Gay Sex The Musical The Show The Experience - what the sex scenes in 'All Of Us Strangers' and 'Red, White & Royal Blue' tell us about queer fantasy
I watched All Of Us Strangers (2023) and Red, White & Royal Blue (2023), two films both alike in gay-ity, and that’s pretty much where the similarity ends.
If queer sex scenes are finally commonly occurring in mainstream cinema, what does that do to queer intimacy on screen? Yes, I'm horny, but what is the cultural cost? I watched All Of Us Strangers (2023) and Red, White & Royal Blue (2023), two films both alike in gay-ity, and that’s pretty much where the similarity ends. They both:
Came Out 💅🏼in the same year
are queer stories in that they both heavily feature a relationship between two men who fall in sweet sensual gay love and have sex about it
were both directed and written by a homosexual.
But other than that, we’re looking at two pretty different films. Andrew Haigh, homosexual director of All Of Us Strangers, made an arty, feelingsy, indie-like film with a (I assume) decent budget for once. Matthew Lopez, homosexual director of Red, White & Royal Blue, worked with Amazon Studios and a (I assume) trillion dollar budget to produce his corny-cute romcom, adapting it from a popular book of the same name by Casey McQuiston. One is an “emotionally wrenching masterpiece” and the other, a shiny, slapstick romp. Importantly, the intended audiences are different; one is a queer audience, one is a mainstream audience with a fringe of queer, and we’ll get to why that’s important later. But for now, they’re both out there, on the field, brothers in an uneasy alliance of lgbtquosity.
For a long time, queer sex onscreen has been taboo, codified, and occurring mainly only in underbelly cinema and on the iphones of prominent politicians. Ever since Jojo Siwa invented being gay, and the world took notice, we’ve seen more and more television and film arise in culture, from and about queer people. Is that… a good thing? Sure. Yes? … Kinda….?
Too Many Of Us Strangers (To A Good Root)
All Of Us Strangers stars the stupidly gorgeous duo Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, and they really could not have found two men on earth that I needed more viscerally to witness, kissing. The film is about Adam (played by Scott) and his growing closeness with his neighbour Harry (played by Mescal) (where ‘growing closeness’ is a euphemism for sucken n fucken).
To me, the queer gaze (inheritor of the female gaze, inheritor of the male gaze, a strong and proud lineage of affective gendered looking) is in play; meaning that there is an attempt by the filmmaker to be using the camera, editing & mise-en-scene to empathise with all the characters on screen. Furthermore these same characters are empowered through the act of their own looking to uncover their desires. If this seems complex, it’s because it is. But the effect is a wordless knowing taking place in your gut. The kind of knowing you get right before you’re about to have really good sex.
Look! At! This! The orange and blue hues of the scene are muted but starkly highlighted by one sexy shaft of late afternoon sunlight streaming in to caress them. It’s a quiet scene, imbued with trepidation and promise, where the careful rhythm of the edit echoes those intoxicating first steps towards new passion; two bodies slowly giving up pretending that they don’t want to fall into each other. Also it’s really hot.
It’s been said that film is an empathy machine, and this whole sequence is a true testament to that. It isn’t voyeurism, because the camera’s gaze is not fetishistic. Instead the camera feels as the characters, sharing in their tender fears and growing mutual desire. What we see is often directed by the desires of the two men onscreen - they look down at their hands exploring one another, and the camera follows suit. If we were to imbue the camera with a personality, image or characteristic, it would probably be, like, a vine unfurling slowly, feeling its way up a window pane (if we’re gonna be gay about it) (which we will).
We watch Harry start to go down on Adam, which we partially witness from behind Adam’s shoulder. Harry kisses down Adam’s stomach, then pauses, looks up at Adam, as if to say, “I see my own desire reflected back in your eyes”, or “I am as you and you are as me”.
As Harry’s hands move out of frame, the sexual act is implied, but not seen. It’s the age-old seductive lifehack, to show a little in order to imply a lot. Just like the imagined monster under the bed, the things therein gain greater potency, and poetry, when they remain out of sight. We are forced to use our imagination, and that is one very real space in which queer sexuality begins, and thrives.
And honestly? I can relate. I myself am a bit of a monster under the bed. Most trans people find ourselves, and each other, fumbling in the under-darkness with no light switch, and no hope of a neon image that feels like home. I watched, holding my eyes clockwork-open, as the whole entire screen became dark except for Adam’s blue eye, looking. “I see you” his eye says, “I see you seeing me”. It creates this fantasy space of belonging, of comprehension, of fucking recognition, and it begins in their mutual eye contact, and the implied but out-of-frame response… It’s the queer gaze as transformational power.
I, like you (I assume), am longing to be transformed by recognition like that: a film like this, gives me a chance to microdose that kind of felt transmission.
