The Agony of "Gay" "Cinema": In & Out
A gay movie for straight people, In & Out is the product of possibly the whitest gay mind imaginable.
In & Out (1997, directed by Frank Oz, a.k.a. the one true voice of Miss Piggy, all pretenders be damned) was on the syllabus for the Queer Cinema seminar I took in college, not because it is queer cinema, but, if I remember correctly, because it isn’t. The professor showed clips from the film—we didn’t watch this one all the way through—to illustrate the difference between films made by queer people, with a queer sensibility in mind, and films made for a mainstream audience about gay people. I think we discussed the ways that Kevin Klein’s performance—and basically all of the film’s comedy—relies on stereotypes about gay men that a straight audience would recognize. I remember the professor qualifying his critiques by telling us that he liked all of the films we were discussing that semester, including In & Out. And yet, I was left with the impression that this movie was cheap heterosexist schlock—gaysploitation, if you will. To the extent I thought of it at all since then, I thought of it as a dated relic from the 90s that wasn’t worth any actual queer person’s time.
I…no longer necessarily think this. I mean, yes, In & Out is very dated. Its anodyne depiction of gayness does rely on broad stereotypes and is neutered beyond all sense. In & Out takes what is a very serious and sad subject—the closet, the corrupting power of compulsory heterosexuality over queer people’s lives, the way fear of rejection by family and community distorts our sense of self from an early age, influencing the choices we make well into adulthood—and turns it into a screwball farce. This is obviously not the ideal way to address these issues, and we certainly would not make a movie like this now. But, to be fair, the discussion of how traumatic it is for queer people to grow up in a homophobic society isn’t something many people were familiar with in the 90s. It’s barely part of mainstream discourse today.
Also, In & Out is the product of the whitest gay mind imaginable. I do not believe there was a single person of color—other than Whoopi Goldberg as herself—in this entire movie and I am unconvinced that anyone involved at any time considered how the experience of being outted might differ for someone who is not a cis white guy.
And yet…I loved this dumb problematic movie! God help me, I giggled quite a bit while also rolling my eyes at its absurdity!
I can’t remember whether, in college, we talked about the fact that In & Out was written by out screenwriter, playwright, and novelist Paul Rudnick and how that might influence our understanding of it. (I’m almost certain we wouldn’t have discussed Scott Rudin, who was one of the movie’s producers.) But having watched it, start-to-finish, for what I’m pretty sure was the first time recently with Rudnick’s involvement in mind, I was struck by the fact that the film is doing something that is probably so familiar to gay men of his and my and maybe every generation: it’s trying to get you to love it. “You” in this context being straight people. It’s trying—and succeeding!—to entertain you so you won’t reject it. It’s using innocuously cheeky humor to convince you that its queerness isn’t a threat to you. Every gay boy who has ever felt like he has to be the funniest, most stylish, most entertaining dinner guest—the most useful, the most indispensable, the best little boy in the world—will recognize that feeling. It’s not a strategy for acceptance that I particularly love, but I get it. I understand where it’s coming from and I’m willing forgive it and appreciate this very funny movie for what it is.
We open on bucolic scenes of quaint small-town America: a lovely fishing dam, some verdant farmland, Mainstreet U.S.A., a picturesque local high school, everything straight out of Norman Rockwell: perfect and peaceful and the kind of place that you would never in a million years expect a gay to be secretly lurking.
Openly straight actor Kevin Klein plays high school English teacher Howard Brackett. Howard wears bowties and rides a bicycle and reads romantic poems to his 30-year-old students—including Lauren Ambrose with an unfortunately severe bob and Shawn Hatosy, who was also in Six Feet Under one time. But these kids aren’t interested in poetry! They just want Howard to tell them all about former student Cameron Drake (a bleached blonde Matt Dillon) who went off to Hollyweird and is now a movie star and is nominated for an Oscar. An important thing to know about this school is that all the boys are really dumb (including Cameron) and all the girls are mostly just crazy about Cameron, which kind of begs the question: How good a teacher is Howard, really?
Meanwhile, in addition to teaching poems and molding the aerated minds of future bleached Oscar nominees, Howard coaches a sport! I’m not 100% sure what sport, but I think it’s just track and not an awesome manly sport like football. Still, Howard is beloved by jocks and girls alike—which are the two genders of students at this school—and to celebrate his imminent wedding to fellow teacher Joan Cusack, all his teenage male athletes douse him with beer that they somehow obtained and brought to school, because (white) boys will be boys and nobody cares in Indiana I guess? I assume all of these dummies grew up to become Trump voters.
