I almost quit early.

Not out of offense. Out of boredom. The opening stretches move fast and loud. Beautiful men. Perfect bodies. Sex scenes stacked close enough together that my thumb kept hovering, trained by years of scrolling to skip ahead. Everyone is objectively hot in a way that starts to feel impersonal. Efficient. Disposable. Like the story knows exactly what it’s doing and is content to keep doing it.

If you stop there, you’ll think you know what this is.

You don’t.

You have to push through.

I came to Heated Rivalry without having read any of the books in the Rachel Reid series. No loyalty. No prior affection. No interest in defending it. That turns out to be exactly the right posture, because the show assumes you might leave. It lets you underestimate it. It even encourages that mistake.

Then it quietly refuses to stay shallow.

Early on, sex is the engine. Explicit enough to feel like the main attraction. Frequent enough to feel repetitive. That’s deliberate. You’re meant to read it as spectacle at first. But over time, something shifts. The sex scenes begin to fade to black, not because the show gets coy, but because it no longer needs them. By then, you already know these men are in love. You see it in how they speak to each other, how they fight, how they circle back. Sex becomes confirmation, not propulsion.

That transition is easy to miss if you leave early. And that’s the point.

What Heated Rivalry is actually doing isn’t rearranging sexual roles for shock value. The old top-versus-bottom obsession is played out. What’s far more interesting, and clearly deliberate, is how masculinity itself is portrayed. Across both relationships, the same quiet argument keeps surfacing: real strength isn’t swagger, force, or performance. It’s steadiness.

Kip makes that clear almost immediately.

He isn’t dazzled by Scott’s fame. He isn’t intimidated by it either. That alone cuts against a deep cultural reflex. The famous athlete is supposed to carry the power. Kip refuses the premise. When he draws the line. I’m not willing to be closeted for you. it isn’t framed as rebellion or ultimatum. It’s self-respect. Calm. Non-negotiable.

That’s masculinity in a classic sense. Knowing who you are. Knowing what you will and won’t accept. Being willing to walk if necessary.

Scott, by contrast, is the one burdened with the stereotypical baggage. He’s the star athlete, but he’s also closeted, careful, scared. When they’re alone, the swagger drains out of him. Public confidence doesn’t translate into private ease. The power dynamic everyone expects collapses the moment no one’s watching.

The same pattern repeats with Shane and Ilya.

On paper, Ilya looks like the obvious center of gravity. Big personality. Loud. Charismatic. He talks openly about liking both women and men while insisting he could never be open in practice. It isn’t confusion. It’s armor. He understands the cost of visibility before he understands the value of choosing it. His confidence early on is performative. Protective. Designed to keep the world at arm’s length.

Shane is the opposite.

He’s elite. First-class athlete. Physical authority without question. And yet there’s no swagger. He’s kind. Thoughtful. Considerate. He listens. He doesn’t posture. Crucially, the show never codes that decency as weakness or passivity. Shane doesn’t give off “bottom energy” because the show refuses the idea that emotional literacy diminishes masculinity.

In fact, no one in either relationship gives off “bottom energy” at all. Everyone is grounded. Assured. Self-directed. Which is why it’s genuinely surprising when our assumptions about traditional roles quietly fail. Ilya’s swagger doesn’t disappear in private. It follows him into the bedroom even when he’s the more passive partner. The same is true with Kip and Scott. Confidence and dominance don’t map cleanly onto position, and the show never pretends they should.

I realized some of my surprise wasn’t really about the characters at all, but about the fantasies I’d absorbed. A whole generation of gay men grew up eroticizing force. I know it may be trite, but for me the Russian accent still conjures Ivan Drago in Rocky IV. The idea that masculinity announces itself through physical domination, dragging you off with a grunt and a threat. “If he dies, he dies.” That script runs deep, even when we think we’ve outgrown it.

Heated Rivalry doesn’t mock that fantasy. It simply outgrows it. What replaces it isn’t softness or passivity, but flexibility. Swagger without fragility. Desire without hierarchy. Men confident enough that intimacy doesn’t require reenacting power.

Late in the story, when Shane bottoms for Ilya, it doesn’t read as reversal or revelation. It reads as trust. As choice. As heat without hierarchy. The moment works because masculinity here isn’t tied to position, control, or performance. It’s tied to confidence. And confidence, the show insists, is flexible.

Ilya’s growth mirrors that philosophy.

What finally changes him isn’t pressure or persuasion. It’s example. When Scott kisses Kip at the end of the championship game, it lands like a permission structure snapping into place. Someone went first. Someone survived. You can feel Shane and Ilya watching the future become visible. Suddenly the risks feel survivable. That’s why Ilya’s decision to go to the cottage matters so much. He refuses at first because refusal has always kept him safe. Saying yes later isn’t surrender. It’s growth. It’s him choosing presence over distance once he understands the world won’t end.

Across both couples, the men with less public power are the ones most at ease with themselves. The men with fame, status, and external validation are the ones carrying fear. Strength consistently lives with those who know themselves well enough to set boundaries and keep them.

That’s not accidental.

And it explains why the sex recedes. Once you understand how these men relate to power, intimacy no longer needs spectacle. You don’t need anatomy or choreography. You already know what’s happening. Love becomes legible in tone, routine, memory, and care. Sex becomes a subplot because the relationships have outgrown the need to prove themselves.

Is this Emmy-worthy? No. It isn’t trying to be prestige television. Will it single-handedly change the narrative for gay men? Probably not.

What it does instead is quieter, and in some ways more useful.

It tells a happy story.

With a happy ending.

That doesn’t apologize for itself.

In a media landscape where gay male stories are so often tragic, ironic, or conditional, that refusal still matters. The refusal to punish desire. The refusal to equate masculinity with damage. The refusal to confuse swagger with strength.

You can stop early and dismiss Heated Rivalry as surface-level fantasy. But if you stay long enough, the fantasy changes shape. It becomes a story about men who are strong without being brittle, confident without being cruel, and secure enough to insist on being fully known.

That may not be revolutionary.

But it is deliberate.

And that makes it powerful in its own way.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

I grew up inside two Christmases.

One was the world my family built. Smilax pulled from the woods and wired into submission. Colored lights blazing from every surface. Radko ornaments catching fire in the glow. Elders drifting through the house like benevolent ghosts, appearing suddenly with trays or opinions. My aunt launching the season sometime in October, whether the calendar approved or not.

That Christmas was sensory, generational, handmade. It smelled like Aromatique and cedar and floral wire and the faint metallic heat of light bulbs that had been plugged in too long. It was loud. It was overdone. It was earnest. It assumed, without question, that Christmas was something you did, not something that merely arrived.

Preparation was the point. Excess was the language. If you weren’t exhausted by December 24th, you hadn’t taken it seriously enough.

The other Christmas lived on the screen.

It was written by John Hughes.

And the older I get, the more I realize how astonishingly those two worlds mirrored each other. Comedically. Chaotically. Tenderly. Accidentally. As if the Griswolds were running a parallel simulation of my childhood just a few states north, populated by different furniture but governed by the same emotional physics.

Hughes understood something I wouldn’t have language for until adulthood:

Christmas is the season when the entire family system rises or collapses under the weight of its own longing.

And National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation may be the purest expression of that truth ever put on film.

It was supposed to be silly.

But it was also, somehow, a documentary.

The Gospel According to John Hughes

People often misremember who actually wrote the early National Lampoon vacation films. Harold Ramis, an original Lampoon founder, looms large in the mythology, and rightly so. But he didn’t write the first three movies. Those scripts—Vacation, European Vacation, and Christmas Vacation—came from John Hughes.

Hughes, patron saint of American nostalgia and suburban emotional truth, understood families the way botanists understand ecosystems: every moving part connected, every dysfunction rooted in love, every ridiculous incident growing out of something tender and unresolved. He understood that nothing truly absurd happens inside a family unless something sincere caused it first.

Who else could have created Clark Griswold, a man undone not by selfishness, but by devotion?

Hughes also understood the holiday myth better than anyone:

The optimism.

The chaos.

The yearning.

The fear that this year won’t live up to the last.

The belief that the perfect Christmas will fix what daily life cannot.

Christmas, in Hughes’s universe, is not a reward. It’s a test.

It asks families to perform themselves at maximum intensity. To compress memory, tradition, obligation, resentment, hope, grief, and joy into a narrow window of time and pretend this compression is festive rather than dangerous.

And Hughes wrapped all of that in slapstick so the truth wouldn’t sting.

The turkey explodes so we don’t have to talk about disappointment.

The cat electrocutes itself so we don’t have to talk about exhaustion.

The lights fail so we don’t have to talk about how badly Clark needs this to work.

Hughes built Christmas universes on film the same way my family built them at home: through excess, earnestness, and an absolute refusal to give up on the idea that magic could be engineered through brute force and goodwill.

Nothing in Christmas Vacation is accidental. Not the clutter. Not the noise. Not the endless procession of relatives. Not the way every good intention becomes another logistical problem.

Hughes wasn’t mocking Christmas.

He was defending it.

The Griswolds: My Accidental Cinematic Cousins

The Griswolds were, in their own way, us.

Not exactly. My mother never turned a turkey into a geological specimen, and my father didn’t grease a sled with experimental lubricant. But the emotional beats were identical.

Old people coming to stay.

Kids sharing rooms.

A house suddenly overfull and unmanageable.

A parent who wanted, desperately, to make it perfect.

In our world, my great-grandmother and her sister arrived each December with enough luggage to make you wonder when they actually planned to leave. Beds shifted. Rooms rearranged. The house expanded like a lung. Privacy dissolved. Hallways became thoroughfares. Everyone learned to knock with their voices instead of their hands.

This woman, who woke at five every morning of her life, chose Christmas morning as the exception. My sister and I whispered in the living room, muttering WHY TODAY? while adults negotiated reality under their breath.

Clark Griswold would have understood.

And then there were Rusty and Audrey, recast for the third time with no explanation, no apology, and no continuity. We got Juliette Lewis, already exhausted beyond her years, and Johnny Galecki, still soft with childhood. We accepted them instantly, because Hughes never asked us to believe in the Griswolds’ faces.

Only their energy.

That was always enough.

We once amputated the top of my aunt’s Christmas tree because it was too tall for her living room. She shrugged and called it her “Christmas shrub,” as if nothing catastrophic had occurred. No mourning period. No apology. Just immediate narrative control.

John Hughes couldn’t have scripted a better visual joke.

It’s a Wonderful Life played endlessly in the background, just as it does in the film, because in the eighties it ran so continuously that it felt less like a movie and more like a hostage situation. Hughes wasn’t exaggerating. The film became part of the architecture of December.

In my family, the cast didn’t change, but the roles did. One year you were assigned stockings. The next, greenery. The next, full orchestration of the Snow Village. December was its own annual recasting, each of us stepping into new parts as the years required.

That’s Hughes’s real genius. Everyone sees their own family in Christmas Vacation. Not in the details, but in the energy. The chaos. The hopefulness. The frayed nerves. The unresolved arguments. The desperate desire to make one perfect memory.

Hughes understood that the holidays don’t make families better or worse.

They just make them unmistakably themselves.

