Stuff Guys Do That Doesn’t Mean They’re Gay Every individual is a minefield of random quirks and desires. 1 For example, I’ve met some guys who were both romantically and physically attracted to women, but only physically attracted to men, with no romance involved.
To complicate things further, you can have a mixture of attractions to the same gender, when it comes to both physical and emotional intimacy. "Even having sexual encounters with other men does not necessarily mean a man is gay." 4 Basically, many people experiment, and it doesn’t have to mean anything. In one study, the number of people who had had sexual experiences with people of the same gender was twice as many as the number who considered themselves gay or bisexual.
Are these two boys crushes? Are they friends? Can the movie be an allegory for coming out either way? All you can do is squint until something takes shape.įor more of Slate’s coverage of Luca, check out Dana Stevens’ and Karen Han’s spoiler-filled discussion of the movie on the Spoiler Specials podcast.Furthermore, though mainstream society tends to paint attraction as something “black and white” and never-changing (i.e., once you are gay, you are always gay any same-gender attraction means that you’re gay, etc), the reality is that life is just not that simple.Įven having sexual encounters with other men does not necessarily mean a man is gay. How gay is it? Whatever the director’s stated intent, the answer seems to be: as gay as you want it to be. Luca seems firmly in this last tradition. Fans have since picked up on homoerotic undertones in Raya and the Last Dragon and the live-action Mulan, but these movies remain rainbow Rorschach tests, with audiences having to read between the lines or project their own meanings to find queer representation. Ironically, the Disney movie that gave us the term “exclusively gay moment” in the first place took a different tack: The live-action Beauty and the Beast’s LeFou is more in the spirit of the studio’s long-standing tradition of strongly queer-coded, if not explicitly gay, villains. Meanwhile, while Disney has congratulated itself and claimed to blaze new trails, plenty of other animation studios have been miles ahead of them: Laika’s ParaNorman, for example, featured an openly gay character way back in 2012. Pixar at least seems to have learned a lesson about making too much of these moments: In Onward, an extremely minor character mentions having a girlfriend, but the character is still just that-extremely minor-even if the filmmakers were smart enough not to herald this development by tooting their own horns. For both live-action and animated movies, the studio has overhyped what have become known as “exclusively gay moments,” tiny morsels of representation that are either so subtle you hardly notice them (a kiss between two women in the background of a Star Wars movie) or so plot-irrelevant that they can be easily chopped or overlooked by international censors (here’s looking at you, Endgame’s unnamed Grieving Man). You’ll Never Convince Johnny Depp Fans That He’s Guiltyĭisney’s track record here doesn’t help matters. The Star Wide Receiver Who Has All of College Football Panicking The Casual Marvel Fan’s Guide to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness The name Luca, meanwhile, is surely another coincidence, since Luca is a very common Italian name. According to him, this coming-of-age story takes place in a “pre-puberty world.” The Call Me by Your Name-esque elements, he says, were based instead on his own experiences growing up with a childhood friend in Genoa. “I was really keen to talk about a friendship before girlfriends and boyfriends come in to complicate things,” he said at a press event.
But Casarosa has insisted that the movie’s central relationship is purely platonic. And these jokes were only further encouraged by the fact that the new Pixar movie shares a name with that Oscar-winning queer romance’s director, Luca Guadagnino. The first trailers for the movie-about two boys, one more worldly than the other, growing closer while sharing swims and bike rides in the Italian countryside-invited some inevitable jokes about it being a kiddie Call Me by Your Name. When director Enrico Casarosa says he didn’t intend to make Luca a gay romance, I believe him. This article discusses the ending of Pixar’s Luca.