Bluntman Loves Chronic: The Best of Queer Stoner Entertainment

One of the most fun things to do while partaking in the ganja is turning on a classic stoner movie. We’ve long moved on from the days where the only stoner entertainment is Cheech & Chong, with cannabis taking center stage in a number of big-name comedies and even dramas. But, as queers, it’s nice to see ourselves represented in media, even in stoner flicks. But, until the day comes when I find someone to produce my queer-stoner-Christmas-punk-anti-fascist-comedy script (seriously, I wrote one, someone finance it) the options for queer stoner entertainment remain somewhat limited. So, we wracked our brains to come up with the best options for queer-friendly stoner entertainment for the next time you’re having a sapphic moment with Mary Jane.

Broad City

When looking to put together the words “stoner” and “queer,” nothing fits quite as perfectly as Broad City. The brilliantly funny Millennial self-parody that was created by Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, who play fictionalized versions of themselves, started as a web series before getting picked up for five hilarious seasons on Comedy Central. The series recently caught more attention after a phrase from an old episode of the show went viral on TikTok (“In the klerb, we all fam”).

While much attention is paid to their relationships with men, Ilana is depicted as being pansexual, there’s the recurring character of their gay friend Jaimé (Arturo Castro), and the far-left main characters are really into queer inclusivity in general. As one frustrated security guard tells them in the Season 2 opener “In Heat,” “You kids are all straight and you’re all gay.” Oh, and since the series ended, Jacobson married a woman and Glazer came out as non-binary.

The Complete Kevin Smith Askewniverse Canon

Okay, I’m cheating here because I couldn’t choose just one Kevin Smith movie for this article. Smith’s brand of stoner comedy has been lighting up screens since 1994’s Clerks, and it’s always been consistently hilarious. Smith has a gay brother and, because of that, he has always sought to be inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community in his films, even if he doesn’t always get it exactly right.

The 1997 lesbian-themed comedy Chasing Amy is extremely controversial in the LGBTQ+ community, being a film made by a straight man about gay culture. Sav Rodgers’ 2023 documentary, Chasing Chasing Amy, does a great job of examining that controversy from a sympathetic perspective, and it features the great moment when Rodgers sheepishly comes out as a trans man to Smith and Smith responds as positively as a cishet man possibly could.

But one of my favorite queer-inclusive moments comes from Jay and Silent Bob Reboot, in which Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Kevin Smith) realize that their fictional counterparts, Bluntman and Chronic, have become queer icons with a t-shirt that depicts them as gay lovers. I really want one of those t-shirts, but I’m not a big fan of shirts that don’t show off my boobs really well.

That ‘90s Show

That ‘70s Show is a stoner classic, but being a show about the ‘70s that was made in the ‘90s, it didn’t have a ton of LGBTQ+ characters (although it had a couple here and there). The subsequent reboot, That ‘90s Show  —  which was just as much a stoner comedy as the original series — had to acknowledge that LGBTQ+ people were becoming more visible in the ‘90s.

The reboot series featured the character of Ozzie Takada (Reyn Doi), the gang’s sassy gay friend. For a show that takes place around 1995, Ozzie’s teen friends are surprisingly accepting of his sexuality, and they’re always happy to include him in the infamous stoner circle popularized by the original series.

Sadly, That ‘90s Show was recently cancelled by Netflix and, despite reports that there was a network on the verge of picking it up for a third season, there has been no official word on the series for about six months now, meaning it’s likely dead. That’s a shame, especially since the series ended on a cliffhanger, but it seems another great Netflix show has gone up in smoke.

Freaks and Geeks

Long before director Paul Feig was infuriating incels with his all-female Ghostbusters reboot, he was dabbling in television with one of the best shows to be tragically cancelled after only one season: Freaks and Geeks. The brilliant series aired for a season on NBC from 1999-2000 and featured a lot of future big-name stars before they got big, including Martin Starr, Jason Segel, Linda Cardellini, and a fresh faced, young Seth Rogen.

The series followed the lives of the two Weir children, Sam (John Francis Daley) and Lindsay (Cardellini) as they navigate their high school social circles of geeks and burnouts, respectively. Even for the late-90s/early-2000s, there was a surprising amount of unapologetic drug use for a show on a major network.

In the penultimate episode of the series, “The Little Things,” one of the burnout kids, Ken (Rogen), discovers his girlfriend is intersex, having been born with ambiguous genitalia. Despite her insistence that she is a woman and feels more comfortable as a woman, Ken has a stereotypical cishet reaction and has to go through a whole existential crisis to decide if he’s gay or not. In the end, he has to come to terms with the fact that his girlfriend’s gender is exactly what she says it is and that her intersex status doesn’t affect his sexuality whatsoever. It was a kind of revolutionary plotline that NBC only let them get away with because they knew they had no intention of renewing the show, but it managed to earn the show a nomination for a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Individual Episode.

High Fidelity (the Hulu series)

Again, I have to cheat a little because queer stoner media is not easy to come by. The 2020 Hulu adaptation of Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity didn’t feature a ton of weed use, but it definitely involved some very casual weed use that you almost don’t notice because it just seems to come naturally to the characters. But even without the heavy weed use, every version of High Fidelity has an overall slacker tone to it.

And the 2020 adaptation was certainly queer, as this version of the story turned the lead character from a straight white man (John Cusack in the 2000 film) into a bisexual biracial woman (Zoe Kravitz), which, frankly, helped it shed some of the misogynistic aspects of both the novel and the movie.

Sadly, this is yet another show that was cancelled way too soon, giving it only one season on Hulu. Does it end on a cliffhanger or does it basically wrap up the plot threads from the season? A little of both. Kravitz’s version of Rob has a solid character arc that I think culminates in the last episode pretty well. But I’ll always wonder about what could have come of this series if it kept going.

As you can see, our list isn’t as long as we’d like it to be, and even with just five entries, we still had to make a few stretches to fill up the list. So, what do we do about that? For one thing, if you’re rich, you can finance my aforementioned screenplay (seriously, I want to make this movie). But more than that, we need to make and support more media with queer people in it, media of all genres. There’s been a tendency for decades to limit LGBTQ+ people’s roles to big, sad, dramatic pieces about our own oppression, and only recently have we seen queer characters start to pop up in other types of roles. Queer people belong in all media, including stoner media, and the only way we’re going to get there is if queer people keep making media that tells our stories.