Brüno: Does it validate homophobia?

The biggest box office draw in America is a brutal satire of homophobic attitudes featuring “a gay lead character,” said Joe Garofoli in the San Francisco Chronicle. So why are gays so … ambivalent? Some gay-rights groups, including the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, have condemned Brüno—Sacha Baron Cohen’s follow-up to Borat—for “reinforcing negative gay stereotypes,” given that its eponymous hero is a limp-wristed fashion victim in gold short-shorts who minces across America, horrifying various unsuspecting rubes and celebrities with his lisping pronouncements about butt waxing, enthusiasm for sadomasochistic sex, and general flaming queerness. “It’s not that we don’t get it,” said Rashad Robinson of GLAAD in the Los Angeles Times. Baron Cohen’s latest prank-umentary is clearly trying to “satirize and expose homophobia.” Our problem is that it does so by means of a vile gay caricature that “ultimately affirms” many of the same stereotypes “it believes it is trying to demolish.”

I can see why you’re uncomfortable, said Dennis Lim in Slate.com. Baron Cohen’s creation is a walking compendium of all of the nastiest misconceptions about what it is to be a gay man—but that’s exactly the point. The joke is funny because this “hyperbolically crass and ridiculous narcissist” isn’t an accurate depiction of any gay men we know. The dwindling number of Americans who could believe that Brüno is a typical gay man are the butt of Baron Cohen’s joke. We’re laughing at them, not him.

I wish I could be so sure of that, said Adam Sternbergh in New York. For urban sophisticates with Ph.D.’s in semiotics, Brüno may indeed play like a brilliant piece of anti-bigotry jujitsu. But for a raucous gang of teenage boys watching the film in a suburban multiplex, it plays just as successfully like a long, bawdy, and very familiar joke about how hilarious and disgusting it is that some men have sex with other men. This “comedy two-fer-one” effect has certainly been good for Brüno’s ticket sales and Baron Cohen’s bank balance. But is it good for gays? Maybe not. Besides, said Cosmo Landesman in the London Sunday Times, it’s hardly daring of Baron Cohen to root out homophobia among evangelicals and rednecks. I’d prefer to see how Brüno’s in-your-face queerness would be received by straight people in New York or Los Angeles. How much more interesting it would be to examine the sexual anxieties of “we self-professed enlightened liberals.”

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