love!

I was thinking about High School Musical 2 the other day. Aw, hell, let’s be honest here – I think about High School Musical 2 most days. But on this particular day, I was thinking about the song that Ryan and Chad sing together, “I Don’t Dance.” The song is about, well, Ryan (Ryan is the gayest character in the series, in a totally non-sarcastic and unfunny way: he is literally gay and literally out. Deal with it, parents of tweens who did not realize this.) fucking Chad (the most homophobic character in HSM1, and still the most butch even in HSM2).

Sample lyrics:

Ryan: “Hey batter batter, hey batter batter, swing.”
Chad: “I’ve got to just do my thing.”
Ryan: “You’ll never know if you never try.”
Chad: “I don’t dance.”
Ryan: “I know you can.”
Chad: “There’s not a chance.”
Ryan: “Slide home, you score, swinging on the dance floor. … Take your best shot, just hit it.”
Chad: “I’ve got what it takes playing my game, so you better spin that pitch you’re gonna throw me.”
Ryan: “Lean back, tuck it in, take a chance.”
Chad: “You make a good pitch.”

Look, I don’t know what half of that stuff means, but I know it’s dirty.

So anyway. I’m wondering how this fits into the greater scheme of the HSM world. I go online, I google away and I come up with…nothing! Almost nothing. Seriously! Google “gay subtext high school musical” and you find one guy with two short little valiant attempts at blog posts (which, incidentally, he calls “shockingly in-depth” – oh you poor little man, you have no idea) and then a bunch of angry high school dudes calling it “gay” as an insult. (Well…and this, which Ian didn’t realize was a joke for what was frankly an embarrassingly long time.) Maybe it’s just so freakin’ obvious that everybody else figured it wasn’t worth writing about. Well. I don’t have such high standards. And I know what I must do.

I must write a shockingly in-depth analysis of the raging homosity of HSMs 1 and 2, so that future generations may google this information safely. You’re welcome.

HSM1 is a relatively straightforward coming-out analogy. The movie is about Troy’s struggle to come out (as a, ahem, singer) to his friends and his father. His best friend Chad is sort of a homophobe (In trying to explain to Troy why the high school musical is lame: “It’s not hip hop, or rock. It’s, like, show music. It’s all costumes and makeup.” [Shudders]). His dad is ultra-traditionally masculine – the coach of the basketball team and Wildcat basketball champion, class of ’81! The Coach has never worried that his son is gay because it’s something he couldn’t even conceive of. During the big attempt-at-coming-out scene:

Troy: “Hey dad? Did you ever think of trying something new, but were afraid of what your friends might think?”
Coach: “You mean like going left? You’re doing fine. Come on.”

Now, I have no idea what “going left” means, but I’m working under the assumption that it’s a basketball thing. The Coach just doesn’t get it. It’s not so much that he disapproves of homos – it’s just that being a homo is not an option for him. In fact, poor Coach is very much re-living his glory teen basketball champion days of ’81 through his son, and Troy knows it. This is both why Coach can’t possibly imagine that Troy is gay (he wasn’t) and also why it’s so hard for Troy to come out – the Coach isn’t homophobic, like Chad is, it’s just that he’d be disappointed that his son is choosing such a wildly different life than the one he chose. It wouldn’t matter if his son was “gay,” or a “singer,” or whatever: just that it’s different.

Gabriella, Troy’s supposed girlfriend, plays a surprise role here. You’re thinking “beard” at first, but not at all. Troy and Gabriella are both basically playing the same character here. They’re both young gay men coming out – in fact, they’re basically both the same young gay man coming out. I don’t mean this in any smarty-pants literary way, that she’s his feminine side or anything like that. I just mean that the writers expanded one role into two parts. They’re both the same type of character searching for the same thing. You can treat them as one person, for convenience’s sake, throughout most of the movie. She even gets her own “hey dad?” kind of scene:

Speaking to Taylor, about singing: “It just happened…but I liked it. A lot. Did you ever feel like there’s this whole other person inside you, just looking for a way to come out?”

Gabriella’s position as simply an extension of Troy leads to the question of Sharpay. Is she, too, simply an extension of her male counterpart, Ryan?

