I want to write this film review all the same. It was a powerful experience learning even at this stage of LGBTQ liberation, when we think and act as if we've won the fight, that homophobia still has the power to rip your soul out of your body and stamp on it till it's dead. I am among the flock of gay people who roll their eyes at every new coming out story. "Good God, not another one! Talk about a story that's been done before. A million times. Can't we get on to more interesting stuff!?"
This one's really different.
This is the coming out story of Colton Underwood. Colton made a name for himself playing defensive end for the NFL. He was born in Indianapolis to a white middle class family of athletes and everything about him screams middle class white privilege. As his story unfolds, though, it becomes obvious how his status backfired. Raised a religious Catholic by loving parents, he inherited a desire to please and a belief in the importance of heterosexual normativity. Privilege, it turns out, was just another way of saying the higher up you are on the totem pole, the farther you have to fall.
His masculine looks (6'3" and 250 pounds of muscle) and charm got him a spot on reality TV. He was a contestant on the 14th season of The Bachelorette in May 2018, and then the star of the show in The Bachelor the following January. Which only meant that he would live even more in the public eye than he did as a football player, and therefore feel he had even more to lose by coming out. He says he knew from the age of six that there was something that set him apart from those around him; he became aware at a very early age that he was sexually attracted to men.
Coming Out Colton brings home in spades how entrenched homophobia is in mainstream American culture. I don't want to make too much of the two-culture theory of American social life, but Colin is clearly a product of the midwest, and not bicoastal America, despite time spent in New York and Los Angeles. LGBTQ folks from New York, Hollywood or San Francisco may have a tough time understanding how this story needs to be told now, so many years post Stonewall and Harvey Milk, but that's the whole point. That's the reason this series got under my skin. As familiar as I am with how deep-seated American homophobia can get, I still find myself being surprised at how far the struggle still has to go for a whole lot of folks, and I attribute my lack of knowledge to a lack of intimate familiarity with America's midwestern culture.
Coming out is still stressful for probably most LGBTQ folks, even those with strong constitutions, and I still need reminding that the gap is still wide between people like Colton, who can remain in the closet well into his adult life and many young people today - take the story of the boys in Heartstoppers, for example - who find lots of support as their quest to understand their sexual feelings unfolds in a way unthinkable a couple decades ago. We're a big country, with room enough for two subcultures to exist side-by-side, and I tend to forget that, living as I do in a place where I don't have to think twice about identifying my same-sex life partner as my husband. I'm a Bay Area snob who refers to the environment Colton grew up in as "a thousand miles away and thirty years back in time." If Coming Out Colton were less effectively constructed as a story I would have moved on to another Netflix offering, but I was glued to the screen from the start.
Most of us who come out as gay follow the same pattern, coming out first to ourselves, then usually to a best friend, eventually to parents and others in authority. But because reality star Colton had flaunted his claim to heterosexuality on television to the whole world, he had a much greater task ahead of him. And because he had made a complete fool of himself, stalking one of his Bachelorette girlfriends in the mistaken conviction that she was his last chance of becoming straight, he had to pick his coming out venue carefully. He chose Good Morning America. And don't miss the irony here in the label "reality star." His story is also a story of how readily we give our lives over to fantasy versions of reality.
Probably the best feature of this coming out story of a big football star and model of masculinity surrounded by adoring women is not the shock and surprise to friends and family that there is a gay man hiding in their lives. It is the point made that in coming out Colin has far more to do than tell people he's gay. He has to peel away the layers of inauthenticity he has covered himself with for nearly thirty years. "Finding oneself" is a cliché. But clichés begin with real meaning, and there's something quite moving about watching a fully-grown man undergo the discovery process.
The reviews of his appearance on Good Morning America were mixed. He got his full share of public support, but he also encountered a whole lot of cynicism. Many thought he was just another miserable attention-getter, doing it for the publicity. Who the hell are you to think you're so damned important? Who are you to make so much of yourself? Those messages came through in twitter comments, and as much as he thought he was prepared for all the publicity, he wasn't. There was still some distance to go before he hit bottom.
There is something about this series that keeps me from showing unalloyed enthusiasm for the story, and that is the strong suspicion that all this coming out was staged. Did Colton actually get the people he comes out to to agree to be filmed before he confronted them with the shocking information? If so, shame on them for not telling us that the reactions are not authentic.
Because the quality of the production is so high and because it's basically about Colton's search for personal authenticity, I have to assume Colton's years in reality television gave him the wherewithal he needed to get his family and friends to sit with cameras running. In which case, bravo! But I'm still not convinced this quest for authenticity is authentic. They hold back. They don't tell us, for example, as Colton's Wikipedia page does, that he attributed his recovery from Covid to hydroxychloroquine, which makes me wonder if the producers felt a need to pretty things up a bit. They also don't give us any details about his sex life after coming out, but that may be because it would be a distraction, something you'd expect more from a reality show than from a serious study of a quest for authenticity. And the aspects of the personalities we get to see of his mother, father, friends and coaches make them all out to be almost heroic. Why, one has to wonder, would Colton find it so necessary to go back to his high school coach and relive the agonies of the locker room, for example, if these people were all the warm and supporting characters we see today. Something has been touched up.
At least one reviewer was more put off by the staginess of the production. Read Justin Kirkland's review in Esquire for a much harsher take on this show. Kirkland thinks Colton is not so much seeking authenticity as grabbing a money-making opportunity. To my surprise, I'm not that cynical. But his review reminded me to ask myself who the intended audience for this series is. Is it just another piece of didactic American television? A how-to for LGBT kids out of reach of bi-coastal culture? A bit of balance against the overwhelmingly straight world of reality TV? Or, as Kirkland suggests, a phony taking an ordinary coming out story and blowing it out of proportion? I'm going to argue it's a story worth watching of a not-quite-ready-for-prime-time American, one who says things like "between you and I" and misses the boat on a number of fronts, an imperfect being, and if he makes a few bucks on the deal, that doesn't make him a monster; it makes him an American entrepreneur.
One of the episodes stood out, for me, as more powerful - head and shoulders more - than the others, precisely because it was not touched up (unless it's not his real priest talking - which is, admittedly, possible) and that was the one in which Colton comes out to his parish priest. Colton makes clear that he wants to keep a strong connection with his church and that he sees coming out as something he would not have been able to accomplish without God's help. Watching Colton's face as the priest tells him he cannot be gay and Catholic brought me to tears. I won't go into what happens next - you'll have to watch the series for that. But it's a poignant part of the story.
Watch it. And tell me: Is this all a grand put-on? Or the best coming-out story you've seen in a long time.
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