Great Moments in Gay - Bring it On
Thursday, June 2, 2016 at 7:00PM 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.
Reader Comments (7)
Too bad we lost Peyton Reed to franchises.
I could never get past that Les is introduced to Eliza Dushku's character as, "you speak fag." And I get it wasn't intended to be derogatory but reclamative, but man.
peggy sue -- agreed.
james -- but yes, reclamative.
I LOVE LES in this movie. was always disappointed that Hunter didn't have a career thereafter. I love this movie so much it hurts. and fun choice of scene because it's unexpected.
I had SUCH a crush on Les when I first saw Bring it On - when I was in the back half of high school. This was definitely one of the very few films that I felt was speaking directly to me, and it's simple, easy treatment of Les - even the "do you speak fag?" moment, which introduced the character as owning his sexuality in a way I had never seen up to that point, ESPECIALLY on screen - was a big reason why. Although I probably only knew on a subconscious level at the time.
LOVE this.
As an impressionable queer youth when I first saw Bring It On, it's hard for me to overstate just how important Les's character was to me in the movie. Even though his part is miniscule in retrospect, his inclusion legitimately meant the world to me.
guzel paylasım
Completely agree with this great article and the above posters. Huntley Ritter was unfathomably gorgeous and I also really liked the way they wrote his character - he was sporty and jockish, but was also allowed to show, not a necessarily more feminine or 'gay' behaviours but a comfort with himself that he didn't have to uphold a forced pretense of toxic masculinity. The way he comforted his best straight friend (and the fact that he even had a hot cool straight best friend with him on the cheer squad who was totally cool with him) when they both got teased by the football idiots showed subtly that he was actually better, tougher and more experienced at standing up to bullies than his straight friend. He very clearly told Jan - it's their problem, not yours, don't let it bother you.
I also just think the fact that the filmmakers insisted on keeping the in the meet-cute scene at all when it didn't necessarily advance the central plot but showed that the writers knew they had created a strong character and that they knew the movie's audience would be rooting for this handsome, likeable gay dude to not just be an accessory but at least get a glimpse of having a romance of his own. I made up so much fan fiction to continue he and Tim's romance.
As yes, Huntley Ritter (even his name, Huntley grr) was one of my first massive crushes. But I've never seen him in any thing else.
All hail Bring it On! The original and still the best!