Clark Griswold, Patron Saint of Trying Too Hard

Clark’s frantic desire to create the perfect Christmas never struck me as absurd.

It struck me as familiar.

He planned.

Clipped.

Wired.

Wrapped.

Schemed.

Imagined.

He wanted everyone to feel what he once felt: the purity of childhood wonder. He wanted to build a holiday big enough, bright enough, warm enough to contain everyone he loved.

That wasn’t comedy to me as a child.

It was devotion.

By the time I became a parent, I recognized Clark with uncomfortable clarity. The mania. The tenderness. The longing. The belief—naive or noble—that magic could be constructed through sheer force of will.

Clark wasn’t a fool.

He was every parent who once felt joy so deeply they spent the rest of their lives trying to recreate it. He was the embodiment of what happens when memory becomes a blueprint instead of a gift.

My Griswold Era: The Village, the Moose Cups, the Ornaments

At some point, my affection for the film became material.

I own the full Christmas Vacation snow village. The Griswold house. The RV. The garage. The yard. It glows on my sideboard each December like a porcelain terrarium, frozen in permanent suburban crisis.

I own the moose punch cups, because if a movie offers you a drinking vessel shaped like a joyful woodland creature, you show respect.

And I own every Hallmark Christmas Vacation ornament ever produced.

Clark on the ladder.

Eddie with the hose.

The exploded turkey.

The squirrel.

The station wagon with the tree.

I didn’t set out to collect them. They simply gathered around me the way traditions do. Quietly. Persistently. Inevitably.

These objects aren’t kitsch.

They’re evidence.

They say: I lived long enough to find this funny. I survived enough Christmases to understand the joke isn’t cruelty.

It’s recognition.

The Advent House: A Decoration, a Quest, a Quiet Theology

There is a small but crucial object in Christmas Vacation that almost no one talks about.

The Advent House.

It sits on a sideboard. It’s lit from within. It doesn’t move. Each day in December, one tiny window opens until Christmas arrives.

Some Advent houses hold candy. Some hold trinkets. This one holds vintage Christmas images. Old Santas. Snowy streets. A slow reveal.

In the movie, the kids open a window each day. Nothing explodes. Nothing goes wrong. No punchline. Just a small, steady ritual that exists entirely outside Clark’s chaos.

That detail mattered to me more than I realized.

Years later, my desire for that Advent House turned into something unhinged. A man online promised replicas. Deposits were paid. He disappeared.

Clark would have understood.

Eventually, through a Christmas Vacation forum—the kind that predated Reddit and rewarded persistence rather than algorithms—I found someone who built them by hand. With reverence. With restraint.

In South Carolina.

Ten minutes from where I grew up. It felt improbable enough to be meaningful.

I ordered one immediately, then waited. Weeks. Months. It was finally ready in October. I asked my mother to pick it up so I wouldn’t have to pay shipping. She laughed, but agreed.

When she walked into the workshop and saw it, she bought one for herself.

Not because she needed it.

Because she recognized it.

Today, my Advent House sits glowing through December. Hers sits in her dining room, dignified and exact. And occasionally, my younger niece or nephew opens the windows, blissfully unaware of the mythology behind them.

Magic doesn’t need an origin story.

It just needs someone willing to open the next door.

Aunt Bethany and the Holiness of Chaos

One last piece of trivia, because John Hughes never missed a detail:

Aunt Bethany was played by Mae Questel, the original voice of Betty Boop.

The Griswold Christmas is literally blessed by American animation royalty.

It fits.

This movie is camp and chaos and sentiment in equal measure. So was my childhood.

My family Christmas was beautiful because it tried too hard. The Griswolds made me feel better about every Christmas that didn’t. And John Hughes gave us a holiday gospel about longing, love, and the wild, impossible hope that this year, finally, the lights will come on.

And usually, they do.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

There’s a moment every December (or sometimes October) when the season finally begins for me. Not when the tree goes up, not when the temperatures drop, but in the instant those first driving notes of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” burst through the speakers. Nothing else comes close. Not the crooners, not the hymns, not the curated holiday playlists designed to smell like a scented candle.

It’s Darlene Love — that voice, that ache, and that impossible wall of sound behind her — that signals the shift into Christmas.

The history is complicated. Phil Spector was a visionary producer, yes, but also a violent, paranoid man who eventually became a murderer. There is no separating the brilliance from the destruction. Yet the music remains, because its emotional force didn’t come from Spector’s control. It came from the human beings whose voices and labor filled those rooms — most of all, Darlene Love herself.

To understand why this song still lives at the center of the season, and why the final Letterman performance has become its own form of secular liturgy, you have to go back to the beginning. To the rooms where the music was physically built. To the woman whose voice could overpower an entire production apparatus. And to one claymation parody that, against all odds, treated the tradition with absolute sincerity.

This is the story of maximalism, longing, and the strange lineage of American Christmas music — a lineage that begins with bodies packed into a studio and ends, fittingly, on the stage of one of the last great temples of television spectacle.

Rooms Filled with People: The Physics of Early Pop

Before stereo.

Before multitrack recording.

Before digital layering.

Before a single producer in sweatpants could build a cathedral of sound on a laptop.

If you wanted a bigger record in the early 1960s, you didn’t reach for plugins. You reached for people.

More guitars playing the same line in unison.

More drummers driving identical rhythms.

More pianos stacked on top of one another.

And, crucially, more singers — the Spectorettes — to create that massive, shimmering choral blend.

The Wall of Sound wasn’t an abstraction. It was manpower. It was bodies generating air pressure in a confined studio until the tape could barely hold the energy. That is why the records overwhelm you. They were built to overwhelm you.

And then Tina Turner arrived — the clearest proof that one human voice could rival the machinery built to amplify it.

Tina Turner and the Human Wall of Sound

There’s a moment in What’s Love Got to Do with It that captures something essential about Tina Turner’s early career. She’s putting on her makeup backstage before a performance. Phil Spector watches her through the mirror. The film plays it as subtle, almost playful, but beneath it is a harsher truth: it’s the first time a powerful man in the industry says to Ike Turner, implicitly, what Ike feared most:

“No. I only want her.”

Not the revue.

Not the brand.

Not the choreography or the structure that Ike controlled.

Just Tina.

You can see the realization flicker across Ike’s face. Someone with musical authority has named what everyone already knows: Tina Turner is the gravitational center of the act.

Spector may have been unstable and, ultimately, dangerous, but he understood instantly that Tina didn’t need the machinery he built. She didn’t need the Spectorettes or the stacked guitars or the echo chamber at Gold Star Studios. She didn’t need a wall of sound.

Because she was one.

You hear this with full clarity on “River Deep, Mountain High.” Spector threw his entire sonic arsenal at the track — the orchestra, the choir, the roaring percussion — and Tina still rises above it like a supernova. It’s the moment the system admits what it cannot contain: one voice can overpower the architecture meant to support it.

The record flopped in the U.S.

Spector unraveled.

Tina moved forward.

But the truth of that recording remains: it is the clearest demonstration of what happens when human force eclipses technological aspiration.

“Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” and the Architecture of Longing

If Tina was the voice that transcended the system, Darlene Love was the voice that gave it emotional depth.

Spector undermined her career repeatedly — shelving recordings, controlling release schedules, burying tracks — but none of that diminishes what’s on tape. “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” is one of the great feats of American pop: a heartbreak song disguised as a holiday anthem, longing wrapped in tinsel and bells.

It’s the sound of someone calling out into winter air, hoping someone is listening.

The arrangement is enormous — the definitive Wall of Sound — but the core is intimate. She’s singing to one person who isn’t there. That tension is why the song returns every December. It’s not nostalgia. It’s emotional truth.

And it’s why David Letterman turned it into an annual tradition.

And why Paul Shaffer escalated the arrangement every single year.

Until, finally, it became the last great televised Christmas spectacle.

But before we get there, there’s the strangest, most affectionate homage of all: a claymation fever dream with more musical integrity than most Christmas specials.

The Claymation Interlude: SNL’s “Christmastime for the Jews”

In December 2005, Saturday Night Live aired one of Robert Smigel’s most memorable TV Funhouse shorts: “Christmastime for the Jews.” Stop-motion claymation, Rankin/Bass visual language, and a parade of New York Jewish life dialed to absurdity.

But the key is the music.

Darlene Love sings the track herself — not a sound-alike, not a parody vocalist, but Darlene Love. The arrangement is a meticulous recreation of the Spector-era Wall of Sound: real horns, real choir, real stacked vocals.

It works because the music is treated with total seriousness.

The parody lands only because the sonic architecture is legitimate.

You cannot spoof the Wall of Sound unless you build the Wall of Sound.

The sketch is affectionate, ridiculous, and unexpectedly faithful — and it forms a bridge between the original Christmas album and the modern cultural memory of it.

Which brings us to the stage where the tradition would find its last, greatest incarnation.

The Letterman Years: Ritual, Excess, Economics, and the Last Great Live Wall of Sound

For more than twenty years, Darlene Love appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to sing “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Over time, it became its own form of liturgy — the unofficial opening ceremony of the season.

Paul Shaffer approached the arrangement with escalating ambition.

Every year: bigger.

Every year: fuller.

Every year: more.

And this is the part younger viewers can’t fully grasp:

this spectacle was only possible because of the economics of an earlier era of television.

Before streaming hollowed out revenue.

Before cord-cutting decimated ratings.

Before the Big Three networks lost their monopoly on national attention.

In those years, late-night shows could afford enormous live arrangements: union musicians, horn sections, string sections, dancers, staging rigs, snow machines, and elaborate lighting resets — all for a four-minute performance.

Today, a host can be number one in late-night and still not turn a profit. The ecosystem that funded this kind of spectacle no longer exists.

Which is why these performances — and especially the final one — feel like the last of their kind.

And then there’s the space itself.

All of it happened in the Ed Sullivan Theater — the last great American broadcast room built for this kind of scale. The stage where the Beatles first played. Where orchestras performed weekly. Where variety shows once dominated the medium.

It is a room designed for spectacle.

When Darlene Love tore into “Please… come home” that final night in 2014, she wasn’t singing into a typical late-night studio. She was filling one of the defining theatrical spaces of twentieth-century television.

By then, the production had tipped into full-on Christmas opera:

• snow machines fanning the stage

• dancers swirling in choreographed chaos

• an expanded choir filling the rafters

• strings and horns crowded into every corner

And in one of the earlier years, a saxophonist was even lowered from above — a visual embodiment of the “answering voice,” the long-acknowledged musical stand-in for the absent lover in the song. A metaphor made literal.

It is theatrical.

It is excessive.

And it is perfect.

This is what camp truly is: sincerity expressed through grandeur, emotion rendered through scale. The Letterman tradition became one of the most fully realized pieces of queer-adjacent holiday camp ever broadcast on network television — not because it was silly, but because it was emotionally enormous.

And then comes the moment that seals its place in history.

After the last note of the final performance, David Letterman — famously resistant to overt sentiment — stands up from behind his desk, crosses the stage, shakes Paul Shaffer’s hand, and gently kisses Darlene Love’s hand as she stands on the piano.

He almost never did that.

But for this moment, for this tradition, he broke character.