Later, Howard and his mother Debbie Reynolds and Joan Cusack are all picking out Joan’s wedding dress. Joan, whose family is entirely dead so we don’t have to think about them, exposits that she thought she would never get married because she used to be fat and why would anyone ever wed themselves to a fat lady? But luckily she got inspired by Richard Simmons and now she can fit into her wedding dress and so is worthy of the chaste love of a bowtie-wearing, bicycle pedaling, track-coaching high school English teacher. It’s a tough look for poor dear sweet old Joan, and there’s for sure a lot of casual gay misogyny wrapped up in this character. But Cusack was nominated for an Oscar—an actual one in real life—for this role, so I guess it’s fine!
So, then I guess it’s that weekend and at Howard and Joan’s…rehearsal dinner? engagement party? What is this function?...Howard gives a speech in which he reminds everyone that he vowed never to get married unless Cameron Drake got nominated for an Oscar. Which should make everyone else wonder, like, why is he so wrapped up in this kid’s career? I mean, I guess it is impressive and historic when someone from your hometown gets famous, but still. If I were these townspeople, I’d be like, “It’s really weird that you’re making major life decisions based on the vagaries of the career of someone who you possibly haven’t been in touch with since he was a teenager.”
That night is the Oscars and the whole town is watching to see if Cameron wins Best Acting for the movie he was in about a homogay army man. Howard and Joan are just watching together at home in their cardigans, but Debbie Reynolds is having a full-on OSCAR PARTY with popcorn and score sheets and a ton of nanas and aunties watching together! It looks like so much fun! Remember when the Oscars were fun, before W*ll Sm*th ruined them and made them just as soul-suckingly depressing as everything else in the world? Sigh.
During the Oscars red carpet pre-show, entertainment reporter Peter Malloy (Tom fucking Selleck, who is bravely moustache-less for this brave role!) is interviewing Whoopi Goldberg but shoves her right into a pit of snakes when Cameron shows up with his bored girlfriend, 90s supermodel Shalom Harlow who is literally always smoking cigarettes. She’s still smoking when, seconds later, they are inside the Oscars and Glenn Close is announcing the nominees for Best Man In A Moving Picture. Then for some reason we see a montage of clips from Cameron’s movie, To Serve and Protect, in which his character is convicted of gayness because he owns a cherished video cassette of Beaches and is kicked out of the army by Cher’s dad from Clueless. Then Glenn Close reads all the other nominees which are all savage reads:
Paul Newman for Coot
Clint Eastwood for Codger
Michael Douglas for Primary Urges
Steven Segal for Snowball in Hell
But it’s Cameron who is the winner of the Oscar for Best Performance of Manhood, and as Glenn Close hands him the little gold man, part of me wishes I could go back in time and tell this fictional version of her to hang onto that Oscar for herself because it may be the only one she ever gets, and thus maybe prevent Hillbilly Elegy from happening in the In & Out timeline.
During his acceptance speech—which along with this whole movie is apparently inspired by Tom Hanks’s when he won in 1994 for Philadelphia—Cameron thanks “all the gay soldiers and sailors and other guys and women who defend this country to keep us free, but can’t date.” Then he drops this gaybomb: “Maybe I should thank someone else. Someone who’s really been there, someone who taught me a lot about poetry and Shakespeare. Someone who’s just an overall great guy and a great teacher. To Howard Brackett from Greenleaf, Indiana!”
Hooray! Howard and Joan are thrilled!
“AND HE’S GAY!” Cameron adds.
And everyone in Greenleaf makes this face:
Joan is like “What’s he talking about???” And at the very same moment Howard’s parents, Wilford Brimley and Debbie Reynolds, arrive because I guess they live next door and they too would like some answers please! Howard assures them he’s NOT GAY, and considers suing Cameron, which Wilford Brimley is all for. “Get that Johnnie Cochran, not that woman,” he advises because this is 1997 and The People vs. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story is just a twinkle in Ryan Murphy’s gay eye so everyone still hates Marsha Clark and her hair.
Meanwhile, Debbie Reynolds is on top of the emotional labor: “Howard, we want you to straightly know that you are our straight son and we’ll always love you, but not in a gay way, whether you’re straight, like you are, or gay, as you definitely are not and never will be, or do something that is the equivalent of being gay like massacre people in a bank—AS LONG AS YOU GET OPPOSITE-SEX MARRIED!” Apparently, Debbie Reynolds is addicted to wedding planning! And with that, she and Wilford Brimley leave taking Joan with them—because as a healthy non-religious straight couple Howard and Joan obviously don’t live together or do sex upon each other.
