The Film Experience

A series by Christopher James investigating the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Martin Donovan stars as Bill Truitt, a kind teacher whose life is torn apart by his half-sister (Christina Ricci)

In this column, we haven’t really looked at many movies that were written or directed by queer people. You don’t have to be gay to include a gay best friend in your film. If that were a prerequisite, we would have so much less gay representation onscreen. But something magical does happen when queer people tell queer stories. It changes and affects the DNA of the movie. Take for example this week’s choice, The Opposite of Sex, written and directed by Don Roos. There’s a daring and unflinching energy to the film that can only be described as inherently queer. This allows the movie to take large swings that don’t always connect. It’s emboldened by the confident voice behind the camera that knows what it wants to do.

The movie is narrated by Deedee (Christina Ricci), a sixteen year old girl with a mean streak who runs away from home in Louisiana and moves in with her half-brother, Bill (Martin Donovan), in suburban Indiana...

Bill is an openly gay high school teacher who lives with his much younger new boyfriend, Matt (Ivan Sergi). Always having a penchant for destruction, Deedee decides to seduce Matt. Once successful, she convinces him that he’s the father of her baby and that they must get away and move to Los Angeles. The Opposite of Sex has a lot of plot. In many ways, it has too many twists and turns for its own good, often losing the thread in favor of shoehorning in another zany set piece. However, the film clips forward with great zest thanks to a really fun performance by Ricci.

While Deedee may be the narrator, she’s decidedly not the heart of the movie.

She may have been everyone's favorite "friend" in the 90s, but Lisa Kudrow is a far cry from Phoebe in her role as Lucia in "The Opposite of Sex."The friendship between Bill and Lucia (a perfect Lisa Kudrow) remains the most interesting and endearing element of The Opposite of Sex. It’s fascinating in the way that it both uses and eschews different tropes of the straight woman-gay best friend dynamic. Lucia was the odd, socially awkward child who had a complicated, yet loving, relationship with her brother Tom (Colin Ferguson). They became even closer when he came out as gay. When Tom fell in love with Bill, who worked as a teacher at the same high school with Lucia, the three became inseparable and possibly co-dependent. Tom died of AIDS, leaving Bill and Lucia brokenhearted. They turned to each other to process their grief and comfort each other. The basis of their friendship is comfort in the face of tragedy, even if they have very different responses to tragedy.

Lucia: I don't know how you do it. You're always so nice and so calm. Tom was like that too. It's depressing.

Bill Truitt: You're nice.

Lucia: That's how I always felt around you too, like the Baroness in The Sound of Music. While everybody's just singing and climbing an Alp. And I just wanna STUFF THAT GUITAR UP THAT NUN'S ASS! And... ugh!

Matt didn’t just cheat on Bill with Deedee, he also had another boyfriend in the form of Jason (Johnny Galecki). When Bill and Deedee leave for California, Jason confronts Bill, thinking that Bill has harmed Matt or taken him away from him. When Bill doesn’t help Jason and Matt reunite, Jason accuses Bill of sexually molesting him when he was in high school. A media frenzy sparks and Bill is asked to take a paid sabbatical while he awaits trial. In a sense, Bill’s life has fallen apart. However, he copes rather well, sequestering in his nice house and gardening. Lucia decides to stay with him to keep him company and check in on his mental health while under the duress. She also expresses the indignation and anger that Bill doesn’t care to express. She’s the one yelling at reporters, cursing Matt’s name and urging him to go to California to find Deedee and Matt to clear his name.

This speaks to what is so interesting and works so well about their friendship. Bill is the calm neutralizer, who can handle anything that’s thrown at him. He knows the world is not fair and is prepared to take his lumps and move on. For lack of a better phrasing, Lucia has a chip on her shoulder that has only grown bigger with time. She feels the world has not been kind to her. When the world throws her negativity, she returns it with more negativity. At this point, she’s never had a sexual relationship, never had many friends and the one major relationship she had (with her brother) was taken away thanks to AIDS. However, Lucia is not depressed. There’s a fire to her negativity. She is willing to scrap, sneer and fight for just a nice peaceful life for her and Bill. He’s got too much niceness and not enough fight. She’s got too much negativity that gives her fight. Together, they are a match to be reckoned with.

