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Grappling with one’s feelings about the Kevin Kline comedy In & Out is a gay rite of passage, as evidenced by previous analyses here on Decider. Is a 20-year-old comedy really worth so many words? I think so, since Hollywood still makes so few queer-centric movies that we gotta look to 20-year-old movies for representation. That being said, In & Out remains one of the best depictions of coming out that I’ve seen and, as I discovered re-watching it on its 20th anniversary, I needed to live another decade as a gay man before truly appreciating this film. If you need a refresher on what In & Out is about, here’s the Amazon summary:
A former student who’s now a superstar actor tells an audience of millions that Howard is gay. Poor Howard. He’s outted when he didn’t know he was in! Kevin Kline plays stunned Howard, scrambling to go forth with his wedding to devoted Emily (Joan Cusack) and doing his frantic best to assert his manliness.
That’s pretty much it, although that summary leaves Howard’s conclusion about his sexuality up in the air. Spoiler alert (?): Howard is way gay, and that reveal comes a little past the halfway mark. This movie doesn’t culminate with a coming out. It actually deals with what happens next, which was a bold move for a major studio movie in 1997. And I just realized that 1997 had more hit films with an overt, indisputable LGBTQ lead (1) than 2017 has had so far (0). We’ve come so far? Sigh.
I missed In & Out when it opened in September 1997 because I was an 8th grader growing up in a Southern Baptist family in suburban Tennessee. I internalized the yucks and groans this movie elicited from those around me, ensuring that I would remain closeted for another 8 years. I decided to watch the film in 2007, right after coming out to myself and close friends but before I came out to my family. I cringed at every stereotypically gay moment. Why does Howard Brackett (Kline) have to like Barbra Streisand and why couldn’t he dance to the B-52’s and not “I Will Survive”? I was angry that Howard wasn’t my subgenre of gay. I now get that Howard goes through a cycle of self-acceptance in 90 minutes that took me another decade to get through. Also I hadn’t seen I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry a decade ago, and I didn’t really know what offensive gay stereotypes looked like.
For gay men, coming out is inextricably tied to masculinity. Either we’ve never lived up to the masculine ideal and being gay is an admission of “defeat,” or we use masculinity as a shield against our feelings. In & Out isn’t just a movie about coming out; it’s a movie about performative masculinity and the way they disrupt our lives. The film repeatedly lists adjectives that separate gay men from straight men. Gay men, like Howard, are prissy, smart, well-dressed, really clean, decent human beings, like poetry and Shakespeare, and use napkins. Straight men, on the other hand do not dance, avoid rhythm, avoid grace, avoid pleasure, work, drink, have bad backs, and get disgustingly, puking drunk. Those are a lot of rules!
Those rules, however, are readily broken by Howard’s straight buds during his bachelor party. A gay-panicked Howard barges into his party, gropes a blow-up doll, grabs a cigar, and gets ready to watch porn. His friends, instead, present him with the Streisand classic Funny Girl.
When Howard shoves the album away, his friends are confused because Howard actually got them to like Streisand. They offer to watch A Star is Born instead and, in a fantastic subversion of masculinity, Howard gets into a fistfight when someone comes after Yentl. These guys were eager, even pumped, to partake in some Barbra for Howard’s bachelor party. In & Out posits that while there is truth in stereotypes, the rules aren’t hard and fast. Liking Streisand doesn’t automatically make you gay, and–as the Spartacus-style finale illustrates–the assumption that gayness spreads like a virus is ludicrous. These guys hung out with Howard and all they caught was a fondness for show tunes, and they’re comfortable enough in their masculinity to embrace it.
All this comes to a head when Howard buys a self-help tape titled Be a Man: Exploring Your Masculinity. The tape instructs him to partially untuck his plaid flannel shirt, adjust himself, and resist dancing to Diana Ross’ cover of the gay anthem “I Will Survive.”