The next day everything is BANANAS due to the entire town being fully shook and unable to cope with the mere possibility of a gay in their midst. The Gay Agenda is obviously already taking over because “Macho Man” is the song that wakes Howard up on his clock radio! Also, The Media has descended upon Greenleaf because Howard is the biggest story in the history of news, and they have important questions for him like: “Do you know Ellen?” and “Should gays be allowed to handle fresh produce?”
Meanwhile, the whole school is in turmoil. Howard’s students are shocked and confused, but he assures them that he is not gay because he is marrying a lady in three days. (Three days from the day after the Oscars; keep this in mind, because it’s gonna come up later.) They ponder why Cameron Drake might have mistaken straight Mr. Brackett for a gay-wad, and determine that it is because of how clean and smart and gay he seems. Also, The Media is harassing poor Principal Bob Newhart.
Later in the boys’ lockerroom, the 40-year-old teens on the track team are discussing gay sex: “It’s the human body. It’s divided up into in-holes and out-holes. And stuff is supposed to go in the in-holes and come out the out-holes. But gay guys, they, like, put stuff in the out-holes.”
Anal sex. They are talking about anal sex. But then there is some confusion about the mouth hole, which is an in-hole due to eating, but also sometimes you barf making it an out-hole which is wrong because you are sick. And the whole time I’m like, IS NO ONE GOING TO MAKE A BLOWJOB JOKE? But no one has time to make a hilarious blowjob joke—not even me, and mine would have been the most hilarious!—because suddenly Mr. Brackett is there and all the pretty much fully-clothed 40-year-old teen boys are afraid he is going to look at their inexplicable dad bods with lust in his heart. Howard laughs this off, but he’s clearly bummed by this development in his relationship with his students.
Clean shaven entertainment reporter Tom Selleck is in town with the rest of The Media and that night he stalks Howard to the local diner where he is having dinner alone, which probably has definitely nothing to do with the feelings of alienation that have been eating him alive for his entire life because of the secret that he’s for sure not too afraid to admit even to himself. So, Tom Selleck is like, “I work for Network and I’m just gonna stick around town until you agree to tell me your gay story.” Apparently, Network wants to turn Tom Selleck blonde because his ratings are no good, and only Howard’s gay story can save him. “This story has everything,” Tom Selleck insists, doing jazz hands at Howard, “Sex, a small town, a movie star! Howard Brackett: In and Out!” And we all take a shot because he said the name of the movie in the movie! Also, he is wearing the worst tie! I hate it so much!
Additionally also: why did the 90s want all men to bleach their hair?
After this very unsettling encounter, Howard goes directly to his bachelor party, determined to be a man with his brother and the town’s menfolk by smoking cigars and I guess doing stuff to a blow-up doll and watching these specific pornos: “Little Oral Annie,” “Traci Lords?”
YIKES. Does…Howard think that heterosexual men are all…pedophiles?
Luckily, in addition to the cigars and blow-up doll and stack of Playboys, the menfolk have brought Howard’s favorite movie: Funny Girl. WHAT? Howard is like, “No! Not a gross gay Barbara Streisand musical for gays! Not at my baccalaureate soirée!” And all the townsbros get it and suggest other movies they can all watch, like Yentl or A Star is Born, which are funny because those are also Barbara Streisand movies, which means gayness.
Howard is just about to storm out when one of the bros is like, “Yentl sucks!” and then they get into manly fisticuffs about it, and that scene is over.
Later, on TV, Jay Leno makes a joke about Michael Jackson marrying Howard, and that is just a whole vortex of gross that I don’t want to deal with.
Moving on, Tom Selleck spends the next few days bald facedly (because no moustache) interviewing everyone in town about whether they think Howard will actually get married on Sunday. (Sunday. Three days after the day after the Oscars. Which would have happened on a Monday night in late March.) And everyone is like, “Yes, our beloved straight friend Howard is 100% getting opposite-sex married to a lady no doubt about it for sure,” through clenched teeth, just white knuckling their way through this existential crisis.
Also: graduation is coming up on Monday. (The day after Howard’s wedding. Which is on Sunday, three days after the 68th Academy Awards, which happened on a Monday night in late March. WHAT IS TIME IN THIS MOVIE???) We find this out because Principal Bob Newhart pulls Howard into his office to not-so-subtly threaten his job.
“Howard, do you enjoy teaching?”