Bill (Martin Donovan) and Lucia (Lisa Kudrow) have been through thick and thin, but every friendship has its fault lines.

Lucia: I don't know. I just don't - I don't get sex.

Bill Truitt: You should get out more.

Lucia: I mean, "I don't understand sex." I don't get it. Get it? It seems like a lot of trouble for not much. Am I the only one that thinks this?

Bill Truitt: I don't think you're the tip of an iceberg, frankly.

Lucia: I would rather have a backrub, you know. It lasts longer and there's no fluids. You know, what's so great about that? It's like, "Hi! I'd like to blow my nose on your face." I mean, you wouldn't like that, would you?

Bill Truitt: And after they do it, they never phone you.

Lucia: Yeah, or a shampoo. You know, just a really great shampoo. That would make sense. If you were chasing this asshole all around the country because he gave really great shampoos...

Bill Truitt: It's not just sex, Lucia. I CARE for Matt, alright?

Lucia: It IS sex, Bill. You just won't admit it. Cuz you wanna be above that. You wanna think that nothing that happened happened because you like sex.

Bill Truitt: I'm really beat.

Lucia: You know, sex kills, Bill. You just - you won't accept that. But why do you think there's no more real Hawaiians, huh? And why would they bother coming up with the phrase "died in childbirth" if it only happened one time? It's fucking dangerous, sex!

Bill Truitt: Tom didn't die because of sex.

Lucia: Didn't he? I mean, PC crap aside, didn't sex kill Tom? Huh? I mean, if he just couldn't get enough shampoos or backrubs, wouldn't he still be here today?

Bill Truitt: You might as well say I killed him.

Lucia: You didn't give it to him.

Bill Truitt: No, but some OTHER faggot did! Isn't that what you think?

Lucia: No. What I think is: Fine. Chase this bimbo from Indiana to Chippewa Falls, for all I care. Go ahead. Throw away your reputation, your job, and your students, and whatever because you want Matt. That's - it your RIGHT! Just don't say that it's about love, okay? You're an English teacher. Call things by their right name.

After chasing Matt and Deedee all around California, Lucia and Bill end up in Palm Springs. A lot has happened, including a murder (told you the movie has a lot of plot). None of that is important. Lucia feels like she’s lost the thread on why they’ve gone on this journey. Are they trying to clear Bill’s name or is Bill actually trying to get Matt back?

We’ve talked a lot about how the “gay best friend” trope can be negative in the ways that it neuters the gay characters. They often exist to support the female lead’s quest for love, never having a sexual life of their own. The Opposite of Sex plays with that trope while making sure Bill exists as a sexual being whose desires drive the movie. Though Lucia and Bill share so much as friends, including a great love for Tom, there are things that they can’t share. Lucia doesn’t understand sex at all, much less how it plays a role in Bill’s life.

A specific way homophobia manifests itself is disgust for gay sex. The AIDS crisis only deepened this feeling for many straight people, as gay sex became synonymous with disease and death. Lucia doesn’t hate gay people. In fact, the only people she seems to be able to stand are gay people. However, she has plenty of internalized homophobia that she has not processed or worked through. She loves having a gay best friend that she can watch TV and eat ice cream with. However, she thinks gay sex (or sex in general) is disgusting and she hasn’t let go of the anger she feels towards AIDS taking away her brother.

Roos never lets any of the characters off the hook, while also never letting them apologize for themselves. This extends to Deedee, who frequently makes severely homophobic comments throughout her narration. There’s something queer about the way homophobia is presented and lambasted throughout the movie. All of Deedee’s most horrifying lines are played for laughs. Lucia’s disgust about gay sex serves is important to her arc as she learns how to embrace intimacy. The queer authorial voice of Don Roos allows us to laugh at these characters and their damaging views. The audience gets to be in on the joke, rather than the butt of the joke.

Enough is enough. Bill (Martin Donovan) grabs life (and Johnny Galecki's Jason) by the pierced nipple in one of the film's strongest moments.