First, perhaps, it’s necessary to really explain how obvious and simple and accepted it is that Ryan is gay and out. First, the obvious and stereotypical things: He dresses trendily, he wears pink, he has physical gay mannerisms (the way he cocks his head, purses his lips, walks sexily). At one point, when he thinks he’s getting “punked” he shouts excitedly, “Maybe we’ll get to meet Ashton!” His sister is his best friend. He dances and sings. He’s a fucking theatre kid. Of course he’s gay. This all sounds just silly and embarrassing to type out, because these are such goofy stereotypes, but you’ve got to remember that this movie is a celebration of young, cheerful, fun, campy gay culture – so they’re going to positively revel in the sweet, innocent stereotypes like musical theater and teenage crushes on Ashton Kutchner. (In the sequel we also see him doing yoga with his mother, impersonating Liberace during an Estelle Williams dance sequence, aquiring a fat-girl fag hag, and of course that whole converting-Chad baseball thing. He also has this exchange with his mother:

Mom: “Tell [Sharpay] that if she worries too much she’ll get frown lines.”
Ryan: “I already told her twice.”

Incidentally, his mother calls him “Duckie,” an in-joke reference for us old folks to that other obviously-gay young man, well-dressed and a good dancer, from another teen movie.)

I think the most telling bit, though, is that Ryan is never paired romantically with a girl. Fucking everybody gets a chaste little relationship in these movies. Troy gets Gabriella, of course. Sharpay gets Zeke. Chad gets Taylor. Kelsi gets Jason. But the only pairing Ryan ever falls into is either with his sister, or, hilariously enough, with Gabriella in the second movie – both of these are women who are completely off-limits to him. Check out this hug he and Gabriella share, which Troy happens to see and get jealous of:

That terrified, disgusted pelvis, held uncomfortably 12 inches back, is of no threat to you, Troy. In fact, Ryan is paired with one other woman throughout these two movies. In the next-to-last scene of HSM2, when all of the couples walk out onto the romantically lit golf course and Troy and Gab finally have their long-awaited kiss, Ryan (on the far left, yes, in the hat) is holding hands with – that’s right – the fat girl. Ryan has found his fruit fly.

Look, Disney does an awful lot of stuff wrong. I’m sure everyone knows how I feel about the Disney “Princesses.” But they do a lot of stuff right in this first HSM movie: the sex roles are nicely balanced (not only is Gabriella an “Einsteinette” in math and science, but the school’s science teacher is a – pregnant! – woman, too), and there’s an interracial couple which just sort of passes through unremarked upon. But the handling of Ryan’s sexuality is my very favorite thing that they’ve done right. I don’t think that they’re trying to hide it or deny it by never explicitly mentioning it. I mean, fuck, it took two whole movies just to get an extraordinarily short kiss out of the two main love interests: it’s just a really really chaste movie. I think that not mentioning it is not hiding it; it’s more equitable to the way they don’t mention Sharpay’s and Zeke’s inter-racial status. It’s unremarked upon because it is unremarkable. So what? He’s gay. That’s just how Ryan is. It’s normal and they don’t care. And that’s fucking brilliant. (So why then all the brouhaha over Troy coming out? Why isn’t it no big deal for him to be gay, too? Well, it’s different – he’s the basketball star, the son of the masculine school coach. It’s unexpected for Troy, and he’s also been in the closet for so long, hiding it for so long, that they feel as though he was lying to them. Ryan never lied, never hid. And he’s a theatre kid – it’s no surprise, so it’s no big deal.)

So back to Sharpay – is she, like Gabriella, simply an extension of Ryan, her male counterpart in the movie? Is she, say, the woman Ryan wishes he could be? No, no, no. Because, one, Ryan is not a cross-dresser. He has plenty of opportunity to be one if he wanted to, with all the costumes and role-playing in the theatre department, and he never does it. (He plays – or wants to play, sigh – the very masculine Fish Prince in the talent show in HSM2.) He doesn’t want to be a woman, so he doesn’t need her to be that for him. But also, Sharpay has her own separate role to play, and Sharpay is playing another gay boy in this movie. Sharpay is the movie’s drag queen. Have you seen her hair? Have you heard “Fabulous?” Have you heard it performed at your local Drag Night yet? You will. You will.