A queer audience, watching this, can perhaps more easily read or relate to this scene, as we know what it is to piece together a lifetime of romance from a single glance. Homos have a whole history of cruising for sex where the ability to gaze astutely was tantamount to getting laid at all. We are more likely to understand too, the place of fantasy in becoming something more than the sum of your seeming parts. We are more used to our desires existing as some unspoken, unseen thing, under society’s gaze. What a relief to have something to look at that looks back at you.
Postcards from Gay Paradise
Less than a week later I watched Red, White & Royal Blue. It’s a film about Prince Henry of England (Nicholas Galitzine) falling in love with the American president’s son, Alex (Taylor Zakhar Perez). Prince Henry is not in line to inherit the throne but he does nonetheless feel enormous pressure to not be a huge massive gay faggot. Alex is bisexual but quiet about it. They start out as enemies and guess fucking what!!! They fall in sweet Achillean love. Again, this is a very different film. But it is still a movie depicting queer sex in the mainstream, and I will bravely watch and engage with all such queer content, for you, my avid readers.
The first thing we notice: hey, what the hell!? those guys are Kissing!! Our brains quickly register the casual opulence that drapes them both in a finery of buttery yellow light, the room they’re in showcasing an embarrassment of wealth and good taste.
The decadent mise-en-scene is met by editing and camera-work both intended to be seamless and forgettable. The camera’s like, here’s two boys kissing!!! Check it outtt!! Oop! Henry’s going DOWN if you know what I mean!! If the camera in All Of Us Strangers is like an unfurling vine, the camera here is like if you gave a shaggy, horny purple bean bag little stick legs and googly eyes.
It’s even the same set of actions, technically; they kiss, they start to undress, they caress, one of them gives the other one a blowjob, tale as old as time. Alex and Henry do hold a mutual gaze, briefly, in between kisses. Only, the image of their mutual looking is flattened, pasted onto the screen like a postcard, and the body isn’t asked to share in the zing and flutter, the texture of reciprocal gaze on the verge of a fuck. The gaze falls flat.
Do not mistake me! I had fun, it was silly, there’s even a cutaway to the phallic George Washington Monument in D.C. in place of an actual human erection. Later on they have a cheeky hook up in a shed, which is at least realistic. Ultimately it’s a film that’s also about fantasy, but where All Of Us Strangers was (for me, anyway) queerly creating spaces for intimacy to blossom, Red, White & Royal Blue gives more, gay wish fulfilment.
Queer Fantasy Space for one
Both of these films deal in queer fantasy, with completely different approaches, intentions and bodily affects. And my body was, not as affected. If queer intimacy is about being changed, Red, White & Royal Blue is like what happens when you get to watch two hot dudes from the gym have sex (which, to be clear, I am obviously in support of). But I can’t find myself in there anywhere. I do love it for them. I just wish I could love it for me too, or anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into easy categories. Meanwhile, any mainstream audience gets to leave the experience having watched some gay kissing and to them, maybe it feels… comprehensible????? Inclusive?!??? I just don’t know!!!
I realised that a film about loneliness made me feel more connected and seen, and a film about love made me feel fluffy, but… lonely. It’s the ultimate “I’ll have what she’s having” only, I never can. No matter how many steps you take towards acceptable cis-passing transness, you will never be him, or cis, not ever. And while being trans is a blessing, there’s also a benediction being called for, the right of recognition, the right to be seen.
Alas, the unholy era of rainbow capitalism is upon us. It clunkily stalks our every move, like a transformer, but gayer, our very own Floptimus Prime, going quietly sicko mode on our collective ass, intent on death by assimilation. Hungry to gobble up real, tangible queer experiences in order to shit out palatable queer aesthetics, we watch as the refuse scatters like little gay blocks of lego on western culture’s sad, cumstained carpet.
Ultimately, Red White & Royal Blue is like what would happen if a primary colour had sex with a pancake. Delicious, sure. But not nutrient dense. All Of Us Strangers was a feast, giving me a lot to chew on and work through, both painful and pleasurable. As ever, with capitalistic assimilation, there is a danger in trying to make yourself into something comprehensible, in this case, to a cishet audience. If you’re dumbing it down or trimming the fat, you’re already giving away too much of your mystery, your nuance, your complex, hard-won beauty.
I choose to see all this as a sign that we’re moving forward, treating these as growing pains. You can’t make someone see you. You shouldn’t have to. And sometimes, if you look closely enough into the eyes of a stranger, you might see a flicker of yourself reflected back.
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Sodi M Shrives (he/they) is a bisexual transfaggot on the edge of glory. An actor, a bedroom poet, playlist curator, tree appreciator & dance floor diva, Sodi works with students in Union House Theatre making plays and acts in the improvisational community-based theatre company Melbourne Playback. Occasionally they can be found working on film sets too.
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What a great piece