Bill Truitt: [pulling on Jason's pierced nipple] Listen to me, you little grunge faggot. I survived my family, my schoolyard, every Republican, every other Democrat, Anita Bryant, the Pope, the fucking Christian Coalition, not to mention a real son of a bitch of a virus, in case you haven't noticed. In all that time since Paul Lynde and Truman Capote were the only fairies in America, I've been busting my ass so that you'd be able to do what you wanted with yours! So I don't just want your obedience right now - which I do want and plenty of it - but I want your fucking gratitude, right fucking now, or you're going to be looking down a long road at your nipple in the dirt! Do you hear what I'm saying?

Though we’ve been following Bill this entire film, this is when he finally takes agency. Many of the characters marveled at how Bill could accept the abuse, media and forced sabbatical after Jason’s accusations and just go to his garden. However, that is how Bill has been able to survive as a gay man in 90s culture. He just had to let homophobia stop bothering him and just roll off his back. There’s inherent privilege in that response. Bill still lives in a big house and has money from his former lover and family. He can retreat to this guilded palace and garden all day to block out the haters. This isn’t something that many other queer people could do to cope with homophobia. In many cases, their homes were their unsafe environments. That could also be said about Deedee. She’s someone who never had a place where she could retreat when things got hard. She always had to hustle. These privilege gaps inform their gulf as half-brother-and-sister and likely are at the root of her homophobia.

Still, this passage also addresses the important generational divide between gay men. Bill’s life had been ostracized as a teenager and young adult. He finally found love but had it ripped away by AIDS. Matt and Jason are young adults coming into their sexuality and finding some level of acceptance and representation. There’s a normalcy that they can enjoy that Bill had to fight for and that Tom died for. For all of the movie’s zany fun and big comic swings, it still reminds us that it exists in the real world. Bill fought hard for his boring little life and he won’t have a group of young people ruin it for him.

Lisa Kudrow justly had a great run at critics awards back in 1998, including a Best Supporting Actress win from the New York Film Critics Circle.

Sheriff Carl Tippett: What's the point of sleeping with you if it doesn't get your attention? If I always come second to Bill?

Lucia: Excuse me?

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Say the point of sex isn't recreation or procreation or any of that stuff. Say it's concentration. Say it's supposed to focus your attention on the person you're sleeping with, like biological highlighter.

[significant pause]

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Otherwise, there's just too many people in the world.

Lucia: So while I'm sleeping with you, I'm not supposed to care about anybody else?

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Look for me first in any crowded room. And I'll do likewise.

[poignant pause]

Sheriff Carl Tippett: Otherwise, a person ends up sleeping with somebody else.

[Looks at her intensely and then sits back and waits]

Lucia: It's just a habit, thinking about Bill. Because of Tom.

Sheriff Carl Tippett: I know.

Roughly a zillion things happen in the thirty minutes between the above passage and the previous passage. What’s important to note is that Lucia engages in a sexual relationship with the local town Sheriff, Carl Tippett (Lyle Lovett) who wants to make their relationship more official. Carl sees what the audience sees. Lucia has been using her friendship with Bill as an excuse to not live her life or take care of herself. They can cocoon themselves in their shared love of Tom and never move on in a meaningful way. Bill’s relationship with Matt is a first step towards a new life, but Lucia hasn’t made any steps up until now to distance herself from her grief and anger around Tom’s death.

What the “gay best friend” trope has done is turned gay men into an “accessory” for straight (often white) women. Bill is more than Lucia’s accessory, he’s her focus. More so than that, he’s her emotional support gay. He’s her hurt bird that she can focus on repairing so she doesn’t have to think about her own life. Carl allows Lucia an off ramp from this damaging co-dependent relationship that she’s been driving.

Not every bit of The Opposite of Sex has aged like a fine wine, but that’s the point. Don Roos has made an acerbic, saucy and emotionally honest comedy that is a window into gay life in the 90s. Not everybody says the right thing, does the right thing or has the best intentions. All of the characters struggle in some ways to get by in their lives. In order to find their own happiness, they often feel the need to rob others who they believe are happy. It was a joy to watch a movie where the characters were treated without kid gloves and could be unlikable, opportunistic, self serving and tired of being nice. We need more movies filled with characters (especially queer characters) who don’t have any of their edges sanded off and are comfortable with their own negative qualities.

Previously in Gay Best Friend

Who is your favorite (or least favorite) example of a “gay best friend” in movies? Let us know in the comments below.