It was the acknowledgement of something ending:

not just a yearly performance, but the economic, cultural, and architectural world that made it possible.

Why This Music Endures

So why does all of this still resonate? Why does this tradition stay lodged so firmly in the cultural imagination? Why does “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” remain, for so many people, the true start of the holiday season?

Because the Wall of Sound wasn’t merely a production style.

It was a way of turning longing into architecture.

A way of building a container big enough to hold an oversized feeling.

A way of giving emotional excess a physical form.

Christmas is the one season where that scale feels appropriate.

Where longing, memory, distance, joy, and ache coexist in equal measure.

Tina Turner proved the machinery wasn’t necessary.

Darlene Love gave it heart.

Robert Smigel revealed its strange joy.

Paul Shaffer rebuilt it every December with reverence.

And Letterman — despite himself — let the spectacle move him.

The final performance stands as the last great moment when network television had both the resources and the audacity to stage something on that scale. It is the end of an era when “big” was possible.

And the Wall of Sound endures not because of the man who invented it, but because of the artists who transformed it into something deeper, more human, and more lasting than he ever imagined.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

This year, that thing is easy.

Amazon Prime’s new documentary I Like Me is a portrait of John Candy that feels almost too tender for the world we live in. It’s touching, unexpectedly heavy, and full of stories that confirm what people suspected all along: he wasn’t just a great performer — he was a good man. The kind you don’t meet very often, and the kind who makes you realize how rare basic decency actually is.

His children speak about him with that soft, grounded affection that only shows up in families where someone loved consistently and without ego. And then there’s Macaulay Culkin, saying plainly that Candy was one of the only adults on set who seemed to grasp how difficult his father was and how he was being treated. It’s a small moment, but once you hear it, you can’t un-hear it. You suddenly recognize the quality that shows up in every one of Candy’s characters: the instinct to look out for people who needed it.

That instinct shaped his whole career. His colleagues say the same thing, from the biggest co-stars to the most invisible crew members: he was kind. Generous. Human. Not “industry nice.” Real nice. The kind that doesn’t survive Hollywood unless it starts bone-deep. No one had a bad word. Not one.

And the heartbreaking part is that he worked himself into the ground because he knew people were counting on him. In the documentary someone says, simply, “He never said no.” If you asked John Candy to do a movie, he did it. If you asked him to voice a Saturday-morning cartoon, he did it. If you needed a cameo to get a project off the ground, he was already on the way. He showed up for everyone but himself.

Which brings me to the Second City and SCTV era — the place where so much of this warmth was forged. Candy came from the same ecosystem that produced Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Martin Short — half the comfort-movie canon, really.

They were trained to support the scene, elevate the partner, and give the emotion its due. That’s why Candy could be enormous and hilarious without ever flattening into a joke. He carried humanity into every performance. Even the loudest, most chaotic characters were, underneath it all, people you recognized.

And for me, that’s where the personal thread enters.

Growing up, I had a favorite aunt — the fun aunt, the one who let us get away with things we had no business getting away with. Every kid has one. The adult who feels more like a co-conspirator than a guardian. The one who’s a big kid themselves. When I look back on John Candy’s movies, especially Uncle Buck, I see flickers of her: the mischief, the softness, the unpolished affection. It’s the same emotional shorthand. The same kind of safety.

Which brings us to Planes, Trains & Automobiles, the only Thanksgiving movie that actually counts. It’s more than nostalgic; it’s honest. It’s messy. It’s unexpectedly sad. It’s a story about two men trying (and failing) to hold themselves together long enough to get home. It’s one of the only holiday films that understands how holidays really feel.

And for the love of all that is holy, you have to watch the unedited version.

Two reasons:

1. Steve Martin’s meltdown at the rental car counter.

A full symphonic arrangement of seventeen F-bombs, delivered with the precision of a man who has truly snapped. Anyone who has ever found themselves in a similar situation can totally relate. It’s the only reason the movie has an “R” rating. On television, the edited version turns it into static. In full, it’s one of the greatest comedic scenes ever filmed.

2. Edie McClurg’s response.

A moment so perfect it should be archived by the Library of Congress. Cutting it should be a punishable offense. Best of all, her dialoge in that scene was completely improvised. John Hughes told her to just chat about Thanksgiving.

Then there’s Home Alone — the best Christmas movie ever made — which Candy magnifies with a cameo he shot in a single day for scale pay, about $400. He ad-libbed every line. The “Polka King of the Midwest” routine? Completely improvised. Five minutes of screen time, and yet he anchors the film’s emotional center of gravity in a way only he could. O’Hara, also from the Second City universe, meets him on that wavelength without missing a beat.

And this week, in the middle of all this remembering, Jimmy Cliff passed away. Most people will rightfully remember him for a career that reshaped reggae. But John Candy fans will go straight to Cool Runnings and his unforgettable rendition of “I Can See Clearly Now,” the song that closes the film. It was the perfect ending then and feels even more poignant now — a kind of joyful defiance wrapped in sunlight.

So here’s the ritual I’m offering you:

Tonight, watch the John Candy documentary.

Then watch Planes, Trains & Automobiles — unedited.

Then let December begin with Home Alone.

Thanksgiving has one perfect movie.

Christmas has one perfect movie.

John Candy sits at the center of both, holding the emotional weight of the holidays together with nothing more than kindness, humor, and a generosity that never once asked for applause.

He was larger-than-life in the one way that actually matters:

he made people feel a little more human.

And that’s reason enough to honor him now.

Further Reading

I keep a running collection of books that shaped this project on Bookshop.org.

Purchases there support independent bookstores—and help sustain this work.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

I was in high school when I first met the Romantic Period. It was an advanced English Literature Class with no more than 20 students. Our teacher was a legend in her own right and certainly the most decorated of the school’s faculty. She had a terminal degree from a fancy “northern” school and had lost count of how many times she had been named the district’s “Teacher of the Year.” I say all this to preface, she was the type of teacher that administration was afraid of, they left her to run the English Department and to teach as she saw fit.

I wish I could remember more, but this kicked off a unit that introduced the romantic poets Shelley (Percy), Byron, and Keats then led into the gothic with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Two years prior, she’d already scandalized the faculty once by showing us Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet (1968). The movie arrived the way all “educational media” did back then: a 200-pound Sony Trinitron lashed to a metal cart with a ratcheting strap—supposedly for safety, though it always looked ready to crush whoever dared wheel it down the hall. She rolled it in like a sacred relic, the strap creaking, the fluorescent lights humming. When Olivia Hussey and her ample, uncovered bosom appeared, all four-ten of her tried to stand in front of the screen, a heroic act of futility that taught us more about beauty and restraint than the play ever could. I like to think that there is a whole generation of boys who remember Olivia Hussey as the first time they saw a naked woman - at least that was my thought when she passed away in late 2024.

So, when that familiar television returned for a screening of Haunted Summer (1988), none of us expected innocence. “Context,” she said, cueing the obscure, candlelit film about the Shelleys and Byron telling ghost stories by Lake Geneva. The film starred Philip Anglim as Byron and Eric Stoltz as Shelley, alongside a pre-Bill & Ted Alex Winter and a young Laura Dern. Characters wandered half-dressed and high, arguing and aching for things they couldn’t name. Here was Frankenstein’s origin story, presented as a beautiful, fevered breakdown.

Most classmates were mortified; I was hypnotized—especially noting Stoltz’s early full-frontal cameo. It seemed fitting that the same teacher—daughter of a high-ranking Episcopal church official—was responsible for showing me both my first cinematic breasts and my first cinematic full-frontal. Art, morality, and education all colliding in one English department. Our teacher never explicitly discussed sexuality or queerness, but she didn’t have to. Frankenstein spoke clearly enough on its own: men creating life without women, a being stitched together from the discarded and forbidden, punished not for crimes but visibility itself. If that’s not a queer metaphor, language has failed us. She let us sit with that discomfort, giving space for lessons we weren’t yet ready to articulate.

When Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came out in 1994, our class organized an unofficial viewing at the mall multiplex. It was mid-90s gothic excess: De Niro’s stitched body trembling beneath candlelight, Branagh’s beautiful yet flawed Victor, Helena Bonham Carter embodying grief and loss. Walking out afterward, I was unsettled—not frightened, but awakened. The film exposed something fundamental about creativity itself: the fear of your private obsessions coming to life and staring back at you. Years later, I recognized this feeling as intrinsic to queerness—the thrill and fear of visibility.

Decades later, there’s a new Frankenstein streaming this week—Jacob Elordi playing the creature, Netflix money and Guillermo del Toro directing. Before the trailer even dropped, I could tell the marketing would be obsessed with Elordi: all height and haunted eyes, the internet’s current patron saint of beautiful alienation.

If the adaptation stays faithful, it will probably do what every Frankenstein retelling does—pretend to be about science while quietly dissecting intimacy. But Elordi as the creature changes the chemistry. Suddenly the “monster” isn’t grotesque; he’s sublime. He’s every impossibly perfect man punished for being too much of what he is.

After Seeing It

I finally watched the film, and it’s almost disorienting to say this, but it might be the best adaptation of Frankenstein I’ve ever seen. Del Toro actually read the book — you can feel it in every frame. The tenderness is intact. The creature’s longing is intact. Even the awful, humiliating ache of wanting to be loved is intact.

Most adaptations treat the monster like a special effect. This one treats him like a tragedy in progress. You don’t brace for him to lunge; you brace for him to speak, because you already know his voice is going to ruin you a little.

And Jacob Elordi — irritatingly, inevitably — is perfect. He makes the creature’s beauty uncomfortable, which is exactly what Shelley intended. You’re not supposed to know whether to pity him or fear the moment he realizes what he is.

What the film gets right, more than anything, is Victor. Not as a mad scientist or a misunderstood genius, but as a young man who never bothered to think past creation. He wasn’t cruel in the mustache-twirling way; he was cruel in the careless way. The worst kind. He never imagined what his creature would need, only what he himself could achieve. It’s the textbook arrogance of a boy who wants the glory of making life but none of the responsibility of tending it.

For once, a filmmaker understood that the real horror isn’t the monster — it’s the parent who never considered what happens after the spark.It’s the same story all over again: creation, rejection, self-knowledge. Only this time, the gaze lingers.

Romanticism has always been coded queer; it just didn’t have the vocabulary. Byron’s swaggering vanity, Percy Shelley’s utopian fluidity, even Keats dying young and tender—it’s all a map of desire turned inward. When the world said “unnatural,” they said “sublime.”

The Gothic grew out of that same soil. These were people obsessed with bodies, boundaries, and what happens when either one dissolves. Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray—each a different mask for the same fear: that passion will expose you. That wanting is dangerous.

Mary Shelley wasn’t writing a horror story. She was writing the autobiography of repression itself. The creature’s real tragedy is not that he’s unloved but that he knows he’s unlovable. He learns language, empathy, music—and it condemns him. Enlightenment as damnation.

That’s the queer condition in shorthand.

Revisiting Haunted Summer recently (now streaming on Amazon Prime), I found it almost documentary-like—beautiful, self-aware, mythic. Byron flirted with his reflection; Percy championed freedom while neglecting those around him. Mary, quietly absorbing chaos, transformed pain into art. Though largely ignored upon release, the film captures queer Romanticism’s creative voltage perfectly.

