BEAR CITY (2010) - I actually watched this fairly recently but forgot to post it - any other gay romcoms I’ve seen predated this thread, which I guess by now is such a storehouse of dark heterosexual energy that it’s easy to forget any other kind exists. Nevertheless this one is definitely a romcom and I would say the gay ones I’ve watched primarily differ from their straight counterparts in the following ways:
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Soundtracked pop songs which are obviously by some guy the director knows rather than being stock music, a pleasing effect
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More explicit about actual sex than your average eg Julia Roberts film
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All romcoms take place in a kind of utopia where the immediate problems of survival are treated as secondary to the more interesting problem of love and desire. And the depiction of that utopia feels a bit more selfconscious and charged when the utopia itself is “a world exclusively comprised of burly gay men who know and like each other” rather than “a world where it’s possible to live in NYC penthouse on the strength of a wordpress site called cookerytips dot com”.
For the third of these reasons most of the gay romcoms I’ve watched tend to shy away from dramatic coming out narratives. However!! They had to structure this movie somehow and the way they do so is quite interesting - “being into bears” is explicitly framed and described as a kind of coming out 2, or gay squared. Our POV character is a young, skinny, out guy who starts the movie wracked with anxiety that his tastes will be discovered by his roommate, another young, skinny, out guy except one who acts just like the oddly sexless and flamboyant gay friend from straight romantic comedies (a weird thing about gay squared is that at points it seems to wrap back around to regular homophobia…??). Anyway as soon as the roommate leaves he’s back on the (now sadly deceased?) “bearotic dot com”, account name boy4fur21. The camera gives us a good view of all the different options and features on this website incl the ability to filter by “Average Bear”/“Muscle Bear”/“Bear Cub”/“Chubby Bear”/“Daddy Bear” and more. Incidentally this website is one of the many bear-themed businesses listed as sponsors of the movie and so at times the movie itself sort of feels like a pitch for a whole extended universe of bear events and products.
Anyway after a while of standing mournfully across the street from a bear bar our hero eventually musters the courage to go in and get introduced to a bunch of characters who are I’m sorry to say universally more interesting than he is. My personal favourite was Michael, the biggest bear of all who has a storyline about potentially getting a stomach band to seem more employable… The others regard this as a form of self betrayal if it’s done for cosmetic rather than for health purposes… Did I tear up just a little when after fighting about this, Michael’s boyfriend giving him a bag of ice for his bad knee at a cookout was what convinced him not to get the surgery? Well, who can say… I would say that having this character and all the other husky guys in the movie portrayed as effortlessly both confident AND sexy was probably the best thing about the film, and also why it feels like such a weird own goal to have everything revolve around the far blander main character (who in turn has to explain it all to the roommate, whose job in the movie is to essentially be Twink Goofus).
The main love interest also feels sorta bland although in fairness they do introduce him whipping out a collection of custom metal sounding rods at the bear-only coffee shop. He bonds with the protagonist by giving him tips on how to bowl but the real turning point comes when the hero goes through an elaborate shopping sequence for, yes, bear-themed merchandise and comes out the other side looking like… well I guess the main way I’d describe it would be “grand theft auto npc”. This is enough to get the other guy’s attention but will it be enough to make him stop giving in to the bears-only peer pressure of his muscular friend group? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out, and to check out the sponsors at the end. Bob Mould is in there!
Finally, some videogame things:
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At one point we see someone playing one of those videogames that looks to have been made up just for somebody to pretend to play in a movie; but in fact, it’s 2007’s “Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia”, and just looks like that.
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Prior to the movie, “Bear City Dot Com” appears to have been the website of a Hong Kong lightgun company.
