: None of this is to say that bisexuals are uniquely targeted: Dot-Marie Jones’s lesbian character is similarly flat and given to stereotype, and the main reason the trans characters come off decently is because they don’t really have much to do in the first place.)
At one point in the movie, Eichner gives a speech to his co-workers about how much he loves the LGBTQ+ community, how even though they fight, these are his people, which fell utterly flat for me owing to the fact that there’s absolutely no indication that Eichner’s character ever thinks about these people, about non-cis gay queers, when he is not at work. Outside of these scenes at the LGBTQ+ Museum, his world is entirely populated with other cis gays and the occasional hetero ally. With the exception of D’Lo — a trans actor who does a great one man show that I saw a few years back — everyone who shows up in various scenes of partying and hanging out seems to be a cis gay. And from what I remember D’Lo doesn’t have any lines (he’s certainly not a particularly defined character) so to call his onscreen presence trans visibility feels… literally true but not nearly as meaningful as it could be.
And I think it was this marketing of Bros as “for all queers,” as some milestone we should all be rooting for, combined with the fact that it was so clearly a white cis gay man who wanted to tell a story about white cis gay men shoehorning the LBTQs into the story so that he could bully us into feeling grateful and obligated, that really left a bad taste in my mouth. I don’t have a problem with white cis gay men making movies about white cis gay men’s lives — the 1995 HIV rom com Jeffrey is an absolute delight — but if that’s what you want to do, you should own it. You shouldn’t slap a 2D parody of a bisexual who’s played by a gay man into a couple of scenes and tell me that it’s representation I should be grateful for. If you want me to give a shit, you should actually try to, you know, give a shit yourself. Especially when you are making a movie that is being broadly marketed to a straight audience (personally I think it should be illegal for straight people to watch Bros).
And the thing that is particularly funny to me about this presentation of bisexuals as the whiners of the LGBTQ+ community, as petty bitches who exist only to remind you that Lincoln had a wife, is that you literally cannot write the history of LGBTQ+ people without bisexual people, without our incredibly significant accomplishments. It is well known that trans women of color were an integral part of the Stonewall Riots, that Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were there fighting for queer freedom; but did you know that it was Brenda Howard — a bi woman who went on to found the New York Area Bisexual Network — who organized the first Pride March? Did you know that a bi man, Stephen Donaldson, founded the Student Homophile League, the first gay student organization in the US? Bisexuals have always been there, we have always been a major part of queer activism and accomplishments. You just need to actually look for us.
If you wanted to actually write a love letter to the whole entirety of the queer community, there are so many beautiful things you could surface, so many artifacts of lesbian, trans, bi, gay, queer history that you could neatly work into your script — jokes you could make beyond Dot-Marie Jones just wanting a giant sculpture of Jodie Foster (it was Jodie Foster, right?) airborne above a main hall like the blue whale at the American Museum of Natural History. But instead we get this fucking weird and honestly boring movie that feels like a cis white gay man who’s pissy that cis white gay men don’t get to be the default queer avatar anymore, who knows he’s “supposed” to do inclusion but has no idea how to do it. We get this lopsided movie that feels more like an intracommunity hate crime than a celebration of all queers.
But hey, I’m glad that a lot of queer and trans actors got paid to be in the film. There is that.
Also, Bowen Yang is great in the film, really steals the whole thing with his gay trauma coaster bit. Don’t watch Bros, just find that clip (and then watch Fire Island after). And also maybe the sex scene where Billy Eichner puts his fist in Luke MacFarlane’s mouth (or was it vice versa), I thought that was good too.
* Perhaps it feels petty to point that out but Eichner throws so much shade at queer films that dare to cast straight actors in their lead roles that it seems worth acknowledging that his movie was literally made by a straight person?
** Just need to note here that I, personally, find “Was this dead person gay or bi?” to be the most soul crushingly petty fight that the LGBTQ community could get up to. Who gives a shit, the person is dead, they can’t speak for themselves, we know they had same gender attractions and maybe we can just refer to them as queer. But also who cares if queer people existed in history, we exist now and we deserve respect.