The Gay We Were: ‘Trick’

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. With The Gay We Were, 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.

This Week’s Film: Trick
Release Date: July 23, 1999
Directed by: Jim Fall
Written by: Jason Schafer
Starring: Christian Campbell, John Paul Pitoc, Tori Spelling, Miss Coco Peru

I’d decided to write about gay rom-coms of the ’90s — and in particular about 1999’s Trick — well before the massacre at gay club Pulse in Orlando. I watched it once a week ago, to re-familiarize myself with a film I hadn’t seen in over a decade; and I watched it again yesterday, with the events of Orlando still smoldering. It’s funny how perspective changes. A big part of Trick deals with the anxiety of the gay bar for a gay man who finds himself for whatever reason apart from the “scene” there. Christian Campbell plays Gabriel, a striving, aspiring composer of musical theater who, in the film’s first 20 minutes, walks into an NYC gay bar to gawk at the go-go boys and make incredibly awkward conversation with his fellow patrons. Of course, in the wake of Orlando, being ill at ease in a gay bar feels like being put in league with self-loathing mass killers. But I’ll be damned if this terrorist attack robs us of our God-given right to angst. Particularly that very ’90s angst that found its way into all corners of pop culture, gay and straight.

There’s been a lot of talk in the last few gays about gay bars as sanctuary, as refuge, as a second home (or in many cases a first home). That’s all true and beautiful and galvanizing. But gay bars are also simply places to come and socialize with prospective romantic partners, and as such they can be terrifying, anxious places. As with previous The Gay We Were films The Broken Hearts Club and Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, there’s a lot of emphasis made on the fact that a character isn’t like other gay men. Gabriel isn’t a queen, he’s uncomfortable with promiscuity, he doesn’t bleach his hair or wear lycra or work out. …Okay, I’ll give him “work out,” but it’s funny the way stereotypes that fall by the wayside. Or should I be bleaching my hair and shopping for some lycra tights? Nobody wants that. Either way, the point is that a lot of ’90s gay entertainment was about breaking stereotypes. Which is all well and good, even if embracing stereotypes is a lot more fun.

The angst that Gabriel feels simply talking to other gay men might make Trick seem rather self-hating, but I found it to be easily the most comfortable of the first three films in this series at speaking about gay subculture from the inside rather than the outside. Even the title trusts its audience to have a familiarity with gay culture and lingo, and the film doesn’t stop itself to define anything, a tactic that both Billy and Broken Hearts Club used often. The trick Gabriel meets is a go-go boy named Mark, who tap-dances (pole-dances?) around the trope of the hooker with a heart of gold on a few technicalities. One, he’s not a hooker. He dances for money, sure, but he’s not getting paid for sex. He and Gabriel cruise each other a bit at the bar, and when they serendipitously meet again on the subway, they decide to go back to Gabriel’s place.

From there, the movie sets out to be a one-crazy-night kind of film, where Gabriel and Mark keep getting thwarted in their attempts to hook up, by Gabriel’s roommate or Gabriel’s neuroses or Gabriel’s best friend, Katherine, played by Tori Spelling. Oh, okay, let’s talk about Tori Spelling. She never quite made it as an actress, and she never quite made it as a gay icon, and both of those dead-end roads converged here. She’s asked to play a bad actress and part-time albatross around Gabriel’s neck, but her performance is so flat-footed at every turn that it’s hard to find any delight in the bad actressing or recognition in her and Gabriel’s friendship. Even her big blow-up scene at the diner at the end of the movie sits in the uninspiring middle ground between good and so-bad-it’s-good.

The timid sex-comedy parts of the film are actually the least interesting ones. Gabriel and Mark have a sweet chemistry, but pulling Gabriel out of his shell feels like a whole lot of labor for not much on-screen reward. The parts where the movie truly comes alive, however, are when they return to the gay club. Now that Gabriel has made some kind of claim on Mark, the club shifts from a minefield of awkward encounters to a gauntlet of men trying to flirt with his man. The absolute, hands-down best scene comes courtesy of renowned drag queen Miss Coco Peru, who plays Miss Coco Peru, though this is no dog-whistle cameo for the city gays. Miss Coco corners Gabriel in the bathroom and proceeds to read Mark up and down for being a low-down dirty dog who will be out the door before the sheets cool down.

The utter maliciousness of Miss Coco in this scene was eye opening. She wasn’t the fairy-godmother do-gooders of To Wong Foo; she wasn’t the celebratory and striving queens of Priscilla; she wasn’t even RuPaul at the MTV Video Music Awards, righteously scratching at Milton Berle on our behalf. This was a drag queen being a straight up nasty bitch to our protagonist, not because drag queens are scary and not because she was just drawn this way, but because she was a person with an inner life who was hurt by a guy and is paying that hurt forward, like an actual human being does. It’s honestly a revolutionary portrayal, in addition to being deliciously performed.

That the rest of the movie can’t quite live up to Miss Coco Peru’s standard isn’t fatal, but it does make everything else feel a little paler. Gabriel and Mark are sweet together, and they accomplish the improbable by turning the earworm showtune “Enter You” that Gabriel’s been noodling all movie into something romantic between them. It’s all relatively low stakes. Gabriel learns to be … comfortable in his own skin around a hot boy? Baby steps, I guess.

When I first saw Trick, I was barely out of my teens, and I was just happy to have found a movie that felt authentically inside the gay world. The movie still ends far more chastely than is realistic, but it still doesn’t apologize for itself as its two main characters negotiate a first-sight hookup. At the tail end of the ’90s, when literally every gay piece of entertainment felt AIDS-related, that wasn’t nothing. Here’s to a movie where the only punishment for the lead characters was having to listen to Tori Spelling’s singing voice.

[You can stream Trick on YouTube.]