Today is Sunday, October 2, 2022. Today was another damp, sweater-wearing, rainy day and Elliot and I made the most of it by seeing Billy Eichner’s new gay rom-com called Bros. at our local Forest Hills theater known as the Cinemart.

This is the film that is being hailed as the first R-rated, big studio gay romantic comedy written and starring an openly gay man, courtesy of Eichner himself, with a principal cast of all LGBTQ+ actors. The film is in wide release from Universal Pictures produced by Judd Apatow. You can’t get more mainstream than that. At first, I thought the character of Billy Lieber, here essayed by Eichner, was insufferable, as he talks too much and is too angry when he has everything: a successful podcast called The 11th Brick in which he is free to discuss topics that are dear to him like the pioneering efforts of Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, two early gay activists who sparked the modern-day movement for queer liberation, many interesting and diverse queer friends, and is instrumental in being the director of the very first LGBTQ+ history museum right here in New York City. Oh, and he has a very nice-looking apartment in Manhattan. What he doesn’t have is a long-term relationship and boyfriend – until he meets the eye of hunky Aaron Shepard, here played by Luke Macfarlane, in a club. Eventually, I did change my opinion of the principal character who seems to have it all except for a solid romantic relationship in his life.

The day began with us getting up at a reasonable hour – 9:30 – and driving to Jackson Hole for breakfast in Astoria. There Elliot ordered silver dollar pancakes with bacon, and I asked for the banana-stuffed pancakes, plus freshly squeezed orange juice, and coffee. We couldn’t sit outside because of the inclement weather, so we were ushered to a small table in the outer room.

From Jackson Hole, we drove to Petco on 31st Avenue, where Elliot bought a box of litter for Jocelyn and I stayed in the car. At this time, I spoke to our friend “Gene” and made plans to meet at the Cinemart theater by 3:30 p.m. to catch a 3:40 showing of Bros.

Before picking up another friend, “Mark,” at 3, I did a little shopping for Elliot at the Natural and Gotta Getta Bagel and picked up a few items for Wednesday night, which marks the end of Yom Kippur’s fast. This time we’re staying home to break the fast; we have usually gone to Woodmere, where Elliot had a house in his former life as a married straight man, and spent the evening with a neighbor by the name of “Cynthia,” but this year, we received no such invitation. Last year we broke the fast at our friend Mark’s apartment.

Now we pick up Mark at his building and drive to Metropolitan Avenue and park the car a block away from the cinema. We walk toward the theater, and within minutes, we see Gene walking toward the theater from the other side. We greet each other and pay for our tickets. Now we have to choose our seats, so I suggest we don’t select seats too close to the screen, since that can cause vertigo in me. That’s not even an option since there are many available slots from what we can see. So we select four seats in Row D.

There aren’t many sneak previews to watch except for one that seemed very intriguing, Amsterdam, an all-star feature from David O. Russell starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Rami Malek, Mike Myers (even), and Robert De Niro. It is set to open on October 7.

Now back to the movie here at hand: Bros. Eichner himself has gone to great lengths to indicate that this is a historical first – that it’s the first movie to star and be written by an openly gay man. It’s not some indie production or “some streaming thing which feels disposable,” as he said to Variety, words that he then clarified after they were interpreted as a slight against fellow gay rom-com Fire Island which premiered on Hulu in June. (I have yet to see that one.) The film is more about mature 40 year-old cis white male gay men who fuck, not a coming-out-story about some teen fumbling his or her first kiss, like roughly 90 percent of gay stories onscreen are, which he posited to GQ in another interview.

When I came home after having dinner with our friends at Nick’s Bistro on Metropolitan Avenue, I went to read some reviews of the movie online. One of them, by Alison Willmore, writing for New York confirms my feelings about the film overall. Her review appeared online on September 30, 2022, and its title is “Bros. Is at Its Best When It Forgets About Making History.”

The film is directed by Forgetting Sarah Marshall‘s Nicholas Stoller, who cowrote the script with Eichner, and produced by Judd Apatow. The movie is, basically, a will-he-or-won’t-he in the best tradition of a more mainstream romantic comedy like When Harry Met Sally. The difference here is that both romantic leads are gay white men. The target of Bobby’s desire, Aaron, is the more hunky of the two, in which his traditional masculinity hides some internalized homophobia, but which the loud, militant, concave-chested Bobby has always resented and yet desires, and the film can’t quite square his resistance with his desire. The film, for me, takes off when Bobby reveals his covert fears to Aaron and when Aaron becomes more than a handsome blank that they actually become individuals who can like one another. The film abounds with much humor on Grindr, “thruples,” anal sex, and something called the “Hallheart” Network, which is a send-up of the Hallmark Channel where on this all-inclusive network there exists such fare as a bisexual holiday special called Christmas With Either and the polyamorous A Holly, Polly Christmas. I later learned that the costar of this film, Macfarlane, himself has starred in his own fair share of Hallmark classics, which explains the send-up of the network here by Eichner and his cowriter. There is also a send-up of real-life gay television producer powerhouse Ryan Murphy in the guise of Bowen Yang who plays a young mercurial TV producer staying in Provincetown who Bobby meets to solicit millions from him for his LGBTQ+ museum.

I would have to say that this is the most unabashedly gay romantic comedy ever to be released by a major Hollywood studio. The question remains: Will straight people see it? In our theater, I thought I saw at least two straight couples in the audience, so that’s a beginning, isn’t it? I wish this trailblazer lots of luck with his first feature.

I hope the weather improves somewhat over the course of the week.

Have you noticed I stayed away from writing about the political spectrum once again? Again, I figured it was the weekend, so that would explain my respite from it.

Have a good week.

Say safe and be well.