Gay Best Friend: Cleo (Queen Latifah) in "Set It Off" (1996)
Tuesday, June 29, 2021 at 2:00PM A series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope
Queen Latifah stood out in the ensemble thriller "Set It Off" as Cleo, a butch lesbian bank robber.Be gay, do crimes.
The film business was born with stories of outsiders committing crimes just to survive. The entire gangster genre is built on that premise. Bonnie & Clyde captured the zeitgeist by making robbing banks seem cool. F. Gary Gray’s 1996 thriller Set It Off gives us a very different view of the Bonnie & Clyde story. The film focuses on four inner-city black women each pushed to the brink by a financial system working against them. Rather than lay down and take it, they band together and start robbing banks just to get by. The cast, which includes Jada Pinkett (before Smith), Queen Latifah, Vivica A. Fox and Kimberly Elise in her first role, is uniformly excellent, building a dynamic that believably has lasted decades.
For the purposes of Gay Best Friend, we’ll take a look at our butch firecracker, Cleo, played with great ferocity by Queen Latifah in the midst of her Living Single fame...