And Howard is like, “No, it is a truly thankless occupation for which I am paid basically poverty wages and endure ridicule and threats of physical violence at the hands of disgusting hormonal monsters every single day. I spend my life watching the gradual degradation of the American mind through the glazed eyes of each successive graduating class and somehow I am not yet dead enough inside to not lie awake each night in terror of the hellish future these little morons will build.”
Lol. JK! He’s very sincerely like, “I love teaching, it’s my life.” And Bob Newhart basically implies that if Howard doesn’t get opposite-sex married, he will be fired. Which feels like it should play a lot more seriously than it does. But this is Greenleaf where homophobia is as cute and quaint as everything else!
Freaking out, Howard, who is not Catholic, goes to confession to get advice on what to do from a priest. Which…I grew up Catholic and am now a full-blown atheist and only ever went to confession, like, maybe once or twice, and I’m still pretty sure advice is not what confession is for. Anyway, he admits that he and Joan have never had straight sex and the priest is like, “If you’re not a homogay then you should go and perform premarital sex with your woman fiancé directly!”
So, Joan Cusack is at home sweating to her oldies (In the middle of the day? Shouldn’t she be at school teaching? What day of the week is this???) when Howard bursts in to make love to her. And she’s…kinda into it. But also, he is acting fully nuts, so she’s like, “Listen, you need to cool it! I trust you, we’re getting married! Right? Right, Howard? I didn’t transform my body and self-image entirely in relation to your interest in me only to have all of that shattered by YOU, did I? Because if you do this to me I will eat myself to death, and it will be all YOUR fault and no one else’s!”
And Howard is like, “Eeeeeeeeehhhhhh…” and runs away again. And then he’s almost run over by Tom Selleck’s Ford Taurus! So, he’s yelling at Tom Selleck about how his life is ruined, and Tom Selleck is like, “Jesus, you’re such a cute spaze,” and he kisses Howard on the mouth with his smooth hairless face! Because Tom Selleck is gay! And he lays Howard gently down in the tall grass by the side of this pond or whatever and they lovingly do gay stuff with their wrong holes.
Ugh! Except none of that happens. Tom Selleck basically just invents It Gets Better on the fly and tells Howard how coming out is actually no big deal and everyone in his life was fine with it. “Howard, everyone surprised me, once I let them, once I trusted them.”
Um…excuse me, In & Out? So, you’re saying that the fear of rejection and potential homophobic violence is…all in our heads? That we gays have actually just built our own closets because we’re too cowardly to simply be honest about ourselves and trust a homophobic society to accept us? That it’s our fault??? See, this is what I mean when I say that this is a very gay movie made so that straight people can feel good about themselves. BLECH! Moving on…
Debbie Reynolds and Wilford Brimley are driving by with the wedding cake and randomly invite Tom Selleck to the ceremony, like normal people do. And Howard jumps back on his gay bike and gayly bikes home, where he puts on his best Michael Tolliver from Tales of the City costume and listens to his secret audiobook about how to be a MAN.
These are the rules of being a man:
Stand straight and tall
Untuck one side of shirt for no reason
Move your testicles around with hand
Never dance
At this point the tape starts tantalizingly playing homosexual anthem “I Will Survive” to test Howard’s masculine fortitude. But he can’t help it! He has to dance! And it’s awesome because he looks like he’s having the most fun anyone in the world has ever had in their life! And we should all just put on our favorite gay song and have a wild micro dance party real quick!
That was fun, right?! Ok, so having failed the ultimate test of heterosexuality, Howard proceeds to the church for his wedding. Because now it is Wedding Day, also known as “Sunday,” I guess!
Joan Cusack is feeling like the prettiest princes that ever there was. Meanwhile, Howard is making this insane face:
You can just see the last delicate threads of his carefully woven web of denial and self-delusion snapping in real time! And then when the minister does the vows, Joan is like, “I do,” but Howard is like, “I’m gay!” And honestly, there’s something a little…weird? Icky?...about openly heterosexual actor Kevin Klein turning and soulfully delivering that line to the whole congregation, including Howard’s parents. It’s like, he has kinda nailed all the funny, stereotypical stuff without being too campy or offensive. But in this moment, when Howard Brackett is like, “I’m gay,” I’m like, “No, Kevin Klein, you are not!”
Anyway, everyone is gasping and Joan Cusack is humiliated and runs away. And Howard runs after her apologizing and self-flagellating in this way that, again, fundamentally misrepresents who is really to blame for all of this, i.e. a homophobic society that forces gay people to deny who they are and create elaborate fictions that eat away at them, resulting in risky behaviors and self-harm before ultimately crumbling under their own mental strain, causing a lot of collateral damage along the way. Collateral damage like poor dear sad old insecure Joan, who screams “Fuck Barbara Streisand,” punches Howard, and fleas!
