I bet you’re all super psyched that I’m writing essays about D-coms two weeks in a row. Can’t stop me, I’m doing it. It’s relevant to Pride Month, ’cause quoth last week:
one of the co-writers as much as said that Lela is into Mack, like in a gay way
Obviously in the middle of writing our essay last week, drift partner and I rewatched the Teen Beach duology, because we needed to cleanse our souls after HSM3 and also just because these movies are both really good and really gay*.
But they’re also gay* in a really interesting way, both because of the constraints of the in-universe genre (1960s movie) and the actual genre (D-com). Obviously, there were queer people in the 1960s. There were even queer celebrities (Sal Mineo, Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Tallulah Bankhead, Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, etcetera, most of whom were very closeted). But homophobia was everywhere and Hollywood was bound by the Hays Code. Quoth Wikipedia:
While the code did not explicitly state that depictions of homosexuality were against the code, the code barred the depiction of any kind of sexual perversion or deviance, which homosexuality fell under at the time.[7] Gay characters on screen also came to be represented as villains or victims who commit crimes due to their homosexuality.[8] Per the production code these homosexual villains would have to be punished by the law in order to coincide with the code’s rule stating that films could not place crime above law.
In short, if the movie Wet Side Story, the in-story teen beach movie of Teen Beach Movie, had been made in the 1960s, there’s basically no way that the writers would have even implicitly made any characters gay*. Maybe the film’s “villain” Les Camembert (Steve Valentine), who is sort of flamboyant in that “evil businessman” kind of way, but he’s obviously punished, at least implicitly.
There are two things to consider, though: sometimes when actors are queer, you can kind of tell even if they’re playing straight, and sometimes straight writers, especially straight writers who have stereotyped and/or problematic opinions of queer people, write queer characters without actually noticing it. Queer audiences pick up on things that maybe aren’t technically there and embrace them because queer audiences see things that straight audiences don’t; straight audiences, even now, often don’t grasp queer concepts because they’re portrayed in a different (often subtler) way.
There’s also the metatextual read that while the characters in Wet Side Story may be queer, they themselves may not realize it because they’re from a time that stereotypes and problematizes queer people. It’s only after interacting with the modern real world (via Mack [Maia Mitchell] and Brady [Ross Lynch]) that Lela (Grace Phipps, now known professionally as Gracie Gillam) unlocks her true (queer) potential. This is what I want to analyze for you.
Full story here.