High School Musical 3 is GAY

HSM3 and Zac Efron destroy box office records, innocence

Someone scolded me for not including a spoiler alert in my last High School Musical 3: Senior Year post, so, uh, if you're that worried about part of the entirely flimsy plot being revealed, stop reading now. I promise nothing I say here should make your average queer enjoy the film any less. We're not in it for the plot. It's a musical, people. It's going to go exactly how you expect. We're there for the gay stuff.

There is no way that teenaged boys singing and dancing in sync is going to be anything but gay. They can be wearing basketball uniforms in the middle of a big game or sporting bandannas and dancing on junker cars. It doesn't matter. The only thing gayer, in fact, is one boy among a chorus line of high-kicking girls -- kicking right along. All those things happen in this movie.

I assumed everyone in the world could tell that Ryan (Lucas Grabeel, who will also appear in Milk), the impeccably clothed kid moonlighting as choreographer, was clearly queer. Then I saw the movie with a bunch of kids and their parents and realized just what a glass closet he lives in. (AfterElton's done a good job of decoding it, if you're feeling particularly challenged today.) "But where do I fit into this?" Ryan sings as his scene-stealing sister, Sharpay, announces "I want it all!" (This is not a surprise even if you never saw HSM or HSM2. Being an evil diva is Sharpay's entire characterization.) The song, probably the strongest in the film, is more than a little like RENT's "Today 4 U," and just about as gay. Or as gay as you can get in a G-rated movie, which turns out to be quite a bit, as long as no one says the word.

I try to reassure myself that there were generations of gays who watched movies -- from the '50s and '60s especially -- in which no one ever uttered the H-bomb, and we still managed to find the ones like us. Somewhere out there are many little boys who like Ryan's songs best, who go home and beg for argyle sweater vests and fedoras. There are hundreds of guys playing Ryan in high school productions of the stage show right now. I suspect they are not as clueless as Disney execs continue to pretend to be.

Zac Efron does, in fact, take his shirt off in HSM3. Apparently, though, Disney would have risked its G rating for a nip shot, so all you get is a tantalizing view of his bare back. (Here, let these fully shirtless pictures make up for it.)

I know you have no reason to believe this, but Zac Efron is actually butcher in this movie than he seems to be in real life. Which is not to say that Troy, his b-ball'ing, singing-and-dancing character, is so butch. The entire set-up of the HSM franchise is as queer as they come: Will this star athlete stand up to parental and peer pressure and embrace his musical-loving self? Will his coach-daddy still love him if he'd rather belt out a ballad than do a lay up? Will his BFF best boy forgive him if he wants to attend Julliard instead of UofA, where they'd be teammates together? (One person who is fully behind his artistic experimentation is girlfriend, Gabriella. But he's also refreshingly 100 percent supportive of her smart-girl ambitions, too. Aww, equality.)

The name of the game in HSM-world is you can, in fact, have it both ways. Hopefully that's the lesson 'mos in the making will take home with them. I'll be at a late, late screening tonight with my own 'mos, howling at all the ways we know exactly where we fit in.

The Making....


Enjoy Life, Be Free!