Taylor and Kelsi, the two other main female roles, aren’t playing gay male roles. Kelsi sure as fuck looks like a boi, but I’m not sure that means anything. Maybe it’s a bone thrown to the lesbos, maybe not. And Taylor’s a BBF, I guess, but that has nothing to do with who she wants touching her cooter. Why aren’t they playing gay male characters like the other two female leads? Maybe because the male halves of their couple pairings are both actually supposed to be heterosexual?

My point here is that half the girls, even, are playing gay boys. This movies all about the gay boys. And my pointing that out isn’t, incidentally, a complaint. This is a movie about young gay men. What do I care if they just so happened to get girls to play some of the parts?

Eventually, Troy decides to audition for the school musical, outing himself to his friends (while the drama teacher accidentally outs him to his father). Troy is the BMOC, the most popular kid in school. Suddenly, by coming out of the closet, he inspires the rest of the school to do the same. In a fantastic musical orgy of personal self-realization and public intolerance, all sorts of kids start coming out in their own way: Zeke bakes! the smart girl dances hip-hop! the stoner (oh – sorry – right, I mean “skater”) kid plays the cello! “I got a confession, my own secret obsession, and it’s making me lose control,” they sing. And everyone around them sings in return, forcing them back into their closets, “No, no, no – not another word. Stick to the status quo.” This is why so many theatre kids don’t come out until freshman year at state university.

Things aren’t going any better for Troy at first. His homophobic best friend Chad tries to talk him out of it.

Chad: “…while you’re off somewhere in leotards, singing ‘Twinkle Town.’”
Troy: “No one said anything about leotards.”
Chad: “Not yet, my friend. Just you wait.”

Chad’s stereotypical view of gay people makes him think that Troy will have to conform to those limits, and he’s trying to save his friend, in the same way that, say, right-wing Christians truly believe that they are “saving” gay people by sending them to fag camps. The only gay person Chad knows is Ryan, and he thinks that if Troy is gay, then Troy will no longer play basketball or be his friend – he’ll have to start wearing pink hats and leotards and hanging out with a different group of people. The “just you wait” might even be interpreted a little more menacingly, as a threat of another sort, but…I’m going to give Chad the benefit of the doubt there, at least.

(Strangely, this whole discussion takes place in the shadow of crazy, disapproving, middle-aged-female weirdness: Chad and Troy are talking in the library, where the librarian [named Ms Falstaff, for, um, some reason that maybe someone who actually remembers their Shakespeare could explain better than I?] keeps popping in to scowl disapprovingly and “shush” them, and Chad’s argument is begun with a story about how much his mother likes Michael Crawford [who played the Phantom of the Opera] – she has a photo of him inside her refrigerator, as “one of her crazy diet ideas,” according to Chad. “Look, I don’t attempt to understand the female mind,” he says. Is all the anti-woman sentiment in this scene meant to underscore Chad’s straight-and-narrow view of masculinity?)

His father, once again, isn’t intolerant, just disbelieving. He simply doesn’t understand.

Coach: “You’re a playmaker – not a singer.”
Troy: “Did you ever think that maybe I could be both?”

The thing is, he probably hadn’t. They get into a fight about this and Troy storms away, but you can see that the Coach is already thinking about this and changing his mind.

Gabriella and Troy discuss the whole situation later:

Gabriella: “Everyone’s treating you differently because of it.”
Troy: “They can’t handle it. That’s not my problem. It’s theirs.”
Gabriella: “What about your dad?”
Troy: “It’s not about my dad. It’s about how I feel.”

Eventually, everyone around Troy comes to understand this. Troy and Gabriella play “straight” for a while: they decide not to audition after all. But when their friends see them moping around dejectedly, they all decide to change their minds and do whatever they can to make their friends happy again. They encourage them to go to the call-backs and sing their gay little hearts out. And Troy had nothing to worry about from his father, after all. “What I really want is to see my son having the time of his life,” he says, and every middle-aged gay man whose father still isn’t speaking to him sighs a jagged, teary sigh.

HSM1 is easy. Troy comes out, struggles for acceptance, and gets it. Everyone in the school breaks out of their pigeonholes, learns to accept that people can be complicated, and sings a little song. I wipe away a single crystal tear. Awesome.