Frankenstein adaptations hinge on one moment: the creature seeing his reflection. Netflix will inevitably feature this moment. It won’t highlight horror, but self-awareness: the creature understanding he’s both masterpiece and mistake. Every artist, queer kid, and human being encounters this profound realization—creating something that accurately reflects yourself and learning to survive its implications.

Perhaps this enduring relevance keeps calling me back. Frankenstein isn’t about monsters; it’s about authorship. Years spent assembling fragments—career, identity, queerness, ambition—revealed themselves as pieces of the same experiment. Victor’s animating spark was my own: the desire for visibility and the strength to survive it.

Netflix might decorate Frankenstein with special effects and cinematic polish, but the heart remains Mary’s: loving something enough to bring it to life and spending eternity trying to understand it. The new adaptation’s true intrigue won’t be the creature’s appearance, but the gaze—who sees whom, and why.

Maybe this time the creature will achieve the tenderness Shelley desired. Perhaps he’ll be allowed beauty without apology. After centuries of punishing the “unnatural,” perhaps we’ll witness genuine compassion.

In retrospect, my high school English teacher, covered in chalk dust, persistently teaching “the sublime,” understood her lessons might only resonate decades later. She was right. She taught us empathy—to witness the creature without flinching. As my own life reformed into something authentic, her lessons surfaced: you cannot destroy what you’ve created, only love it more deeply.

This, then, is Frankenstein’s hidden mercy: the creature isn’t evil—he’s evidence.

Epilogue: On Making and Being Made

We all create monsters—art, ambitions, relationships, careers—and spend our lives learning to claim them. Frankenstein endures because it’s fundamentally about responsibility—to what we create and what it reveals about us.

Looking back at that classroom, the flicker of Haunted Summer, and De Niro’s stitched portrayal, I see myself learning what stories offer—not explanations of the world, but the tools to survive it.

Perhaps this is why I chase this narrative. Between Mary’s storms, Byron’s vanity, and the creature’s reflection lies a simple truth: every act of creation is the same ongoing experiment—a human attempting to give life to something real.

And hoping, desperately, it never turns against them.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases at no additional cost to you.

Further Reading

If you like this series and are curious about books that have inspired me, I’ve curated a collection on Bookshop.org. Buying through that link supports independent bookstores—and it helps sustain this project.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

Originally published as “Fellow Travelers – The Closet, the Costume, and the Cohn Playbook.” Updated following Jonathan Bailey’s selection as People’s Sexiest Man Alive 2025.

Thomas Mallon’s Fellow Travelers is the kind of novel that lingers long after you set it down. A love story built in the shadows of McCarthy’s Washington, it asks what happens to desire when truth itself is criminalized.

When Showtime adapted it, I watched Jonathan Bailey as Tim laugh, ache, and break under the weight of secrecy — and for me, it wasn’t just historical fiction. It was recognition. If you haven’t seen it, it’s excellent, but Jonathan Bailey’s Tim was the scene stealer. This one of the most accurate depictions of intimacy between two men that I have ever seen on mainstream TV (just watch it - you’ll like it).

One queer period drama led me straight into another: from Mallon’s Washington to Shondaland’s Regency London. Strange as it sounds, the connection made sense.

From Fellow Travelers I found myself on a strange trajectory: straight into Bailey’s other work, including Bridgerton. Suddenly I was binging pastel-tinted Regency drawing rooms, catching up for the next season as if I had always been invested in who was marrying whom even crying during Penelope’s wedding. That’s the funny thing about cultural rabbit holes: one queer period drama can lead you to a straight Shondaland romance, and the through-line still makes sense.

Bailey’s Presence

Bailey’s Anthony Bridgerton isn’t gay. He’s straight, burdened with family duty, and more focused on marriage markets than secret trysts. But Bailey himself is openly gay. That matters.

It matters that one of the most visible romantic leads on Netflix is a gay man. In a world where Mallon’s characters would have been destroyed for exposure, Bailey thrives by bringing global audiences to swoon over his performance. That’s not incidental progress — that’s cultural tectonics.

And it matters, too, that Bridgerton is a Shondaland production. Shonda Rhimes’ empire has normalized representation for decades: interracial relationships, queer characters, ambitious women who don’t apologize. Even when the Bridgertons keep Benedict’s queerness as subtext rather than text, the point is that the space exists. The reimagined Regency world is inclusive by design, not by accident.

Jonathan Bailey’s Sweetheart Turn

Bailey has become more than the actor who pulled me into Bridgerton binges. In 2024 he launched The Shameless Fund, a U.K.–based charity that directs money toward LGBTQ+ causes. Among its first grants, two went to organizations supporting older LGBTQ+ people — a group he’s said are often forced to “go back into the closet” in care homes and later life.

“The first five grants we’ve given, two are going to charities that look after elderly LGBTQ+ members … having to go back in the closet …” — Jonathan Bailey, Time interview

That sentiment lands like an echo of Fellow Travelers. The characters in Mallon’s novel are fictional, but the lives they represent were real — men and women crushed by paranoia, erased by policy, and erased by history. Bailey’s reminder is that they shouldn’t be forgotten.

It’s also personal for me. I know what it’s like to hide, to lose love in silence. I know what it’s like to live in a world where the masks felt permanent. His words, and his work, feel like a hand reaching back through time — connecting past to present, reminding us that what’s possible now was paid for by lives lived in shadow.

The Ache and the Liberation

When I think about my own story — decades closeted, losing someone I loved before I could even name it love — these cultural leaps feel personal.

For years, I lived in silence, performing the role expected of me. Watching Bailey, I recognize both the ache of Fellow Travelers and the liberation of Bridgerton. The two aren’t opposites; they’re points on the same continuum.

Roy Cohn’s Ghost

But the politics that made Mallon’s novel so haunting aren’t ancient history.

McCarthyism wasn’t just a witch hunt against communists — it was a purge of “sexual deviants,” a federalized paranoia that destroyed careers and lives. Roy Cohn was the architect, whispering strategy into McCarthy’s ear. Later, he became Donald Trump’s mentor.

The methods he perfected in the 1950s — scapegoating, secrecy, turning fear into spectacle — are alive today. Watch the news. Listen to rallies. The vocabulary has shifted, but the rhythm hasn’t.

From HBO Satire to History

Which is why I keep circling back to the irony of this cultural moment. On the one hand, we have Fellow Travelers, laying bare the cruelty of enforced closets. We have Jonathan Bailey in Bridgerton, showing a gay actor embodying the world’s most streamed romance.

And then we have The Apprentice, the film tracing Trump’s rise under Roy Cohn’s tutelage — with Sebastian Stan playing Trump and Jeremy Strong as Cohn.

Strong already made our skin crawl in Succession. Kendall Roy was the heir you couldn’t stop watching — entitled, twitchy, corrupt, desperate. It was unsettling as fiction.

But in The Apprentice, Strong’s turn as Roy Cohn isn’t satire. It’s history. The grotesque real thing. The same ruthless hunger for influence, only this time it’s not HBO fantasy: it’s the man who taught Donald Trump his playbook.

Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn isn’t casting against type — it’s prophecy fulfilled.

And that’s the scariest part of all.

Where We Are Now

What does it mean to live in this mash-up of past and present? For me, it’s both sobering and strangely hopeful.

The cruelty of secrecy hasn’t vanished, but visibility has multiplied. The same culture that once would have destroyed Jonathan Bailey now celebrates him. The same Hollywood that once closeted Rock Hudson now builds franchises around openly queer talent.

And yet, the political machine that crushed Mallon’s characters is still humming in new forms.

Which is to say: Fellow Travelers wasn’t just a gateway to Jonathan Bailey and a weekend lost to Bridgerton. It was a reminder. Our stories — closeted, lost, recovered, remade — aren’t relics of McCarthy’s Washington or Regency England. They’re alive, contested, shaping who gets to belong and who gets scapegoated.

And whether it’s McCarthy in 1953 or Trump in 2025, Roy Cohn is never far from the stage.

Sources / Links

• Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers (Amazon | Bookshop.org)

• Showtime’s Fellow Travelers series (sho.com)

• Bridgerton on Netflix (Netflix)

• The Apprentice - Movie (Amazon)

• Frontline: “All About the Fight: How Donald Trump Developed His Political Playbook” (Frontline)

• Variety on The Apprentice (2025 film, Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn) (Variety)

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

Further Reading

If you like this series and are curious about books that have inspired me, I’ve curated a collection on Bookshop.org. Buying through that link supports independent bookstores—and it helps sustain this project.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• 🦋 Bluesky: @thecalebreed.bsky.social

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

The Sundance Film Festival isn’t romantic in January. It’s wet snow, expensive coffee, and lines disguised as culture. My first time there, last winter, I went with a friend from Richmond. He’d been volunteering at the festival for more than a decade—knew every shuttle, every party, had even met Redford himself. I knew nothing about how the process worked and waited until the last day to register and pick out my tickets. Let’s just say by the time they get to selling individual tickets to the general public, there’s not much left to pick from.

From everything I had read online the one film I wanted to see was James Sweeney’s Twinless. Once in Park City, it seemed like everyone was talking about it, though always in that low, reverent voice people use when they think art has done something dangerous. Of course all showings were sold out.

We never saw it. Did I learn anything from this experience, of course not. Months later, back in North Carolina, I finally watched it alone. And within five minutes I understood what everyone at Sundance had been whispering about, and why it won the Audience Award for best dramatic feature.

Author’s Note: For clarity, I’ve laid out the plot in roughly linear order, though the film itself is not. Twinless folds time in on itself—memories, fantasies, and present moments looping together until it’s hard to tell which came first. It’s only in the final scenes that we realize Dennis was at Roman’s funeral all along, disguised in a wig and sunglasses. The revelation doesn’t rewrite the story so much as confirm what we’ve suspected: Dennis has been haunting the edges from the beginning.

The prelude to disaster

The movie opens with Dennis sitting alone at a restaurant, poking at his food. A woman approaches and asks if anyone is sitting with him. Mistaking it as an invitation, Dennis blurts that he’s almost finished but has nowhere to be. She just wants the chair. The humiliation is microscopic but total, the kind of moment that sets the emotional weather for the film.

Then Rocky appears. There’s nothing coy about what follows. The scenes are graphic and oddly funny; Dennis can’t stop talking, filling the air with chatter about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen and his childhood fantasy of a long-lost twin. Even in the middle of pleasure he’s narrating, analyzing, trying to turn intimacy into an idea. The sex isn’t erotic so much as diagnostic. Sweeney uses it to show us a man who has learned to think instead of feel, who covers fear with noise.

By the time the open credits start, Dennis has begun texting Rocky compulsively. When the messages go unanswered, he spirals. The story that follows—Dennis trailing Rocky, the fatal confrontation at an intersection, and the horror that ensues—has the rhythm of inevitability. It’s what happens when loneliness decides it’s owed a witness.

Rocky’s death fractures the movie in two. Everything after is lived in that echo.

