The (Bad) Taste Test: Bros, Billy Eichner, and What Queer Art Can Be
Queer history is everywhere in Bros, Billy Eichner’s gay romcom. As Eichner himself has stressed throughout his promotion for the film - a strategy that we can generously call combative - the film itself has, in a way, made history. It’s the first major studio film of its kind; with a queer creative team, and queer cast - the latter of which (obviously) features Eichner himself, alongside TS Maddison, Jim Rash, Luke Macfarlane, and more.
This, on paper, is a good thing. Seeing studios embrace queer stories - especially those that go out of there way to wear queerness on their sleeves as explicitly as possible in the ways that Bros does; from Grindr hookups to gay cowboys in movies - ought to be a positive thing. It ought to be a moment where queer stories, and queer characters, are simply able to exist. But Bros doesn’t think so.
Bobby (Eichner) is a podcast host with an opinion on everything. He’s constantly oscillating between combative and self-loathing, his voice one note away from breaking into an all-too-familiar scream. And in the film’s opening scene, Bobby regales his rapt live audience with the meeting he had with a studio executive, when he was asked to write a gay romantic comedy. In the meeting, Bobby says that an executive wanted him to write a romcom that shows gay and straight people are basically the same, a film that would live by the “love is love” maxim, one that Bobby aggressively rejects. And while there are historical and contemporary divides that make “love is love” (something always said by well-meaning straight people) feel hollow, there’s a deep irony to the fact that Bros is very much the film that Bobby didn’t want to write. A traditional, slightly conservative romantic comedy, but one that happens to have a queer cast instead of a straight one. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
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The problem is how much Bros - and Eichner on Twitter - bends over backwards to stress its own historical importance. If Bros were on Grindr, its bio would have to mention flexibility, given how often the film finds itself up its own ass. One of the things that Bobby - and the film - constantly stress is that these stories have never been told before; that queer people have existed in silence while being erased from history. All this while Bobby literally runs a queer museum that features the images and legacies of queer figures including Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and even relative queer history deep cuts like Claude Cahun. In one of the museum rooms, these faces - among others - appear in a montage together, but an unanswered question lingers in the spaces between these historical figures: what is this montage for? Is it a way for the film to gesture towards understanding the legacy of queer histories (both explicit and erased) that have led it here?
If the answer to that question is yes, then Bros itself is unable to exist in the form that Eichner wants it to - it can’t be some rallying cry shouting queer stories from the rooftops, because these stories have always been told, and would continue to be told with or without Billy Eichner’s contribution, no matter how self-congratulatory he or the film want to be. Bobby even wins a “white cis gay man of the year” award at a charity gala!
What makes Bros so frustrating is that, ironically, when it decides to be less obnoxious in its queerness and (self) importance, its actually a pretty good movie. The jokes land, some of the performances are good - at this point I’ve accepted Eichner will never be a taste that I can swallow easily - and some of it is really charming. There’s a scene where Bobby and not-quite-boyfriend Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) dance together on the beach in Provincetown that feels legitimately moving. But Eichner, like his avatar Bobby, seems unable to get out of his own way. On their first (not) date, Bobby and Aaron go to see a movie about tortured gay cowboys, which Bobby calls a great way for straight actors to win Oscars. But it also presents the image of Bobby - a man who aggressively prides himself on his knowledge of queer history - as someone who seems to think that these are the only queer films that exist. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two: Brokeback Mountain and The Power of the Dog. Two films, incidentally, that are better than Bros.
While Bros might be a frustrating movie - effective as a romantic comedy, insufferable as a poor and patchy history lesson - Eichner’s response to its release has been even more baffling. When the film opened to poor box office numbers in the US, he claimed that “straight people didn’t go to see it.” The laughter and applause at the jokes in the screening I was at - and to be fair the joke about Caitlyn Jenner as a trans terrorist is a good one - made me wonder if there might have been something to it. But the more Bros went on, the more it tried to distance itself from cliche queer media only to embrace it later on, and the more its constant pleas to understand history were undermined by its own unwillingness to do just that, I wondered who the film was for, and what it - or any queer art - was allowed to be.
Eichner has gone on the record many times stressing the idea that to see Bros is some kind of political act; that a ticket stub is like crossing a box in a voting booth. At this year’s video music awards, Eichner said to his captive audience “I need you all here in theatres on Sept. 30. We need to show all the homophobes like Clarence Thomas and all the homophobes on the Supreme Court that we want gay love stories and we support LGBTQ people. And we are not letting them drag us back into the last century, because they are the past, and Bros is the future!”
“But queer art has never needed to go through an Important era in order for queer people to find and love it.”
Bros isn’t the future and it doesn’t have to be. The film - which, I feel the need to continue stressing, is fine! I’ve been movies that are way worse, gay and straight, this year. There’s nothing wrong with queer art acknowledging the history that created it - ironically one of the best jokes in the film is about the intergenerational difference of growing up queer: “we had AIDS and they had Glee” - but Bros seems more interested in lip service and giving Bobby something to scream about than it does actually engaging in a dialogue with the things that came before it, simply assuming that if its protagonist shouts loud enough for two hours that’ll make up for the decades, centuries, of silence that Bros seems to force onto people like Baldwin, Turing, Woolf, and more.
Eichner’s film asks a lot of uncomfortable questions, although none of them come through in the text of the film - instead he seems to be forcing audiences to ask what they want their queer art to be, while insisting that there’s only correct answer: that it needs to be Important, and wear that Importance on its rainbow sleeves in order to make people sit up and take notice. But queer art has never needed to go through an Important era in order for queer people to find and love it. In the end, Billy has done what Bobby never wanted to do, and made a gay romcom - because in the end, this is Gay rather than Queer - for straight people.
Words: Sam Moore
