The year was 1999 and as congratulations for my group’s project getting the highest score in the class, our teacher invited us to have lunch in her room for a week to watch a movie. We chose the Tim Allen/Sam Huntington flick “Jungle 2 Jungle,” which includes a character played by a young Leelee Sobieski. As a 9-year-old, Sobieski was my first celebrity crush, and I accidentally mentioned that I had recently seen “Never Been Kissed” and that “she’s so pretty” in the movie. One of the kids in my group was also the class bully, and he wasted no time pouncing on this slip-up. “Are you a d**e or something?” It wouldn’t be the last time he’d call me that, nor would he be the only one to do it. After years of therapy — I’ll fully admit that my years of hypersexual behavior with men in my teens and early 20s are directly related to being terrified that people would know the truth: he was right.
I can only speak for myself, my lived experiences, and the identity intersections that I inhabit, but the 1990s and 2000s were a pretty atrocious time to be perceived as gay, let alone living openly as such. Of course, it’s still Not Great today, but the casualness, frequency, and social permissiveness of blatant bigotry was rampant. And it wasn’t just gay people. Anyone who was marginalized in some way was dodging microaggressions and straight-up aggression on the daily. Hell, there was an entire ad campaign launched in 2008 called “Think Before You Speak” urging people not to say “gay” when they mean “stupid” or “bad.” Like, colloquial homophobia was so pervasive that they hired Hilary Duff to star in commercials to tell people to tell people to knock it off.
This is why it’s so weird to me that despite our current obsession with making movies set in the late ’80s, 1990s, and early 2000s … the attitudes of the time period are being defanged to the point of revisionist history.