As movies written about queer teens go, storylines like that of The Prom and Love Simon showcase an astonishing disconnect between the actual problems that queer youth face and those that are glamorized to fit a screen. The commentary is completely without nuance and makes no effort to condemn deep rooted institutions that could have much more of an effect coming from a Hollywood blockbuster.
Critics of queer representation in media will agree on two points: gay sob stories that focus on gratuitous homophobia and queer misery are exhausting, and glamorized versions of queer narratives that refuse to engage with uncomfortable realities in any meaningful way are also exhausting. Both of these tropes are rooted in homophobia in different ways. The former leaves no room for queer joy, or for stories about our lives outside of our queerness. The latter pretends that queerphobia is nonexistent, a thing of the past, or present only on an individual level, absolving the systems that perpetuate it on much larger scales. Somehow, The Prom manages to be guilty of both. Our protagonist was kicked out of her own house, is relentlessly bullied in school, and has nobody on her side except for a group of out-of-touch Broadway actors. An accurate portrayal of queer life being shown under a spotlight like this could have had lasting positive ramifications for our community, but instead Hollywood chose a performative, oversensationalized movie about struggles that very few young gay people will relate to. This combination makes The Prom intensely exhausting to watch as a queer person, but, admittedly, extremely marketable to mainstream heterosexual audiences.
Movies with straight main characters in which romance is not only exciting but nuanced are all too common in mainstream film and television, so the alternate side of depressing stories of queer teens being abandoned by their parents is not the type of media we need. Until the story’s resolution, there is no true queer joy in this piece. How exhausting for the young queer children and adolescents this film markets itself towards, those who are queer only online, to see that an openly queer experience is so drenched in misery. Even Emma’s insultingly chipper line, “Note to self: Don’t be gay in Indiana” overemphasizes loneliness and bullying as an inescapable side-effect of coming out, not to mention that the storyline of this play is ridiculously out of touch. The idea that a white lesbian teen in the south being thrown out by her southern bumpkin parents is what homophobia looks like today is astonishingly false. Sure, homophobia in rural areas is a massive issue, but the idea that New York City is a promised land of acceptance where bigotry has been eliminated pushes a harmful and ignorant narrative for us. In 2020, the year that this film came out, NYC hate crimes targeting the LGBTQ+ community had increased by 20% since 2018. In my own personal experience as a LGBTQ+ teenager in NYC, I have seen countless instances of homophobia and transphobia ignored by administrators and parents. NYC is not, by any means, immune to these issues.
Gay tragedies, especially in the mid twentieth century, have often been the only publishable queer stories in the country. This is thanks to the Motion Picture Production Code, known generally as the Hays Code, a set of guidelines that was intended to police the morals and messaging of American media. These guidelines have had a strong influence on American media long after their abandonment. In place from the 1930s to the 1960s, the code forbid depictions of “deviance,” especially “sex perversion” such as interracial relationships, homosexuality, or sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage, unless the villain responsible got their comeuppance. If a writer wanted queer people in their story, they had to be miserable, predatory, or tragic. Today, we still see a strong market for queer media that focuses excessively on violence, depression, or abuse.
This movie also clearly is not made by or for gay people. The attitude that Emma, the main character employs of “I just want to have a prom, I’m not asking for much” sends the message that queer people are only valid when they are asking for the bare minimum. Several times throughout the movie Emma stresses that the drama around the prom is too big of a deal for her, and she just wishes it would all go away, which is disappointing but unsurprising. Straight people are only accepting of the gay rights movement when it does not push back against their institutions in a palatable, comfortable way. This mainstream comfortable activism is lazy and uninteresting. To put it colloquially, “love is love” is not a hot take anymore.
This movie’s uninspired insular hollywood cast is another point of dissatisfaction for many viewers. Meryl Streep, James Corden, Nicole Kidman, and Andrew Rannells occupy four main roles of the film, three of whom are straight, and all of whom are white. James Corden (a straight actor) plays a gay Broadway star, and his performance in this movie is one of the most out of touch, riddled with stereotypes, idiotic casting choices I have ever seen. James Corden’s representation of a gay man is not only insulting because of the way he plays his character, but also because he and the other actors in this movie so clearly believe they are exempt from criticism regarding queer allyship for participating in it. This casting not only fails to uplift new queer POC actors, it keeps big budget films like this insular and exclusive to the same people we as audiences have seen a hundred times. This isn’t to say that recycling the same leads is per say a problematic act, but on a movie about queer struggle, they should have casted more people who have experienced it first hand.
As more and more years pass since the Marriage Equality Act and Obergefell v. Hodges, we are seeing a new kind of queer narrative come into the spotlight: clean, romanticized stories that ignore or minimize more uncomfortable queer experiences are a very easy way for writers to secure a queer audience without alienating a cishet one. These stories feature thin, white, cisgender, conventionally attractive leads, and engage with homophobia only at the individual level. They often have an emphasis on how similar to a straight person the queer lead is. Issues like homelessness, addiction, white supremacy, disability, illness, poverty, discrimination, gender, and any mention of history are entirely excluded, despite being crucial points of understanding for any accurate portrayal of queer experience. Queers have a long history of internal community struggle between assimilation and liberation, between “we’re just like you” and “we shouldn’t have to be.” These pieces reinforce the idea that progress comes from molding ourselves into a form inoffensive enough for cishet people to respect, a theory that inherently throws under the bus any queer person who will not or cannot do so. Butches, transgender people, gender non-conforming people, queer people of color, and neurodivergent queer people, to name a few examples, will never fit into the respectability movement. Likewise, they are consistently absent from these moderate liberal feel-good stories.
Despite its boring overuse of sad lesbian content, The Prom still fails to engage with real issues affecting queer youth in any meaningful way. The examples of homophobia the audience is bombarded with are mostly on the individual level, and are not rooted in the historical, systemic oppression of queer people. Teenagers condemn their lesbian classmate because they believe that homosexuality is a sin, but their minds are quickly and completely changed once they are reminded of the Bible’s encouragement to “Love Thy Neighbor.” This is not what homophobia looks like in America in 2021. The defining experience of queer youth in the country today, in my opinion, is not being excluded from the prom, but growing up almost entirely online in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic. Nearly an entire generation of queers were systematically murdered, leaving us queer children, adolescents, and young adults with gaps in our cultural connections and a depressing lack of elders to rely on. Our liberation movements have been co-opted and made unrecognizable, and too much of our history has been lost to us. Queer youth struggle disproportionately with substance abuse, homelessness, poverty, illness, and barriers to education and employment. For all it has been praised on the basis of its progressiveness, The Prom does not dare to mention the more uncomfortable realities of the queer experience it pretends to represent.
Profit is the motivator for these types of new-age queer stories that somehow manage to overload the audience with gay tragedy while refusing to confront homophobia meaningfully. Stories about our joy and success are less interesting to heterosexuals; they prefer to feel “moved” and “inspired” by our resilience in the face of adversity. Stories about the ugly parts of the queer experience are also a turn-off to straight viewers; they prefer to absolve themselves and the systems they benefit from of guilt. We are to be pitied, never revered. We are to be martyred, never fought for. These narratives ask us to be accessories to well-meaning straight people, to act as confirmation for them that they are good people, to help them feel progressive, whether or not their actions support that. The Prom endeavors to forgive well-meaning straight people (who would never explicitly say they hate queers) of all their guilt. This was not a film made for queers.