The aftermath

At Rocky’s funeral, Dennis sees his twin brother Roman—both played by Dylan O’Brien—and begins orbiting him. What might have started as curiosity becomes mutual recognition. Roman is searching for someone to replace the feeling he once had with his brother—never alone, always paired, a built-in companion for every mundane hour. Dennis wants the same thing, though he dresses it up as fate. The friendship that forms between them isn’t a misunderstanding; it’s an agreement neither says out loud. Roman asks for exactly what Dennis craves: someone who will always be there, someone who won’t leave. What begins as solace turns into dependency, a shared delusion of wholeness.

Sweeney plays Dennis as a man performing stability one tic at a time. He’s meticulous, anxious, always trying to manage the temperature of a room. O’Brien meets him with a kind of exhausted kindness. After years of Teen Wolf and The Maze Runner, O’Brien has never been quieter onscreen. His Roman is all small gestures—polite nods, half-smiles, the restraint of someone afraid that any release might become collapse.

Their connection is believable precisely because it’s uneasy. Each sees in the other what they can’t live without.

Marcie and the unraveling

Dennis unwittingly introduces Roman to his coworker Marcie, played with plainspoken warmth by Aisling Franciosi, who grounds the film. Roman and Marcie fall in love, giving the story its only glimpse of daylight. But for Dennis, the match feels like displacement. He’s given away the one person who made his guilt bearable.

Marcie is the film’s only adult in the room—comfortable with intimacy but unwilling to be consumed by it. She loves Roman but also insists on space, on the right to be alone. For Dennis and Roman, who both equate closeness with survival, her boundaries feel like rejection when they’re really proof of health.

When Marcie discovers Dennis’s deception—the fabricated story about his own long-lost twin, the lies that brought him into Roman’s life—she confronts him. Her ultimatum is simple: tell Roman the truth or she will. The confession scene that follows is pure humiliation. Dennis, trying to delay the inevitable, offers Roman a foot massage, a gesture so wrong it’s almost childlike. When the truth comes out, Roman’s response is brutal and immediate. He beats Dennis and leaves him bleeding in a hotel room.

That violence isn’t cathartic; it’s mercy disguised as rage. It marks the boundary Dennis refused to draw for himself.

The sandwich scene

Time passes—Sweeney doesn’t specify how much. When Dennis and Roman finally meet again, the film’s tone has cooled. Roman is with Marcie now, but the relationship has limits. She’s an only child and doesn’t share his appetite for constant companionship. Roman still longs for the kind of total twin bond he’ll never have again.

In a diner, he and Dennis share a sandwich, an echo of their earlier intimacy stripped of obsession. Dennis tells him, “The only version of myself I liked was the one when I was with you.” Roman doesn’t argue. They both ask for a box at the same time—a tiny synchrony that lands like grace. The movie ends there, refusing to explain what reconciliation means.

What Sweeney built

With Straight Up (2019), James Sweeney made a sharp, neurotic comedy about a gay man afraid of physical intimacy. Twinless inverts that impulse. Here, contact is easy; it’s the aftermath that destroys you. The new film is quieter, meaner, and infinitely sadder.

Sweeney’s Dennis is one of the most precise portraits of loneliness I’ve seen on film. He’s not evil or crazy—he’s desperate. His monologues about pop culture and childhood fantasy are ways to keep silence from swallowing him. When he talks through sex, through grief, through apology, he’s trying to fill the air so he doesn’t vanish.

O’Brien’s dual performance is the revelation. His Rocky is all surface charm; his Roman is the aftermath. He carries the film’s moral weight, proving that empathy and self-preservation can’t coexist indefinitely. Watching him here, you can see the actor shaking off the last of his teen-idol polish.

Sweeney’s direction matches his subject: still, symmetrical, unblinking. The camera often holds just a little too long, forcing you to sit in the discomfort Dennis spends the movie trying to outrun.

The psychology of exposure

The opening’s graphic realism isn’t there to shock. It’s the film’s thesis. By starting with unfiltered physicality, Sweeney shows us the problem before we have time to judge it: Dennis can’t live inside his body. He intellectualizes everything, even desire. The film keeps testing that disconnect—between thinking and feeling, between needing and deserving.

When he kills Rocky by accident, it’s not just a plot turn; it’s punishment for believing intimacy can be manufactured. His later friendship with Roman becomes a form of atonement that neither man understands until it’s too late.

The scene with Marcie is the hinge. She’s the only person who sees through him, the only one who forces honesty. Her ultimatum breaks the film’s illusion and leaves Dennis exposed, literally and emotionally.

The ache underneath

Twinless isn’t about twins at all. It’s about the fantasy of being completed by someone else, and the violence that fantasy invites. Dennis wants what so many queer men are taught to want—a perfect mirror, someone who sees you so clearly that you stop questioning your own existence. But the mirror always cracks.

The film understands that longing without judgment. It’s not moralizing about obsession; it’s showing how easily love curdles into appropriation when loneliness goes untreated. The tenderness between Dennis and Roman near the end isn’t forgiveness—it’s recognition. Two people admitting they can’t save each other, but also that they don’t have to keep pretending.

When I finally turned off the TV, I thought about the night in Utah I should’ve seen it—the crowded streets, the volunteers herding us toward the next big thing. I would’ve watched Twinless surrounded by strangers, all of us trying not to breathe too loudly. Maybe that’s the right way to see it; maybe it isn’t.

Watching it alone felt truer. Sweeney made a movie for the quiet hours after connection, when the phone stays silent and the apartment feels too large.

I’ve known versions of Dennis: men who talk through everything, who use humor as anesthesia, who want to be seen so badly they mistake attention for love. Some days I’ve been Dennis. Other days I’ve been Roman—grateful for affection but terrified of its cost.

What Twinless leaves you with isn’t despair; it’s a reluctant tenderness. The film suggests that the best we can do is meet each other halfway, knowing we’ll fail, and call that mercy.

Sweeney and O’Brien give us a story about obsession, grief, and the impossible math of needing people. It’s also, quietly, about survival—the kind that doesn’t look noble, just human.

Because in the end, connection isn’t cure. It’s evidence. Proof that, for a moment, you were seen. And sometimes that’s enough.

Twinless and Straight Up are currently available for streaming on Amazon Prime - Twinless | Straight Up

Some links may be affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases—at no additional cost to you.

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Halloween doesn’t have to be prestige misery. Sometimes you just want neon blood, fog machines that never turn off, and villains who look like they shop at Chess King. These are the movies that understand horror can be stupid and sublime—the cinematic equivalent of drinking warm beer in a plastic cup while a fog machine wheezes in the corner.

1. Night of the Comet (1984)

A comet wipes out humanity, leaving two Valley Girls to shop, flirt, and fend off zombies. Shoulder pads, apocalypse, and the best mall lighting in film history.

2. Fright Night (1985)

Your next-door neighbor is a vampire with impeccable taste in silk pajamas. It’s part Hitchcock, part closet allegory, and all sweaty teenage panic. The gayest straight movie ever made.

3. The Lost Boys (1987)

Leather jackets, sax solos, and a vampire coven that smells like Aqua Net. Somehow both a comedy and a thirst trap.

4. Evil Dead II (1987)

A one-man Looney Tunes episode starring Bruce Campbell and a cabin full of possessed furniture. Splatter has never been so graceful.

5. Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988)

Alien clowns turn humans into cotton-candy cocoons. It’s stupid, perfect, and absolutely deserves its Criterion release that will never happen.

6. Sleepaway Camp (1983)

Every moral, psychological, and cinematic boundary gets violated. You’ll want to shower after, but you’ll never forget the ending.

7. The Witches of Eastwick (1987)

Cher, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Susan Sarandon share one devilish boyfriend. Spells, gossip, and feminist vengeance in shoulder-padded glory.

8. Maximum Overdrive (1986)

Stephen King directs his cocaine habit. Trucks revolt, AC/DC scores it, and somehow Emilio Estevez keeps a straight face. It’s beautiful chaos.

9. Cujo (1983)

One dog, one car, and two hours of claustrophobic sweating. Proof that the real horror is being trapped in a Pinto with a kid who won’t stop screaming.

10. House (1986)

A PTSD-ridden novelist fights rubber monsters in his haunted house. If you’ve ever wondered what Full Metal Jacketwould look like with puppets—here’s your answer.

How to watch:

String lights, cheap candy, red Solo cups, and a playlist that oscillates between Oingo Boingo and Bauhaus.

Mood:

Tongue-in-cheek. Blood-on-denim. A wink before the scream.

Further Reading

If you like this series and are curious about books that have inspired me, I’ve curated a collection on Bookshop.org. Buying through that link supports independent bookstores—and it helps sustain this project.

Stay Connected

• 📖 Subscribe to Caleb Reed for weekly chapters and essays.

• 📸 Follow along on Instagram: @caleb_writes

• 🧵 Join me on Threads: Caleb_Writes

• 📘 Facebook: Caleb Reed

• Visit my Bookshop.org Store

October used to mean pumpkin carving, cheap masks from the drugstore, and late-night marathons of Halloween and Friday the 13th. Now it means opening Netflix and finding yourself dropped into a haunted house where every door leads to a different queer-coded nightmare. Some of it is intentional, some of it isn’t, but the effect is the same: spooky season is a queer playground.

This year’s lineup proves it. Ryan Murphy’s latest season of Monster resurrects Ed Gein, the killer who inspired Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Boots tells the story of a closeted gay teenager who enlists in the military in the 1990s. Mae Martin’s Wayward spins a queer-tinged mystery in a town full of secrets. Even the return of Nobody Wants This, Netflix’s relationship drama, feels like part of the mix: horror isn’t just blood and knives, it’s also intimacy and exposure.

If it feels like spooky season has been remixed by a drag troupe, that’s because horror has always belonged to the outsiders. Long before streaming, long before “representation” was a marketing hook, monsters were already us.

The Queer DNA of Horror

Film historians have been shouting this for decades. Vito Russo’s The Celluloid Closet (movie) traced how queerness was smuggled onto screens by turning us into villains and predators. B. Ruby Rich and her contemporaries argued that horror, more than any other genre, was about the Other—the body and the desire that frightened straight society.

You can see it everywhere once you know to look:

• Dracula was never just a foreign count biting virgins. His seductions crossed genders, his contagion spread desire as much as death.

• Frankenstein’s monster wasn’t merely grotesque; he was a queer allegory for the outsider, desperate for recognition, shunned by his “father,” abandoned by society.

• Psycho’s Norman Bates blurred lines of gender performance, creating terror from transgression.

• A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 has been called “the gayest horror movie ever made”—its lead actor Mark Patton later became an icon for how subtext leaks through even when the script insists it isn’t there.

• And the Final Girl trope—Laurie Strode, Sidney Prescott—has always been a stand-in for survival through difference, the one who endures precisely because she doesn’t fit the mold.

Even Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp,” written in 1964, could be read as a secret manifesto for horror: exaggeration, artifice, the drag of performance. Horror’s monsters have always been drag queens in latex masks.

Netflix’s Haunted House

So what happens when you walk through Netflix’s October catalog? It looks less like a content hub and more like a haunted house built on queer foundations.