This sequence is one of the film’s defining moments (along with Kline’s extended lip-lock with an unfortunately clean-shaven Tom Selleck). It distills the argument around toxic masculinity down to its core: men aren’t allowed to enjoy themselves (for nebulous reasons). Why resist dancing? Does dancing make you less of a man? Does being gay make you less of a man? When Howard cuts loose, Kline sells it. Howard is alive. He’s not a fantastic dancer, but he’s finally free of his masculinity cage. He can tuck his flannel in and smoke cigars while watching Funny Girl with the boys if he wants.
So if Howard’s students love him in all of his poetry reciting, bike-riding, bowtie-wearing glory and his bros support his more fabulous inclinations, what’s changes? Howard gets unwillingly labeled as gay, and straight people have an invasive fixation on being gay. As soon as his former student Cameron Drake (Matt Dillon) outs him during his Academy Award acceptance speech, everyone gets in Howard’s business, which sucks because Howard tries to maintain a by-the-books life. That’s why he’s engaged to a woman! Now news anchors are tracking him down at the high school to ask him ridiculous questions (“Do you know Ellen?” “Should gays be allowed to handle fresh produce?”). His dad even asks him if he’s “going to get an operation” (!).
Howard is suddenly the go-to guy for all gay questions, no matter how personal they are. I didn’t know how true this was 10 years ago, but after going through the full coming out process, I can definitively say that this happens. People ask invasive questions or, even more bafflingly, preemptively proclaim that they don’t want to know details about your sex life–a.k.a. info you were never going to offer up. This happens when one of Howard’s students (a pre-Wet Hot American Summer Zak Orth) engages in graphic locker room talk about “plumbing” and the body having in and out holes that gay people pervert. Coming out apparently causes straight people to picture you doing it, which is more than enough reason for a proper guy like Howard to never, ever confront his sexuality privately or publicly.
It turns out that this whirlwind is exactly what Howard needed to finally deal with the feelings that his tiny Indiana town was never going to push him to question. Howard meets a comfortably gay entertainment news anchor (Selleck, playing a gay character without his iconic mustache, I’m not letting this go) that shows him what being an out, gay, professional could look like–and he shows Howard by giving him a twelve-second smooch (one that prompts Kline to awkwardly wrap his leg around Selleck’s body). Howard knows what’s up, and he comes out at his wedding. Instead of saying “I do,” he says:
There’s a fantastic moment right after he comes out. Howard, still in a daze after finally saying the words he never knew he desperately needed to say, catches his hand doing limp, sissy thing while he lists everyone he just came out to. “Look at my hand,” he says in confusion. Right after you come out, you feel like a stranger in your own body. You notice things, like how you walk or talk, things you may have noticed before but they’re flaming now. That hand moment is exactly what I felt in the years after coming out, as I got to know myself after learning this major thing. The specificity in that moment is no doubt owed to the screenwriter, gay playwright Paul Rudnick. While Kline and director Frank Oz aren’t gay, Rudnick’s script captures the internal intricacy of coming out and that’s what makes In & Out still resonate 20 years later.
What’s fascinating to me is just how much more progressive In & Out feels compared to a film that came out ten years later (ugh). For one thing, In & Out is actually about a gay man and written by a gay man. It’s also legitimately funny, like Steven Seagal’s Oscar-nominated movie being titled Snowball In Hell or Howard’s mom (Debbie Reynolds) revealing how weddings really make her feel:
The film’s main conflict is also–unfortunately and upsettingly–still relevant. The principal of Howard’s high school (played by one of my absolute heroes, Bob Newhart) ends up firing him for being gay after feeling pressure from the community. That still happens today. We should be much further along, shouldn’t we? The happy ending comes when the entire town, students and parents, stand up and “come out” as gay to show that they love and accept Howard.
I know I could get into some nitpicking about how, like, the queer language around coming out shouldn’t be co-opted by straight people or something, but then I think about how powerful it would be for me to see the straight people in my life do this exact thing for me, and… okay, I get emotional. I’ve now gone through what Howard’s gone through, and I’ve come out the other side of coming out. I like Howard more today than I did 10 or 20 years ago, and that’s why the ending works. It’s clunky and I’m sure there’s a hot take that could light it up, but it’s all heart and it gives me, if only for a few minutes, hope that everything is gonna be all right.