Then Tom Selleck finds Howard outside and is like, “Congratulations, I got it all on TV camera!” Then Howard punches him and fleas!
Meanwhile, in Hollyweird, Cameron Drake sees Tom Selleck’s news report about the wedding and decides he has to go to Greenleaf to save the day.
Back in Greenleaf, the teens are all trying to make sense of the fact that their beloved teacher who they all suspected was gay is actually gay. And at the church, Debbie Reynolds and all the other old ladies take Howard’s cue and start telling all their deep dark secrets about their Rice Krispie treat recipes and their husbands’ testicles, and they all have a nice laugh. And Wilford Brimley finds Howard at home and is like, “Are you going to have an operation?” Which is transphobic. And then, he’s like, “Will you be going into show business?” Which Howard should probably do because now he is fired from teaching poems. But Wilford Brimley convinces him to go to graduation (TOMORROW, durring what I assume is still the month of March!) anyway. And before he leaves he’s like, “Did Barbara Streisand do something to you?” And I really wonder whether Barbara Streisand has seen this movie and if so, what she thinks of it.
That night, Joan Cusack, still in her wedding dress, is wolfing down unshelled peanuts and drinking at a bar. Tom Selleck happens to be there getting drunk too for some reason and she tries to get him to fuck her. Oops, but he’s gay too, which pushes her fragile mind over the edge and she runs into the street where she is almost run over by Cameron Drake! “I’m a grinch! I’m a jinx!” she wails, but what even does that mean??? Then Cameron, looking for all the world like a gay who is addicted to meth, recognizes her and admits that he always had the hots for her, EVEN WHEN SHE WAS FAT! “Skinny girls can be so annoying sometimes,” he says, which is also gross and misogynist, but whatever. So, they quote Romeo and Juliet at each other and then have a slow dance in the middle of the road and now they are in love. Because it is definitely not weird for a female teacher to have romance with a studly former student.
Graduation day is finally here and the whole town is gathered, even Howard’s parents and brother for some reason. Principal Bob Newhart reminds everyone of the Greenleaf High School motto, which translates to “Study, learn, leave,” which is just such a great little throw-away joke and made me chuckle, like basically everything Bob Newhart does in this movie. The man was a goddamn treasure and I really really hope there’s nothing about him I don’t know that would force me to rethink that!
Ok, so just as Bob Newhart is naming some rando Teacher of the Year, Cameron Drake bursts in and is like, “Hey! Mr. Brackett is the best teacher!”
But Bob Newhart and Debroah Rush are like, “No, sorry, Mr. Brackett is fired now due to gayness.” And everyone is shocked at this VERY COMMON INJUSTICE WHICH WAS FULLY LEGAL UNTIL LITERALLY 2020 AND IS BASICALLY A THING AGAIN IN FLORIDA.
“Oh, so you think Mr. Brackett is going to be a bad gay influence on all the students?” Cameron asks. And it was at this point that I realized that this movie has assumed all along that none of the students could possibly also be gay. Because, as everyone knows, when it comes to small town gays, THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE. But literally just as I was thinking this, Animal Kingdom star Shawn Hatosy jumps up and is like, “I’m gay!” And for like five seconds I was really moved, like really poignantly moved.
Except, then one of the girls jumps up and is like “I’m gay!” And then Lauren Ambrose does and they’re doing a Spartacus. Which is very dumb and a bummer, but, you know, whatever. The whole auditorium says they’re gay too and the music swells, and everyone cheers and Cameron takes out his Oscar and gives it to Howard, which, like, what is happening? THAT OSCAR BELONGS TO GLENN CLOSE AND YOU ALL KNOW IT!
So, next it’s sometime later—probably Sunday, the following day!—and Howard and Tom Selleck are adjusting each other’s bowties. What is happening? Are they getting married? How much time has actually passed? Did they fall in love and are now fulfilling Debbie Reynolds’s fondest wish for her son to have a wedding?
Ugh, no! It’s Howard’s parents renewing their vows, which feels like a really weird fake-out that I cannot decipher. Like, is this a commentary on the fact that gay-sex marriage was punishable by death in the late 90s? Or could Paramount Pictures simply not bring itself to commit the spectacle of two men getting married to film and forcing all of straight America to see it? Either way, I hate this cowardly ending. Instead of having the credits roll over the whole town dancing to “Macho Man” at the vow-renewal reception, they really should have ended with Tom and Howard making tender gay love to each other back by that pond from before. Oh well!