Monster: The Ed Gein Story

(Steaming now)

Ryan Murphy’s obsession with turning true crime into glossy melodrama continues, this time with Ed Gein, the grave robber and killer whose life inspired half a century of horror films. Gein’s crimes were grotesque, but the cultural fixation on him has always blurred queerness and monstrosity. He’s the figure who let filmmakers explore gender, disguise, and identity under the cover of “true story.” My only caution is that Ed Gein’s story was horrific enough without Murphy’s additions.

Boots

(Streaming Now)

A closeted teenager enlists in the U.S. military in the 1990s, navigating loyalty, repression, and exposure. There are no ghosts here, no haunted houses, but it may be the scariest show of the month. Horror has never just been about monsters; it’s about the fear of being seen. Boots captures that with suffocating precision.

Wayward

(streaming now)

Mae Martin’s miniseries takes the familiar trappings of a small town thriller—secrets, violence, buried trauma—and infuses it with queer sensibility. Horror is always strongest when the characters are outsiders who know too much, and Wayward lives in that tension.

Nobody Wants This, Season 2

(October)

Not horror in the traditional sense, but still perfect October programming. The vulnerability of queer relationships has always carried a shadow of danger, the possibility of loss or rejection. In its own way, Nobody Wants This is about the most frightening thing of all: intimacy.

The Accidental Gay

Part of the fun of October streaming is watching straight-coded shows get kidnapped by queer audiences. Maybe it’s the chemistry between two male leads in a thriller. Maybe it’s the way a horror heroine carries herself like a drag queen with a knife. Queer viewers have always been adept at finding subtext, remixing it, claiming it as our own. Streaming just makes the process faster, the memes sharper.

A Century in Costume

So no—you’re not the first to point out that horror is queer. The critics got there decades ago. But this October feels different. The closet door isn’t just rattling anymore; it’s been kicked off its hinges. Netflix isn’t hiding the coding—it’s programming it. Shows like Boots and Wayward don’t leave you hunting for crumbs of representation. They serve it straight up, no disguise.

Meanwhile, Monster: The Ed Gein Story reminds us that queerness and monstrosity were once blurred deliberately, a warning dressed up as entertainment. That history lingers. The haunted house is still full of mirrors.

Closing the Loop

Every October, the world pretends to love monsters. We decorate our porches with ghosts and skeletons, we binge slasher marathons, we joke about the things that scare us. But for queer people, the performance was never optional. Horror has always been our genre because we know what it feels like to survive in the dark, to live with secrets, to carry difference like a knife in the pocket.

So when you log on to Netflix this month, remember: you’re not just picking shows. You’re walking into a tradition. Horror has been queerness in costume for over a century. The only difference now is that the costume’s looking thinner by the day.

Looking for more, check out my guide for October here:

Some links are affiliate links, meaning I may earn a small commission if you purchase through them. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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October is the one time of year everyone pretends to love monsters. But queer people always have. Horror was never straight—its monsters, final girls, and outsiders have carried queer DNA for more than a century. This year, streaming platforms have turned October into a haunted house built for us. Here’s your map.

👻 Netflix

• Monster: The Ed Gein Story – Ryan Murphy digs into the killer behind Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Horror as history, queerness and monstrosity blurred.

• Boots – A closeted gay teen enlists in the ’90s military. No ghosts, no ghouls—just the horror of being seen.

• Wayward – Mae Martin’s queer-tinged miniseries about secrets and violence in a small town.

• Nobody Wants This, Season 2 – Queer romantic drama. Proof that intimacy can be just as frightening as a haunted house.

• Interview with the Vampire (series) – Anne Rice’s homoerotic vampires, now fully out of the coffin. They go where I imagine Tom Cruise refused….

🩸 Shudder (The Queer Horror Motherlode)

• Queer for Fear (docuseries) – The definitive look at horror’s queer roots.

• Knife + Heart (2018) – Gay porn studio meets slasher playground. Pure queer camp.

• Hellraiser (1987) – Clive Barker’s puzzle box of desire and pain.

🦇 HBO (Max - or whatever they go by now)

• True Detective: Night Country – Queer undertones in the leads, death in the ice. Worth watching just for Jodie Foster’s performance.IT

• IT: Welcome to Derry – Outsider kids, haunted town, Pennywise lurking.

🪦 Prime Video

• Jennifer’s Body (2009) – Once maligned, now the sapphic cult classic of our age.

• Bodies Bodies Bodies (2022) – Gen Z queer chaos with blood and comedy.

• Saint Maud (2019) – Religious repression and obsession turned into gothic horror.

• Bit (2020) – Lesbian vampires running wild in Los Angeles.

• The Hunger (1983) – Bowie, Deneuve, and lesbian vampires wrapped in silk.

• Seance – Boarding school slasher with queer characters at the center.

🕸️ Hulu / Disney+ Star

• What We Do in the Shadows – Vampires who are all, frankly, very queer.

• American Horror Story (archives) – Murphy’s eternal gay camp disguised as anthology horror. Stick to the earlier seasons, the later season are almost unwatchable. Coven is my favorite season. You can’t beat Jessica Lange’s performance in this one.

🧛 Classics Worth the Hunt (Rent or Stream Where You Can)

• A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge (1985) – The gayest slasher ever made. (On HBOMax)

• Thelma (2017) – Queer love story tangled with supernatural power. (On Prime)

• Let the Right One In (2008) – Tender vampire allegory about outsiders. (On Prime)

• Good Manners (2017) – Brazilian queer werewolf gothic. (For rent on Prime or AppleTV)

🔮 Closing Note

Horror has always belonged to the queer imagination. The monsters were us in costume, the haunted houses our closets. The difference now? Streaming doesn’t bother hiding it. This October, the haunted house is wide open—and it’s fabulous.

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When I first saw the previews for Netflix’s new “dramedy” Boots, I was curious. I’ve always been drawn to the idea of performative masculinity—what it means to “be a man,” and who gets to decide. I write about the worlds I know: an all-male college, fraternity life, corporate life - the rituals that shape boys into something approximating men. I remember what that felt like from the inside, as someone who was different but didn’t yet have the language for it.

Honestly, I was also looking forward to what I knew was going to be a charged environment—the barracks, the showers, the enforced closeness. I knew exactly how those scenes would look: the same choreography of exposed skin and unspoken rules I’d seen in locker rooms and fraternity basements. What was once a site of anxiety now felt like a chance to see it rendered openly, even tenderly.

I don’t dismiss what Marine training is designed to do. For all its brutality, the process is rooted in something real and proven: teaching men to operate as a single unit, to trust one another in situations where hesitation can kill. Breaking recruits down and rebuilding them into a team isn’t just theater—it works. Many describe it as life-changing. And for most, it is.

But as Alan Downs wrote in The Velvet Rage, those systems—military, athletic, fraternal—are built on a template of masculinity that fits most men well enough to function. The masks are designed to fit, even if they chafe. For queer men, though, that molding process can be catastrophic. What shapes one life can erase another.

The new Netflix series Boots opens with a drill instructor’s voice slicing through dawn mist. “Sound off!” he yells, and a chorus of recruits answers back. In some ways, it’s the sound of erasure—young men learning to move in unison, to trade individuality for obedience and discipline.

The show follows Cameron Cope, a closeted teenager who enlists in the Marines with his straight best friend. It’s loosely adapted from Greg Cope White’s memoir The Pink Marine, though that’s where the resemblance mostly ends. White’s book was a raw recollection of joining the Corps in 1979, stepping into a world that looked a lot more like Full Metal Jacket than the sanitized comedy of Stripes. Boot camp then was both forge and crucible—designed to strip men bare before rebuilding them into something the Marine Corps could use. For some, that process made them stronger. For others, it erased them.

Netflix moves that story to a safer, glossier nineties setting—nostalgia in uniform. Critics have praised Boots—91 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, polite applause everywhere else. They call it heartfelt, well-acted, balanced. They’re not wrong, but they’re grading on a curve. The show succeeds mostly by avoiding the full horror of what it claims to represent.

Cameron, played by Miles Heizer, isn’t confused about who he is. He’s a young man who understands his own difference too clearly and too soon. That’s one of the series’ strange choices: he speaks with the fluency of someone decades older, as if already through therapy. Real eighteen-year-olds don’t analyze themselves like memoirists; they stumble, they deflect, they survive without language. The book’s Greg was terrified and naïve. The show’s Cameron is enlightened, which makes his fear feel cosmetic.

The show also invents a fellow gay recruit named Jones, meant to serve as Cameron’s mirror—someone whose gaze lingers a beat too long during drills and showers. In one scene, he winks. It’s convenient for storytelling and impossible for the time. In the real Marine Corps of that era, those glances would have been a kind of suicide. One whisper, one accusation, and a recruit could be gone before sundown. Boots turns danger into longing, rewriting peril as romance. It’s a pretty lie, and maybe the cruelest one.

Even more fabricated is the closeted drill instructor, DI Sullivan, who takes what the show frames as the “honorable” way out—suicide implied but never shown. He wasn’t in the book; Netflix added him to give the story symmetry, an older shadow to Cameron’s awakening. The problem is that his death becomes tidy metaphor instead of indictment. The series treats it as solemn and noble, when in reality it’s just the final act of discipline—a man so consumed by shame he follows orders even into the grave. The Corps worshipped order; in that world, self-destruction could look like obedience.

The truth is far worse. In 1979, homosexuality wasn’t merely frowned upon in the military—it was a felony. Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice classified “sodomy” as a criminal offense, punishable by court-martial and up to five years in prison. Lying about it on enlistment forms counted as fraudulent enlistment, another felony and a Federal crime. Greg Cope White didn’t just risk ridicule; he risked confinement and a dishonorable discharge that would shadow him for life.

If a Marine like DI Sullivan had faced the machinery that awaited him, his ruin would’ve been total. First, an investigation by NCIS; then questioning, locker searches, confiscated mail, interrogation of recruits. He’d have been stripped of command, marched off the drill field in disgrace, tried under Article 125, imprisoned, reduced to E-1, forfeited pay, dishonorably discharged, and barred from every federal benefit. Civilian life afterward meant unemployment, stigma, and a DD-214 stamped Homosexual Conduct. Some men changed names; others didn’t survive the shame. For Sullivan, suicide would’ve seemed less like tragedy and more like protocol—a way to disappear neatly before the system could finish the job.

That’s the real context for those glances between recruits. Critics keep wishing the show had pushed further—more tension, more romance—but they don’t understand that in 1979, the act of looking was already an act of defiance. Desire wasn’t repressed so much as criminalized. Every quiet glance carried the weight of federal law. Boots turns that danger into flirtation, missing that the fear was the story.

What makes this sting is knowing what Greg Cope White actually lived through. When he enlisted, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” didn’t exist because the words themselves were unthinkable. There were no sympathetic sergeants, no quiet allies, no other gay recruits trading secret glances. There was only silence—total and punishing. Every instinct to connect was crushed under the weight of performance. Netflix smooths that brutality into something palatable—retro aesthetics, soft-focus empathy, a playlist of safe emotions.

