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Since queer characters are at present put on the middle of many extra tales than they was, it’s most likely no shock that many of the makes an attempt to revive the Gay Best Friend are interval items — together with “And Just Like That … ,” which, for all of its up to date inclusiveness (there are nonwhite and nonstraight “Sex and the City” girls now!), nonetheless has one Manolo Blahnik planted firmly within the late ’90s. In the second season, Anthony is granted a boyfriend, a good-looking, candy, literary, affectionate, prodigiously endowed Italian poet a long time youthful (truthfully, at the same time as want success, it’s lots). It feels just like the writers, afraid that that standing of Gay Best Friend is now fatally missing in dignity, determined they wanted to show Anthony right into a alternative Samantha Jones (after Kim Cattrall, the actress who performed the character, refused to rejoin the reboot). But you possibly can nonetheless really feel the place their hearts are — with Anthony when he’s at lunch with the women, saying issues like “The universe is a bitch!” or sitting at house alone, desperately ready for one in all them to name and invite him to be a plus-one to the Met Gala. That’s who they, and we, need him to be. And “The Gilded Age,” which wrangled itself a 3rd season partially by unexpectedly turning into a kitschy hit amongst homosexual males, can be striving to have it each methods. The present’s creator, Julian Fellowes, lets himself have grand enjoyable with Nathan Lane because the society string-puller Ward McAllister, utilizing his lubricious drawl and insinuating gleam to map out social methods with the women, however he can’t deliver himself to make the character formally homosexual (though Lane, as all the time, is aware of precisely tips on how to subtextualize what he’s been given). It’s way more pleasurable than the present’s official homosexual story line, a boring, earnest B plot a few character not having the ability to stay his reality (yeah, it was 1883, we get it).
What’s nonetheless lacking, although — and what’s onerous to image — is the Gay Best Friend in 2024. What does he seem like, and what does he need? Nobody appears capable of determine if he’s regressive, or apparently retro or so politically incorrect that his arrival would rely as subversive … and due to this fact very appropriate. This is an period of fixed mandated affirmation and, in homosexual popular culture (truthfully, in all popular culture), that’s continuously shorthanded as “You’re a star, child!” You’ll hear that line usually on essentially the most venerable of all homosexual TV sequence, “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” now in its sixteenth season, which might generally resemble a gaggle remedy assembly wherein it’s all the time all people’s flip to speak, to narrativize their lives because the triumphant surmounting of exhaustively enumerated adversities. The concept that any of Ru’s queens would see themselves as mere ladies-in-waiting is anathema to the premise, and to a lot of present homosexual tradition; it’s a world wherein also-rans are instantly rebranded as all-stars, then introduced again for extra showcasing. In that context, the celebration of a homosexual character as marginal — the factor all of us fought very onerous to not be handled as — feels so unthinkable that possibly it may now qualify as an attention-grabbing new taste; a lot of popular culture nonetheless excludes homosexual males totally that sticking us the place we not belong would possibly qualify as daring.