HSM2 is a little less clear; it’s not quite as simple or straightforward an allegory. Personally, I think this one is almost more about Ryan than it is about Troy. For both of them, though, it’s about becoming their own man. They’re both out, they’re both fags, that’s great – but what kind of a man will each of them be? Maybe this is another thing Disney is doing right. This isn’t a movie about gay people; it’s a movie about people who are gay. (Though here’s something they got a lot wronger than they did in the first movie: the academic team is never once mentioned in this movie. The whole thing is just – dropped. I mean, Gabriella at least could have been hired as, say, a tutor instead of a lifeguard, for her summer job. She really is reduced purely to “girlfriend” in this movie – and in fact, she’s even sort of a very maternal savior-type, saving her man by virtue of her being such an awesome girl and for no other reason. Sigh. And that, of course, is why she’s the lifeguard. Because she has to save her man. [He does, at one point, jump in the pool and shout to her, "Save me!" and oh, she does, she does.] But I’m not here for the feminism; I’m here for the fags.) (Ah, but I’m here for the feminism a little bit: Troy gives little off-handed nicknames to the six young kids he is coaching in golf: Champ, Buddy, Cutie, Man, Killer, and to the last, who doesn’t get a nickname: “You look good.” Guess which ones are the boys and which are the girls.)

Sharpay is a drama queen, a drag queen, a bitch, and a boss. She bosses around her friends, her enemies, and especially her brother. HSM2 is about Ryan growing a pair and leaving her behind. (Maybe symbolizing the way a young gay man has to go through his “big gay” stage, and then leave it behind? Become not a gay man but a man who is gay? Ryan here is fighting and leaving behind the Big Gay? I’m just spinballin’ here.) “We can do whatever we want to!” Ryan says, re: summer vacation. “Everything changes!” The major plot point of the movie is baseball song-and-dance scene, where Ryan and Chad duet together and, uh, make sweet music.

“Hey pitcher,” Ryan says at the beginning. “Gimme the ball.”

Oh yeah. Ryan’s done being the bottom. It’s his turn to pitch.

You could say that the whole “playing for the other team” metaphor was there in the first movie, too (with all the basketball stuff). But it really comes out nicely in this song, with all of its hit-you-over-the-head metaphors about “how I swing” and “pitching” and “scoring” and “you’ll never know if you never try.” Half the baseball uniforms are sleeveless. Jesus, that’s good stuff.

I don’t think Chad is gay. But I think we’ve just been witness to his first bout of youthful exploration. Maybe that fits in with the theme, too, of all of these boys trying to figure out what kind of men they’re going to be.

“Hey Evans!” he says. “I’m not saying I’m gonna dance at the show. But if I did…what would you have me do?” He’s not a fag or nuthin’…but what do two guys do together, anyway?

Oh, Ryan will be happy to show you, Chad.

And – seriously? They’ve traded clothes in the next scene. Really. Suddenly they’re wearing each other’s clothes. Straight teenage boys just don’t do that! Nor do they jerk off ketchup bottles so suggestively, I might add.

And, oh, I dunno, I guess Troy’s doing stuff, too. But don’t worry about him – he’s gonna dance it out.

“I will never try to live a lie again,” he tells us, leaping to and fro. Incidentally, that’s just got to be an homage, right?

(And but also rumor has it that Zac Efron is going to be in the Footloose remake, which is, god, so cute.)

And what does all this have to do with Dirty Dancing? I dunno. But something.

Troy’s about half a second away from chuckling fetchingly, running down that aisle, and jumping right up into Gab’s waiting arms.

Huh – I hadn’t really noticed that before. We’ve got Pretty in Pink, Footloose, and Dirty Dancing references. I really do believe that Ryan’s gayness isn’t hidden in these movies. Ryan is out, I honestly honestly believe that – and maybe Disney doesn’t know it, but damnit, Kenny Ortega knows. Peter Barsocchini knows. But, okay, I’m willing to admit that perhaps there are references that are a little hidden – Troy’s coming out, Sharpay’s drag. And maybe these jokes are meant for the same people who see “Bet On It” and think, “Dance it out, Kevin Bacon. Dance it out.”

And, uh…I guess this is where my analysis starts to wander away and putter out, because I’m growing disinterested. But here is this picture, as my parting gift to you: