A man stands over Versailles, arms braced. Beneath him, another man lies in a canopy bed, propped on one elbow, watching. A moon hangs to the side. A spacecraft drifts past, indifferent. The scene borrows its architecture from history and its posture from something much less dignified: a sitcom bedroom, and the joke that lived in it for two seasons.
The joke belonged to Boone Clemens and Chad Radwell, fraternity roommates in the 2015 Fox series Scream Queens. Boone is written as gay. Chad is not, and says so often, usually right before letting Boone back into his bed anyway, on the condition of no touching — a condition Boone tests once, and a condition a girlfriend later walks in on and reads exactly as it looks. Late in the show, Boone turns out to have been performing his gayness all along, as cover for something else entirely. The bed joke survives the twist either way: something is always being performed in that room.
Boone is played by Nick Jonas, Chad by Glen Powell — both straight, by every public account. Which means the entire gay half of this joke, the longing, the crush, the mannerisms coded as desperate-for-approval, was built by a straight man’s idea of gay behavior and handed to another straight man to reject on camera. It’s a quieter cousin of gay for pay: an industry casting straight actors to originate the gay performance itself while gay actors wait for the same shot at playing anything. But maybe it runs the other way too — the gay role as the one place a straight leading man gets to be soft, scared, wanting, without having to be the hero about it. Theft or permission is somebody else’s question to answer.
That’s the collage, too. A body above, unreachable, lit by a moon and a ship that won’t stop. A body below, close enough to touch, told not to. Approximate symmetry: two men in the same bed, on terms that were never built to hold them both.
— Behan
Sources: Scream Queens (Fox, 2015–2016), created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan
