The Gay We Were: ‘All Over the Guy’

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: All Over the Guy
Release Date: August 10, 2001
Directed by: Julie Davis
Written by: Dan Bucatinsky
Starring: Dan Bucatinsky, Richard Ruccolo, Sasha Alexander, Adam Goldberg, Andrea Martin, Doris Roberts, Christina Ricci, Lisa Kudrow

Over the last few months, the films we’ve covered in this series have more or less adhered to a type that was common for their era. The Broken Hearts Club, Billy’s Hollywood Screen Kiss, Trick, Kissing Jessica Stein, Edge of Seventeen — all these movies fit the mold of middlebrow, urbane, more frank than in previous eras, but still wrestling with self-perception issues; though they have each diverged in one way or another. But when envisioning this series, a movie like All Over the Guy was EXACTLY what I had in mind. Despite the fact that it premiered in 2001, it is perhaps THE quintessential ’90s gay rom-com, both in its adherence to the mainstream gay sensibility of the time and the romantic comedy sensibility of the era. It’s not great, it’s not terrible, and even for an indie movie it’s cast with third-choice performers. It’s a movie you’d expect to find on a premium channel at around one in the morning.

As a concept, All Over the Guy is easily the simplest of the movies we’ve covered so far. Eli (Dan Bucatinsky) and Tom (Richard Ruccolo) get fixed up on a blind date by their straight pals Brett (Adam Goldberg) and Jackie (Sasha Alexander). It doesn’t go well — they clash over everything from grammar to Gone with the Wind — but once their friends start hooking up, they wind up in each other’s orbit enough that something sparks between then. And then come the neuroses! In what passed for a refreshing twist back then, these neuroses are not rooted in either character’s gayness, but instead take the form of some “your parents sure did a number on you” hang-ups. Tom’s WASP-y folks are cruel alcoholics; Eli’s parents have the excessively frank air of psychologists who raised their kid to be open about sex/gender/whatever. The standard rom-com push and pull ensues, with plain old fear of commitment rearing its musty head more often than not. Tom is blunt, aggressive, and a little dumb; Eli is neurotic, judgmental, and a little dorky. If the movie had been made today, my guess is that Tom and Eli would be more clearly defined along “masc” and “femme” lines, respectively, since that seems to be the intra-community contretemps of our time.

But All Over the Guy wasn’t made today; it was made while the ’90s hadn’t yet begun to fade. During the last gasp when you could have a character smoke inside a restaurant. Or when indie film quirks like having Eli and Brett constantly referring to things by their initials (Eli blurts out that Tom has “KI” for “killer eyes”) were merely a misdemeanor offense rather than the felony that they are. Or when getting-dressed-in-front-of-the-mirror montages were all the rage. (Though, seriously, Eli’s but looks really good in those khakis; I hope he wore those.)

Perhaps the most enduring aspect of the movie is the argument between Tom and Eli over the merits of the 1997 movie In & Out. As you may have noticed, re-litigating gay entertainment never goes out of style. (Ahem.) It should be said that Andrea Martin, as Eli’s mom, gets the movie’s best laugh in a callback to the In & Out argument.

What continues to fascinate me about these late-’90s gay rom-coms is how deeply ingrained the anti-promiscuity of the AIDS era had become. Time and time again, gay characters are defined as excessively reticent about sex, as a way of blatantly countering the stereotype of the sexually compulsive gay male. All Over the Guy is no different, with Tom’s promiscuity presented as essentially a symptom of his alcoholism, and Eli constantly pushing back against his the sexual openness of his parents. This kind of sexual self-consciousness is easily the most dated aspect of not only All Over the Guy but the entire genre, though I will say the payoff sex scene in All Over the Guy is both sexy and moving, so maybe it was on to something.

I should give credit to Bucatinsky and Ruccolo for their performances. Neither one of them went on to mainstream leading-man success after this, though Bucatinsky’s career in particular has been incredibly successful. Before his Emmy-winning role as James Novak on Scandal, he co-created The Comeback — and later Web Therapy — with Lisa Kudrow. Kudrow, by the way, has a cameo in All Over the Guy that is mostly notable for being pretty much exactly the same role that Eva Longoria plays in the Lake Bell movie In a World. Bucatinsky’s then-boyfriend, now-husband Don Roos (who exec produced All Over the Guy) directed the film The Opposite of Sex in 1998, making this a kind of reunion for Kudrow, Bucatinsky, and Christina Ricci, who shows up briefly as Eli’s sister. As is often the case, the gay-adjacent Opposite of Sex was better received and is more warmly regarded in the gay community than All Over the Guy ever was. Of course, before drawing any conclusions from that, it should be noted that The Opposite of Sex is a much better movie.

Ruccolo’s only claim to fame is being the guy who wasn’t Ryan Reynolds in Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place, and he does a fine job as Tom, even as you’re tempted to mentally peruse a rolodex of who might’ve starred in his place. He and Bucatinsky have genuine chemistry, though, which carries through some choppy waters. There’s a too-cutesy reference to the “Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear” rhyme that manages to succeed far beyond what it has any right to, mostly because of the actors’ chemistry and the script’s fierce commitment to rhetorical pedantry.

Every micro-genre needs its statistical mean. Its steady line down the middle, above which lie the successes and below which lie the embarrassments. All Over the Guy straddles this line with numerical precision. In all its overt fussiness, in how aggressively Okay With It the Adam Goldberg character is, in how very much the David Gray pop song strains for this-is-2001 relevance. It’s not good; it’s not bad. It’s that era of gay romantic comedies defined.

[You can stream All Over the Guy on Showtime and Amazon Prime.]