At a Virgin gym, I saw a "No paparazzi!" sign, again presumably because if you're a paparazzo, a sign would be enough to deter you from your mission. If it hadn't been for that sign, I'd have been hawking (yes, that word again, it means bringing up phlegm) and scything through my undergrowth with great enthusiasm. "No spitting, no shaving" has been my favourite to date (at Tooting Leisure Centre, for completists). The signs pool management need to put up in changing rooms usually give you an idea of the kind of thing patrons would be up to, if they could. And having once got changed out of a wetsuit in a minibus with nine other people I hardly knew after a swim in a glacial lake in freezing rain, you'd imagine I'd be loth to moan about basic facilities. I've been around long enough to see "progress" that sometimes doesn't feel like that. I've also swum where there were no changing rooms – it's the downside to "wild" swimming (or upside when you consider the state of some of them). “Everywhere you look someone’s omnisexual or transitioning,” says a sassy-straight-sidekick in Alex Strangelove.I 've been to many changing rooms in my long and (ahem) illustrious swimming life I hope I have seen the worst and suspect I'll never see the best.
In both cases, letting the gay hero thrive relies on an idealized-even parodic-progressive utopia. Shortly after that film’s release came the Netflix original Alex Strangelove, a livelier, raunchier, and more insightful attempt to retrofit the high-school comedy for a coming-out story. The intolerance around Simon is light and incidental mostly, he gets to look for love at the same house parties and county fairs as all his friends do. The appeal of the lightweight Love, Simon, though, was in imagining that a gay kid might fall comfortably into a familiar coming-of-age groove: occasionally mortifying, but never actually traumatic. Last year’s absorbing indie drama Beach Rats, for example, portrayed a closeted Brooklyn bro who (spoiler alert) helps his friends mug a guy he meets on a hookup site. This dynamic, of the bullied becoming the bully, is a common one on-screen. In Moonlight, too, the protagonist, Chiron, shrinks himself because of the ever present threat of violence-a threat he eventually pays forward by brutally beating a classmate. The Miseducation of Cameron Post and Boy Erased literalize the way that homophobia can rip people away from the traditional vision of teenagerdom-the backseat make outs, the backwoods keggers-and send them on drab reprogramming missions in which the kids end up policing and punishing themselves. The pulp danger in those films could be seen as almost a fever-dream inversion of the real-world peril facing LGBTQ people. all about the phenomenon of the “gay best friend.” Some female protagonists have flirted with queerness, but many of them merely as part of a larger exploration of delinquency see the deadly troublemakers of Peter Jackson’s 1994 feature, Heavenly Creatures, or of the 1998 thriller Wild Things. Think of Damian in Mean Girls or Blaine in Cruel Intentions: sassy sidekicks so hilarious, and also such clichés, that there was a 2013 comedy called G.B.F.
And as supporting players, they’re allowed to be rowdy rather than just prettily pensive. Gay kids have long shown up in mainstream high-school comedy, just not as stars. Of course, that vision is wider than just the five recent films I wrote about. The rambunctious experience of puberty so familiar in film history-from Grease to Sixteen Candles to Lady Bird-has so far not been central to Hollywood’s vision of the queer coming of age. In content and style, these works vary widely, but they share a somewhat reserved, cautious tone as they portray kids coming to understand their homosexuality. In this month’s issue of The Atlantic, I wrote about the proliferation of gay teens in recent, widely seen movies: the hit rom-com Love, Simon, the buzzy conversion-therapy dramas Boy Erased and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, and the Best Picture nominee Call Me by Your Name and winner Moonlight. It’s happening in cinema, too-though the films hardly feel like celebrations of liberation. On TV, shows like Riverdale have been extending the work of Glee to make stories about, say, girls asking girls to homecoming into no big deal. Rising stars like Kiyoko, Troye Sivan, and Kim Petras have sung of flighty first love through an LGBTQ lens. On this past New Year’s Day, the musician Hayley Kiyoko christened the year to come as “20gayteen.” Her meaning: Queer kids were about to take over pop culture.