Gay people always have their eyes on the future: they’re almost always first to hop on the next big trend, they’re always thinking about the next place they’ll live, or the next big phase in their lives. It seems silly, then, that gay people in college or toiling away in the city to save money or school would “dream big” for a major that has about three times as many degree-holding graduates as there are jobs in the field.
But the truth is that gay people don’t get film degrees so that they can be in movies or make them; they do what every gay person hopes to achieve with a liberal arts degree: become a well-rounded conversationalist. A connoisseur of culture, so to speak. It’s about having elite friends; as far as finding work, there’s always grad school, nonprofits, the Peace Corps… whatever. But with a film degree, you can be highly opinionated, yet avoiding politics, which ensures that you won’t put too many people off. You can also be theatrical, yet avoiding theater, so you escape being labeled since every gay man who has appeared on stage is a raging bottom.
Film studies majors are experts at navigating the gateway to the intellectual class. Highly ambitious, hard-working people simply do not have the time to sit around and watch every godawful indie movie that happens to exist. They want you to recommend only the best ones – the ones that will make them really cultured and refined – and as a film studies major, you are just the person to do it. You are in demand! It doesn’t matter if your “clients” actually like those movies; they will take your word for it that they were good, and tell everyone they loved them. They also want you to tell them that the braindead pop movies that they love like Zombieland or The Watchmen had a subtle, deeper social value, and as a film studies major, you are just the one who can give this to them. All you have to do to have all this is spend your life watching eight movies per week.
One of the things that gay people absolutely love to do is find gay subtext in everything. Even if a writer or director explicitly states that the two guys who became friends in the movie did not have a secret romance, gay men will decide that the writer’s subconscious was speaking and yes, yes they were almost certainly going to have sex after the end of the film. Thus everything from X-Men to Rebel Without a Cause is an analogy for the gay experience.
A final appeal of being gay and in film school is the fact that all the straight guys there are totally metro. That enables a gay person to accumulate a significant posse of “straight guy friends” without having to expend much effort butching himself up. Having straight male friends is thought to be sexy to other gay men who want to be sure you’re not “just one of the girls.” Though said straight friends in film school will be waify hipsters in spite of their heterosexualness, having them around somehow still counts as a masculine trait to gay guys… just roll with it.Stuff Gay People Like (SGPL: ABOUT) is a regular column. Visit the Facebook Page or view the whole list. @StuffGayPplLike/#SGPL on Twitter.