That softening isn’t confined to the barracks. Amazon’s Overcompensating tries to mock frat-boy masculinity by indulging it—keg stands, protein shakes, panic attacks turned into punchlines. It calls itself satire but still worships the insecurity it claims to expose, starring thirty-year-old fitness models as nineteen-year-olds. It perpetuates the same impossible body standards those of us who came of age in the eighties and nineties were fed without question—abs and silence sold as manhood. We didn’t see it for what it was: a culture grooming its boys, polishing them for the gaze of older men who wrote the rules. Back then, the models weren’t icons; they were props—told to wear their pants a size too big so they’d hang just right. The fraternity house isn’t the opposite of the barracks; it’s the training ground. Different stakes, same doctrine. Both teach that emotion is weakness, that belonging requires performance, that silence keeps you safe.

There’s danger in cleaning up stories like this. The moment you start sanding down the edges, you start lying. Every softened punch, every polite glance is a betrayal of the people who lived the unfiltered version. Boots means well, but it turns endurance into entertainment. Once the pain looks pretty enough to stream, it stops being remembered for what it was.

What modern audiences miss is how absolute that danger was. They’ve inherited vocabulary instead of memory—words like repression and representation without the weight those words once carried. They watch Boots and want more affection, more risk, more heat, never realizing that in 1979, risk meant confinement and heat meant evidence. For men like Greg Cope White—or DI Sullivan, had he existed—one glance too long could end a life as thoroughly as a bullet.

That’s what keeps getting lost in translation: the magnitude of what it cost to survive unseen. The distance between shame and prison, silence and safety. The world changed, thankfully—but every time the past is rewritten to make us comfortable, that change gets a little harder to see.

Despite everything I wrote above, I still enjoyed it. Some myths are too familiar to resist, and the casting doesn’t hurt either. But the bigger story is that Netflix produced it at all—a show about gay Marines, now sitting in the platform’s Top 10, led by three openly gay young actors. In 1979, that would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s a hit. That alone feels worth celebrating.

Further Reading & Viewing

The Pink Marine

Greg Cope White’s original memoir—the raw, funny, and often painful account that inspired Boots. A first-person look at what it meant to join the Marines as a closeted teenager in 1979. Signed copies of the book are also available on the author’s website.

Amazon | Bookshop.org

Conduct Unbecoming

Randy Shilts’s definitive investigation into gay service members in the U.S. military, tracing decades of secrecy, courage, and institutional hypocrisy. Essential context for understanding how far we’ve come—and how far we haven’t. This was one of my recent used book finds, a like new hardback copy for $3.00

Amazon | Bookshop.org

Boots

Netflix’s dramatization of The Pink Marine—beautifully shot, unevenly honest, but impossible to look away from. For all its flaws, I still found myself moved by it. Maybe that’s the trap, or maybe it’s the proof that tenderness can survive even the softest retelling.

Netflix

Overcompensating

Amazon’s satire of frat-house masculinity and modern insecurity—uneasy, funny, and revealing in all the ways it doesn’t mean to be. Just picked up for a second season.

Amazon

The first pour looks perfect—sepia light through a tulip glass, a harp logo gleaming like a saint’s halo. That’s the trick of House of Guinness. It goes down smooth, rich in atmosphere and self-importance.

I liked it. It’s beautiful. The costumes have that meticulous dampness only Irish productions can pull off, and the set design practically smells like turf smoke and privilege. But it’s not history. It’s a Guinness commercial with better lighting—and a cast that spends as much time brooding as they do buttoning their waistcoats.

Empire with a Head of Foam

The series rewrites the Guinness dynasty into soulful visionaries, torn between duty to the Crown and love of Ireland. That tension plays great on screen, but the real Guinnesses weren’t conflicted—they were comfortable. They were the Anglo-Irish aristocracy: Protestant, Unionist, and very much part of the system the show pretends they were secretly trying to dismantle.

Arthur Edward Guinness, who the show renders as a reluctant liberal with a discreet fondness for men, was actually hand-picked by Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli to represent Dublin in Parliament. The Queen (Victoria) later made him Lord Ardilaun. Hardly the résumé of a revolutionary.

His relatives, Benjamin and Edward, were no different. They sat in the House of Lords, built model housing for “the respectable poor,” and poured fortunes into charities that promoted good behavior and Protestant virtue. The idea that they were funneling funds to the Fenians—the Irish nationalist rebels who bombed their way through the 1860s—is fantasy. It never happened.

Love Among the Papists

The show takes its liberties elsewhere, too. Edward’s dalliances with a Catholic lover? Pure invention. In nineteenth-century Dublin, interfaith scandal wasn’t romantic—it was social suicide. These were families that drew lines in pews, politics, and marriage. Still, the series indulges in the fantasy: the Protestant heir defiling himself for love and Ireland, the forbidden kisses that double as class warfare.

And then there’s Arthur—moody, magnetic, and endowed like a fertility god. His storyline is all tortured longing and moral ambiguity. He’s gay, but tastefully so. It’s the kind of representation that flatters the present more than it reflects the past.

None of this bothers me. It’s fiction. It’s good television. But when critics start calling it “a vital reexamination of Ireland’s colonial past,” I will have to laugh. It’s not an interrogation; it’s seduction.

Aesthetic of Forgiveness

What the show does brilliantly is mood. Every scene glows with the aesthetic of forgiveness—bronze light, soft rain, confessional tones. The camera moves as if absolving its subjects. The Guinness family becomes a nation’s conscience, their moral haze standing in for Ireland’s.

Every shot hums with repentance, and even the casting joins in. Jack Gleeson—once the world’s favorite boy-king sociopath—returns from self-exile to play Byron Hedges, all tremor and tenderness. It’s almost cosmic penance: Joffrey Baratheon reborn as the conscience of colonial Dublin. You can feel the show straining to forgive not just the Guinnesses, but him, and by extension, itself.

By the time the credits roll, you half believe they brewed freedom right alongside the stout. The real story—that they were empire’s golden children—melts away in the candlelight.

The Aftertaste

If you watch House of Guinness as history, you’ll get indigestion. But as a piece of brand mythmaking, it’s masterful. Guinness has been perfecting this sleight of hand for a century—turning a colonial product into the liquid heart of Irish identity. After independence, the company leaned hard into Gaelic nostalgia: harps, horses, slogans about patience and pride. The show is just the deluxe version, prestige propaganda poured at room temperature.

So enjoy it for what it is. Admire the production design, the accents, and, if you must, Arthur’s impressive anatomy. But don’t confuse it for truth. The Guinnesses didn’t win Ireland its freedom; they just made a fortune while everyone else fought for it.

Still, it’s hard not to raise a glass. The myth is intoxicating, even when you know what’s in it.

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Robert Redford died this week at 89, and with him goes not just one of Hollywood’s great actors but a whole era of American film. He wasn’t simply a leading man; he was a director, a producer, an activist, the founder of Sundance. He shaped American cinema both in front of and behind the camera. But for me, the role that lingers is his Jay Gatsby in the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby.

The film itself has been picked apart for decades, dismissed by some as too pretty, too languid, too much of a coffee-table-book adaptation. But that judgment misses the point, because Fitzgerald’s story is about beauty that can’t last, a dream that slips through your fingers as soon as you reach for it. Redford’s performance—and the film around him—captured that more faithfully than any other attempt.

The Golden Boy as Tragic Dreamer

In the early 1970s, Redford was America’s golden boy: blond, athletic, impossibly handsome. He had already made Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Candidate. He was more than a star; he was a symbol of American promise.

And that’s why his Gatsby works. He carries himself with poise and restraint, the mask of a man who appears to have everything while hiding a hollow center. He isn’t manic, he isn’t deranged, he isn’t the fevered DiCaprio version shouting “old sport” across a glittering circus. He’s still, quiet, his desperation glimpsed only in the set of his jaw, the catch in his voice, the look in his eyes as they fix on a light across the bay.

Redford makes Gatsby’s delusion noble. You believe in him not because he dazzles but because he aches. He’s the Gatsby you want to be—the one who has built an entire persona from scratch, willing himself into existence, not for wealth itself but for a dream.

Aspiration vs. Seduction

This is where the comparison with Leonardo DiCaprio becomes useful. Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 adaptation gave us Gatsby as fever dream—fireworks, Jay-Z, champagne spilling over. DiCaprio was magnetic, but his Gatsby wasn’t someone you identified with. He was someone you wanted to be consumed by. His was a seduction, not an aspiration.

That’s the split between the two versions. Redford’s Gatsby represents aspiration—an ideal of poise and control, a man who keeps his tux pressed and his mask firmly in place until it cracks. DiCaprio’s Gatsby embodies seduction—chaos in a white suit, passion as spectacle, a man you want to fall into even as you know he’ll burn you down.

Both are present in Fitzgerald’s novel. But the quieter tragedy, the sense that the dream collapses not with fireworks but with silence, belongs to Redford.

A Film That Trusted Beauty

The 1974 film, directed by Jack Clayton with a script by Francis Ford Coppola, leaned into beauty as metaphor. Critics complained that it was drenched in chiffon and chandeliers, every frame polished to a Vogue-like sheen. But what else should Gatsby’s world look like? Fitzgerald described a universe shimmering with impossible perfection, so bright you almost go blind. To accuse the film of being too pretty is to miss the point: the glitter is what makes the fall hurt.

Daisy’s Voice, Full of Money

Mia Farrow’s Daisy was another lightning rod for criticism. She was called shrill, shallow, insubstantial. And she is. But Daisy isn’t meant to be a goddess. As Fitzgerald wrote, “Her voice was full of money.” She is meant to be the embodiment of Gatsby’s tragic blindness—a fragile, infuriating figure who can never live up to the dream projected onto her. Farrow played that well, making Daisy at once believable and unbearable. You understand why Gatsby can’t let her go, and why everyone else can see the futility.

In Keeping with Fitzgerald

What the 1974 film captured, more than any other adaptation, was Fitzgerald’s tone. The novel is not about parties. It is about what the parties conceal. It is about longing and silence, about beauty that crumbles, about people chasing what they can never hold. Fitzgerald ended with the famous line about “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” Redford’s film understood that mood. It didn’t shout at us. It trusted us to feel the ache of a dream slipping away.

A 1970s Gatsby

The timing of the film mattered too. In 1974, America was in disarray. Watergate was unraveling the presidency. Vietnam had drained idealism. The country felt exhausted, uncertain of its own myths.

To revisit the Jazz Age then was to revisit another moment of glitter over rot. The nostalgia for the 1920s that ran through the film was really nostalgia for something America felt it had already lost: innocence, possibility, the promise of a better tomorrow. Redford’s Gatsby stood at the intersection of those feelings. He was both fantasy and critique, promise and disillusionment.

Beyond Gatsby

Of course, Gatsby was just one role in a career that stretched across decades. In All the President’s Men, Redford turned investigative journalism into a cinematic thriller, giving Bob Woodward the kind of cool intensity reporters only dream of. In Three Days of the Condor, he embodied Cold War paranoia with that same taut restraint. And when he directed Ordinary People, he proved he could elicit raw, shattering performances from others.

He was more than a star. He was a cultural force, using his fame to elevate independent voices through Sundance. Without Redford, countless filmmakers—from Quentin Tarantino to Ryan Coogler—might never have found a platform.

