When it Comes to Gays, Teen Sex Comedies Are Growing Up

There’s a theory that you can tell more about a society from its “low-brow” pop culture than you can from its high art. If that’s true, there’s not too much that’s more low-brow than the teen sex comedy, movies which are usually celebrations of male promiscuity and debauchery – often with a vague or bittersweet moral tacked on at the end.

What are teen sex comedies saying about gay people?

Surprisingly, the news lately is pretty good. A trio of recent teen sex comedies, Easy A, She’s Out of My League, and I Love You, Beth Cooper, have either included sympathetic gay teen characters, or joked about gay themes in surprisingly progressive or inclusive ways.

Of course, gay folks have always existed in teen sex comedies in some form or another. It’s just that they’ve usually appeared either as brief sight gags to be ridiculed or, far more commonly, as the dreaded off-screen “other,” an unseen symbol of complete rejection and loathing that the main characters valiantly struggle not to be.

In Animal House (1978), for example, losers are called “faggots” and gay jokes abound, and in Porky’s (1982), perhaps the godfather of what we now think of as the modern teen sex comedy, one high school jock tells his physically abusive and horrifically bigoted father, “If being a man means being what you are, I’d rather be queer.”

Not quite the lowest of the low, but almost.

Tim (Cyril O'Reilly) stands up to his despicable father in Porky's

Just One of the Guys (1985) tells the story of a girl who pretends to be a boy. When, in full male drag, she declares herself to the boy she loves and kisses him in the middle of the prom, there’s an audible, disgusted gasp from the other students who think they’re witnessing two boys kissing. Gee, thanks.

Just One of the Guys' cross-dressing Terry (Joyce Hyser) plants one on Rick (Clayton Rohner)