In Great Moments in Gay, Team TFE looks at our favorite queer scenes in the movies for Pride Month. Here's Kieran Scarlett on Bring it On (2000)
Peyton Reed's Bring it On is one of the best high school movies of all time. It's best to get that out of the way first in any writing about the 2000 flick about the politics of high school cheerleading. It's often dismissed, forgotten or written off as a trifle, which couldn't be further from the truth. It so stylishly inhabits its own cinematic universe and does such an excellent job of world building--something that's often missing in a lot of high school movies where the environment can sometimes feel generic or a retread of superior movies. Its first scene brilliantly employs a Greek chorus-style device set to a cheer routine to introduce the world and its characters. And it manages to do so much more gracefully than a similar device in Woody Allen's Mighty Aphrodite, arguably a more high-minded film. Bring it On is not a guilty pleasure. It's simply a pleasure.
The way Jessica Bendinger's script handles so many issues feels revolutionary. This was 2000 mind you. Right in the middle of that murky period when it was being sussed out whether campy punchlines or true humanization would become de rigeur for queer representation in film and television. [More...]
One of the few boys on the Rancho Carne Toros cheerleading team, Les (Hunter Ritter) is very interestingly (albeit briefly) rendered in a brief meet-cute with another male cheerleader during the film's climatic competition scene. As Les awkwardly but eagerly approaches Tim (Riley Smith), the following encounter occurs.
-Hey. That last lift you did was amazing.
-Thanks. Hey...good luck out there.
-Thanks, man. I'm Les.
-I'm...I'm Tim. It's nice to meet you.
-Hey, I'll uh, see you around?
In a brief exchange that can easily read as comic relief, there's much more going on here, both narratively and in the larger conversation about depictions of adolescent homosexuality. Yes, this was after Willow Rosenberg announced that Tara Maclay was her girlfriend on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and after the (at the time) groundbreaking primetime gay kiss on "Dawson's Creek". It was also a far-cry from the frank depictions of queerness featured nine years later on "Glee" and nearly every subsequent TV show or film taking place in high school. It was definitely a time when pretending that gay people don't exist in high school was fine, even preferred it would seem.
And yet in this moment, Les and Tim's brief tête-à-tête smartly and funnily distills what it's like to be gay in high school. Les has encountered that rare holy grail for gay high school students--another seemingly gay student. We see the hemming and hawing that goes on when you know that open expressions of homosexuality raise issues of safety, both socially and possibly literally. So, Les does what...many have done. You rely on like interests (cheerleading in this case) as a way into a social interaction that won't garner unwanted stares or attention. It's bumbling. You can see in Les' eyes that he wants to prolong the conversation, but he doesn't quite know how. And yes, it's funny. It speaks to how the film handles many different issues--racial politics (specifically as they pertain to girls, something we almost never see in film), class politics and the social hierarchy of high school. That may be the most important point. That it manages to be both funny and unexpectedly sensitive to a gay character in a high school without turning him into a punchline.