The Gay We Were: ‘The Opposite of Sex’

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: The Opposite of Sex
Release Date: May 29, 1998
Directed by: Don Roos
Written by: Don Roos
Starring: Christina Ricci, Martin Donovan, Lisa Kudrow, Ivan Sergei, Johnny Galecki, Lyle Lovett

The Opposite of Sex is an appropriate movie for this series only on the most technical of grounds. It’s definitely a ’90s movie, but of the three operative words in “gay romantic comedy,” The Opposite of Sex has an interesting relationship with the first, a strong relationship with the last, and a dark-hearted aversion to the middle one. Or at least it wants you to think so. Writer/director Don Roos had written an inscrutably varied collection of screenplays before making The Opposite of Sex his first directorial effort: the near-campy thriller Single White Female; the middlebrow Michelle Pfeiffer Oscar-bait Love Field; the poorly received thriller remake Diabolique; and the ladies-on-the-road movie Boys on the Side. The only real throughline there is that all four films were exclusively focused on female characters. And while gayness is central to the plot of The Opposite of Sex, it comes most vibrantly alive when it’s following its two female characters.

Sixteen-year-old DeDee (Christina Ricci) is the film’s main character and contemptuous narrator, who kicks off the film by throwing a folding chair into her step-daddy’s open grave and ends up moving in with her older, gay half-brother Bill (Martin Donovan), whom she likes as much as she likes anybody. Doesn’t stop her from stealing Bill’s younger boyfriend Matt (Ivan Sergei) away from him, getting pregnant, and running away with him, stealing money from Bill in the process. Meanwhile, Matt’s other boyfriend Jason (Johnny Galecki) pitches a fit, blames Bill for Matt’s disappearance, and accuses him of sexual abuse until he can get Matt to return. And this is all going down under the withering, judgy eye of Lucia (Lisa Kudrow), who is the sister of Bill’s late boyfriend Tom and Bill’s closest friend. That’s a lot going on, and sexuality is central to it, but calling this a gay rom-com, or even a gay sex comedy, feels like a mischaracterization, at least on a plot level. On an audience level, however, this is a massively gay movie, pitched right down the middle for an audience that will watch a story about two men and their romantic foibles but will DEVOUR a story about a hell-raising, foul-mouthed Lolita type who stomps into a happy home and fucks it all up.

The psychology of why gay audiences go wild for a character like DeDee is almost certainly above my pay grade, but watching it play out, it feels right. The character isn’t nice; she’s borderline hostile to her gay brother, freely using words like “fairy” and “faggy” and vocalizing her AIDS panic (if only because she knows it’ll get under Lucia). But she’s also a teenage girl with zero economic advantages who’s managed to wrap her entire world around her finger, and it’s that kind of harnessing of one’s marginalized power that definitely appeals to gay men, or at the the very least Britney Spears fans. There’s also the fact that this is a movie that’s saying that in order to get at deeper truths, you have to plow through P.C. language barriers, and while you may or may not agree with that, DeDee most certainly becomes a catalyst for the rest of the characters in the film.

The queerness of the film comes through in its attitude. Roos’ writing is exhilaratingly sharp, and not just for DeDee, though she does get some scorchers. “I don’t have a heart of gold, and I don’t grow one later,” she assures us from the break. Roos is remarkably generous in writing for all his characters. Like even dumb ol’ Matt, when asked if he ever tried sex with a woman, responds, “I never tried communism, but I know I wouldn’t like that. It’s the same thing. Or grits.”

But Roos saves his best writing for Lucia, and Kudrow is more than up to the task. Watching the movie again — and in my mid-30s instead of my mid-20s — the film really belongs to Lucia, who is utterly pitiless towards the scheming DeDee (and the dunderheaded Matt, really) from the outset. She’s defending Bill, yes, but she’s also just massively unhappy and angry — that her brother is dead; that the rest of her family was always so horrible to her; that Bill doesn’t appreciate her; that Bill is so willing to be a doormat for Matt and DeDee. All with some truly lacerating takedowns along the way. This culminates in a killer monologue from Lucia about how she doesn’t understand why sex is seemingly worth all the mess and destruction it leaves in its wake. Sex killed her brother. Sex has left Bill burgled and accused about to lose his job. And when Bill tries to tell her it’s more than sex with Matt, she won’t back down. “Call things by their right name,” she tells him. Kudrow won the New York Film Critics Circle prize for Best Supporting Actress for this movie, and she deserved to win a lot more.

The beauty of Roos’ script is that no one character totally gets it. No one character explains it all. Bill and Lucia and DeDee and Matt each get something to contribute to a kind of cobbled-together truth about sex and relationships. DeDee’s attractive cynicism rings hollow, yes, but so does Bill’s saintly priggishness. And while the shadow of Tom’s death (and the AIDS crisis it represents) looms over so much of the film, the end of the movie suggests a refreshing frankness about the role of sex in relationships. “This thing between you and Jason, it’s just sex,” Bill lectures Matt at one point. “Yeah,” Matt responds, “you know that stuff you’re breathing? It’s just oxygen.” Nearing the end of a decade spent hearing “sex kills,” The Opposite of Sex suggests a window to the other side, and it’s just about the most hopeful thing that this wonderfully dark movie has to offer.

[The Opposite of Sex is currently streaming on Amazon Video.]