The Gay We Were: ‘The Broken Hearts Club’

The 1990s were an odd little crossroads for gay entertainment. The dominant mainstream narrative — when it paid any attention at all — trended towards the AIDS crisis and tragedy. At the same time, far from the mainstream, the cottage industry of gay romantic comedies pitched itself to a greatly underserved market. These movies barely made it to a theatrical release, and it’s fair to say that most of them weren’t great films, but they were what passed for a niche genre back then, and that makes them important. Certainly, for a child of the ’90s, they were formative in ways both good and bad. We’re going to examine this subgenre one film at a time and examine what they said about gay entertainment and the era that once was.

It seems strange to kick off this series about ’90s gay movies with a technical outlier, since it premiered in 2000, but its spirit could not be more firmly lodged in ’90s gay rom-coms. The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy is probably most notable today for being a footnote in the career of mega-producer Greg Berlanti, who currently has SIX shows on television (Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, The Mysteries of Laura, Blindspot, and Legends of Tomorrow). He wrote and directed The Broken Hearts Club, only his second professional credit, after writing and producing for Dawson’s Creek. He was 27 years old when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.

The plot sees a group of West Hollywood gay men living, loving, and complaining about every single godforsaken element of gay life. It’d be insufferable (and sometimes it is) were it not for lively writing and characters who are almost all far more endearing than their types would indicate. Over-intellectualizing, massively-neurotic Howie is the kind of guy who will bitch about the damage that gym bunnies are doing to the gay community and kick Justin Theroux out of bed for smoking pot, and still I find him so endearing as played by Matt McGrath. Maybe it’s lines like “Dumb, gorgeous people should not be able to use literature when competing in the pickup pool.” Well argued!

The major players here are Dennis (Timothy Olyphant), Patrick (Ben Weber), Cole (Dean Cain), and Kevin (Andrew Keegan), with Theroux, Billy Porter, and Zach Braff playing second-tier players, and John Mahoney as the group’s mother-hen bar owner/softball coach. If it all sounds rather sitcommy, I can’t really disagree. There’s an episodic nature to the story and a coffee-house air to the conversations. Various aspects of gay life get touched on, but while Patrick’s subplot, for example, involves surrogacy with his lesbian sister, the film generally elides the more buzzy gay topics of the day. There’s no AIDS angle, no gay-bashing, no fraught on-camera coming out to relatives. (The one coming-out story gets discussed after the fact and sets up a pretty good joke about key lime pie, so there’s that.) Rather, the film makes its subject the inner lives and identities of these guys, and the ways in which they’re constantly negotiating their place in the world, particularly in a post-closet culture. In many ways it feels like a check-in on where gay self-hatred has come since The Boys in the Band turned it into an artform. Navel-gazing? Sure. But better to have a movie where gay men looked inward than yet another movie where we were being gawked at from the outside.

Yes, it’s a movie about, handsome (mostly) white gay men fretting about their love lives. As a romantic comedy, I’m willing to cut the film a lot of slack in this area, because that’s what romantic comedies are, and because even in 2000 it’s not like even white gays had a whole lot of places to turn, culturally speaking. Olyphant is ridiculously charming as Dennis, and he maintains a self-awareness that’s essential to a guy who’s awfully preachy about the way gay guys ought to live their lives for a man who’s trying to bone a twentysomething fresh out of the closet. That’d be Andrew Keegan, star of Ten Things I Hate About You and massive teen-star pin-up; he dates this movie more specifically than any other cast member.

As with almost all gay rom-coms of this era, a certain datedness pervades the proceedings, though it’s funny that this almost never comes in the form of pop culture references. Gay rom-coms hardly ever immerse themselves in the pop culture of their own era, choosing instead the pastiche of days gone by; in The Broken Hearts Club, that translates to a Carpenters motif and repeated references to Steel Magnolias. If anything, it’s a reminder that gay culture and mainstream culture still stood far apart in 2000. What really ends up marking the time are the attitudes, though. There’s a stridency about casual sex that is quite ’90s; Dennis has a whole breakdown about selfhood rather than spend one night of purely physical gratification with the guy in the J. Crew sweater. It’s tough to reconcile this worldview with a 2016 that’s fully immersed itself in Grindr culture.

It’s almost beside the point to ask whether The Broken Hearts Club still “holds up.” Gay movies were all stepping stones leading to the next one. Certainly the film’s effortful attempts at lexicon-building feel a bit sweaty — it’s tough to tell whether Berlanti felt like he was starting a movement with terms like “meanwhile” and “hag” or whether they were specific to this group; your own mileage and generosity may vary. But at least these feel like real people with lives and concerns that seem both specifically gay yet also universal. And for a movie with no actual sex scenes, it’s undeniably sexy. Watching Dean Cain lay some heavy flirt game onto a pre-Dawson’s Creek Kerr Smith feels charged, not to mention downright educational (starts at 3:50 of below clip).

We don’t get Superman picking up guys nearly enough in today’s entertainment climate. More’s the pity.

[You can watch The Broken Hearts Club on Amazon Video.]