But Gatsby remains singular, because it was the role where Redford’s public image and Fitzgerald’s character fused into one. The golden boy chasing an impossible dream. The man who seemed to embody American promise revealing the cracks beneath.

A Personal Memory

Growing up, my mother had a small set of Fitzgerald’s books on a shelf. They were bound in black cloth with silver lettering—a uniform edition published by Scribner in the late 1960s and early 1970s, part of a push to re-establish Fitzgerald in the American canon. Even The Last Tycoon—the novel he never finished—was there. Just seeing the titles lined up made me want to read them all.

I started with The Great Gatsby in middle school and worked through the rest, with This Side of Paradise becoming my favorite. I’ve read them all since then, with Tender Is the Night standing out as his most ambitious and heartbreaking.

For me, Gatsby is Fitzgerald’s greatest character, and Redford embodied him perfectly. I think as humans—but particularly as gay men—we understand the longing for something we can’t have, or at least something that isn’t good for us. Gatsby’s devotion to Daisy, absurd as it seems, feels familiar: chasing a dream because it sustains you, even when everyone else knows it will undo you.

The Shirts

And even at that age, watching the 1974 film for the first time, I understood it in my bones. When Redford’s Gatsby pulled stacks of shirts out of his wardrobe and let them tumble onto Daisy—linen, silk, sheer cloth in every color—I wanted to roll in them too. That scene, so extravagant and so silly, became the purest image of desire I had ever seen. Not sex exactly, but something adjacent: the hunger to be surrounded by beauty, to be wrapped in a dream, to lose yourself in the texture of a life just out of reach.

Forever Believing

Now, with Redford gone, that performance takes on an even deeper melancholy. He wasn’t just playing a man chasing a past he couldn’t reclaim; he becomes part of our own nostalgia. Watching him now is like watching the dream of a different Hollywood—an industry willing to be quiet, willing to trust beauty, willing to let melancholy do the work.

There will be more Gatsby adaptations, because Hollywood can’t help itself. But we don’t need them. Redford already gave us the version that matters. He gave us aspiration rather than seduction, tragedy rather than frenzy, beauty rather than noise. He gave us a Gatsby that felt faithful to Fitzgerald’s prose—restrained, melancholy, shimmering with a dream already slipping away.

And now, with his death, that dream feels all the more poignant. Because it isn’t just Jay Gatsby staring out at the green light anymore. It’s Robert Redford himself, forever young, forever tragic, forever believing.

Books & Films Mentioned

If you’d like to revisit Fitzgerald or Redford:

• The Great Gatsby — Bookshop | Amazon

• Tender Is the Night — Bookshop | Amazon

• This Side of Paradise — Bookshop | Amazon

• The Last Tycoon — Bookshop | Amazon

• Film: The Great Gatsby (1974) — Amazon

• Film: The Great Gatsby (2013) — Amazon

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I suppose if I were a proper social critic, I would have known that the Emmy’s were also Sunday night and could have combined all of this into one essay, but here we are. Appropriately so, the buzz Sunday night centered around the Netflix limited series, Adolescence.

Of course I had seen it, but in the midst of everything going on at the time, I suppose I put it out of my mind. If you aren’t familiar, it’s four episodes, each shot in a single unbroken take. I watched them all in one sitting. When it ended, I sat in there for nearly an hour staring at the screen and weeping.

At the center of the series is Jamie Miller, a 13-year-old boy accused of murdering a classmate. Owen Cooper — who just made history as the youngest male Emmy winner at fifteen — plays him with such unnerving precision that you almost forget he’s acting.

The genius of the show is that it doesn’t give you an easy out. You can’t just label Jamie a monster and change the channel. You have to sit with him, minute by unbroken minute, and watch him try to live inside a script he doesn’t yet understand.

That script insists boys prove themselves through dominance, that women exist as validators, not as people who might say no. Rejection isn’t written into the lines. So when Katie laughs him off, it isn’t just embarrassment—it’s collapse. At thirteen, he hasn’t yet been given the tools to understand that her no is simply a boundary, not an existential threat. And in a culture that tells boys they are owed affirmation, even sex, her refusal feels like humiliation. The rage that follows isn’t innate. It’s the by-product of a role he’s been told to play.

Critics have pointed to Katie’s rejection as central to Jamie’s breakdown. Some have tied it to the online “manosphere,” the forums and influencers who preach that women owe men submission. As Paula Mejía noted in The Atlantic, Jamie’s collapse is framed against “the online spaces where young men are told feminism has damaged them,” places where rejection gets twisted into humiliation.

But the internet is only a megaphone. The underlying script is much older. It’s the same one Downs dissected for queer men. It’s the one we see at Westmore, where Ethan memorizes and shouts fraternity trivia until his tongue goes dry, scrubs floors until his knuckles bleed, all to prove he is worthy. Eli wore the masks easily—lacrosse star, golden boy—and Ethan envied it, even as it crushed him.

And it’s not just about gay kids or straight kids. It’s about all boys. The culture still trains them to measure themselves by conquest, and then acts surprised when some implode. In our current climate, with Christian Nationalism pushing the language of male headship and female submission front and center into the mainstream, the script is being reinforced, not dismantled.

Most boys won’t turn violent. Many will turn inward, some toward silence, depression, or addiction. But if we keep handing thirteen-year-olds a script that tells them they are owed obedience, that women can’t say no, that weakness is shameful, then we shouldn’t be shocked when some reach the ugliest possible conclusion.

That’s why I cried when the credits rolled. For Jamie. For Katie. For Ethan. For the teenage version of me struggling with that script. And for my own sons, who are growing up in a world where sadly this script is still often the default.

Further Reading

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I had intended to start Watching & Reading with essays on books and eventually move into movies and TV Shows that I found interesting. But with the death of James Dobson and the release of season two of Amazon’s Shiny Happy People, this felt too timely to wait on.

The series doesn’t sugarcoat it. Survivors and experts say outright that the Duggar family wasn’t just reality TV — it was part of a decades-long project to fuse religion with politics. Season two makes clear this was never about one family, but about the machinery that still shapes America today.

And this isn’t the first time the alarm’s been raised. Amazon’s Bad Faith, released in 2024, traced the same arc — how evangelical leaders methodically built political power over decades. Shiny Happy People adds another layer, showing the human cost inside the families and communities that carried the project forward. Together, they tell one story: none of this is accidental, and it hasn’t gone away.

The Blueprint

The roots trace back to the 1960s. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority. Phyllis Schlafly mobilizing against women’s rights. And then James Dobson — smoother, subtler, harder to pin down. He sold himself as a parenting expert, but what he was really selling was obedience, patriarchy, and fear dressed up as “family values.”

Dobson’s Focus on the Family normalized purity pledges and patriarchal discipline across living rooms nationwide. Teen Mania youth rallies cranked it up — stadiums full of teenagers chanting for Christ like it was a rock concert. These weren’t oddities. They were training grounds.

Reagan’s Bargain

What made it all stick was Ronald Reagan. Folksy, smiling, Hollywood-polished, he gave the Moral Majority a mainstream glow. Reagan wasn’t a zealot, but he was pragmatic. He saw the movement’s value and welcomed them in. That alliance made the religious right respectable overnight. Suddenly Dobson and Falwell weren’t just Christian radio preachers — they were shaping national policy with a seat at the White House table.

Reagan’s “morning in America” glow gave the movement its legitimacy. And once they had it, they never let go.

The Pipeline

The real genius of the system was that it didn’t just target parents — it went after kids. Homeschool curricula, purity pledges, Focus on the Family radio shows, Teen Mania stadium tours — an entire ecosystem where children never breathed outside air. The shiny, happy family on TV was the bait. The goal was a generation raised to obey first and ask questions never.

Those children are adults now. They sit on school boards, write laws, and push Project 2025. What looked like eccentric homeschooling — denim jumpers, Bible workbooks, purity rings — was training for political power. Raise them in submission, shame them into silence, then unleash them into government and culture.

And the public paid for it. Vouchers and “school choice” diverted tax dollars from public schools into private religious academies. Public schools were starved, then blamed for failing. Meanwhile, those redirected funds bankrolled the indoctrination pipeline.

The Silence That Protects Power

The cost was more than politics. A culture built on obedience and patriarchy leaves children vulnerable. Taught to fear authority, trained to keep silent, they became easy prey. And when abuse happened, the system protected men in power, not the victims.

It’s the same pattern revealed in the Epstein files: different worlds, same dynamic. Power shielded. Silence enforced. Victims ignored. It’s unlikely that much from those files will see the light of day.

The Cultural Subtext

The first wave of “school choice” wasn’t about God — it was about race. When civil rights forced schools open in the 1960s, white flight and “Christian academies” sprang up overnight. Parents didn’t want their kids sitting next to Black kids, but they stopped saying it out loud. The new code was “values,” “safety,” and “parental rights.”

As overt racism became less acceptable, the target shifted. Women’s Reproductive rights. Gay and lesbian rights. Now it’s trans people. The scapegoat shifts, but the strategy doesn’t: demonize a group, rile up supporters, consolidate power. Even now, conservatives claim they can “accept” LGB but not “the other letters” — as if slicing up people’s identities is progress.

Martin Luther King Jr. warned that white men would sell out their entire democracy rather than share power. This movement has proven him right, again and again, just swapping scapegoats as the decades roll by.

The Myth of “Judeo-Christian Roots”

One of the most persistent slogans is the call to “return America to its Judeo-Christian roots.” It sounds noble, even historical. But it’s fiction.

The “Judeo” is window dressing. This project has no interest in pluralism or Judaism. It wants Christian dominance, full stop. And the bigger lie is that America was ever founded on those roots. The Constitution is explicit: no state religion, no religious test for office. Jefferson and Madison fought to escape theocracy, not to enshrine it. They knew what happens when governments claim divine authority — Europe had centuries of holy wars to prove it.

Dobson’s heirs aren’t returning America to its roots. They’re pushing the very theocracy the founders designed the Constitution to prevent.

Beyond Trump

Some people comfort themselves by imagining this dies when Trump does. It won’t. Trump didn’t invent the machine — he just rode it like a carnival barker. Behind him stand a hundred polished men in suits waiting their turn. They won’t be the three ring circus Trump has become. They’ll be more disciplined, and more effective.

Trump is the proof that the movement doesn’t care who carries the banner. They’ll crown anyone who pushes their agenda. Trump — the thrice-married casino mogul, serial adulterer, convicted felon, the least Christian man alive — was suddenly their poster boy for “family values.” That’s not hypocrisy, that’s clarity. They don’t care about virtue. They care about power.

People need to actually listen to what’s coming out of Washington. The language of “values” and “freedom” is cover. The project behind it is cold, deliberate, and ongoing.

The Point of No Return

That’s what makes Shiny Happy People — and Bad Faith before it — feel less like entertainment and more like a mirror. The leaders behind these movements aren’t relics of the past. They’re still here, still pushing, still writing the next playbook.

We laughed at the Duggar spectacle. But while we were entertained, they were implementing their plan. Forty years later, the country looks exactly like what they envisioned: democracy chipped away, fear weaponized, religion woven into law.

They’re not coming. They’re already here.

Further Reading

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