No Bro: Why the Film, ‘Bros,’ Wasn’t Groundbreaking

Bros was a textbook of gay stereotypes.

The 2022 film follows Bobby (Billy Eichner), a 40-year-old gay man who lives New York City. His parents have passed away and he seemingly has no interest in starting a family of his own. More pointedly, he has no interest in a committed relationship. Focused on a successful career in and out of the spotlight, Bobby is much more comfortable talking about the problems that face the gay community at large, rather than fixing gay problems at home. It’s quite clear from the first fifteen minutes that our protagonist is unhappy with his life and too stubborn to change his mind.

Bobby meets Aaron (Luke MacFarlane) at a club one night, another detached gay man not looking for anything serious. The big difference: Aaron is a straight-passing bro. Against all odds, Bobby and Aaron fall in love.

If Bobby’s character—a single, career-driven, middle-aged man—wasn’t enough to shed light on a real gay prototype, he was also draped in every edition of the rainbow flag. His job, his friends, every epiphany over the course of the narrative: gay. The number of gay themes smashed into one character was so excessive Bobby was made into a caricature.

Fire Island (2022), was also immersed in gay themes. But, grounded by the weight of lifelong friendship, this film showed us an array of characters and relationships in the gay community. This chemistry, this connectedness, was overlooked in Bros.

Early on, Bobby’s new professional mission is to start a museum dedicated to (big surprise) the LGBTQ community. Enter, the board of directors: a character representing each of the aforementioned letters of the queer acronym. These scenes around the meeting table seemed like try-hard attempts to include cultural texture. The dialogue came across like a thread of comments on a Facebook post about queer inclusion read aloud. So caught up in representation, we lost authenticity.

Instead of running headfirst into stereotypes, offer an alternative narrative. Instead of telling the audience how an entire community feels, show us a scene that exemplifies being singled-out due to identity. Instead of feeding us inside-jokes born from online tropes, ground the humor in real life.

If the point was to make Bobby a relatable protagonist, we needed him grounded in emotional depth. His despair out of the office was real. His desire for love is a shared pain. And his need to make an impact on community is touching. These are the themes that, if expanded across the narrative, could have made Bobby more lovable. But, instead, we got a film about a gay man devoted to a gay lifestyle and angry that everyone else isn’t.

When the romance picks up speed, you’d think Bobby’s demeanor would be softened by Aaron’s relaxed and loving nature. But, in lieu of emotional impact, their opposing ‘gay lifestyles’ was made the most important part of their relationship. Aaron’s avoidance of everything gay serves as an antithesis to Bobby’s camp and glory. They overcome their philosophical differences, yes, but not through intimacy and understanding. The romance felt forced and not always believable. At the end, Aaron is forever changed by Bobby’s point of view, while Bobby remains caught up in his own. Aaron falls in love with Bobby and Bobby falls in love with the idea that he doesn’t have to go through life alone.

The film attempted to explore the soul of the queer community from the inside-out; what we got was surface-level, simplified versions of who queer people are. The film lacked a certain humanness that could have made these characters more touching, more relatable not only to queer viewers but to a broader audience. And isn’t that the goal?

Films like The Whale and Bones and All sprinkled queerness into the background, normalizing queer existence in all types of stories. Everything, Everywhere, All at Once gave us a groundbreaking, action-packed, emotionally-grounded narrative that crossed dimensions and cultural boundaries — hinged on a mother’s acceptance of her queer daughter.

Bros was a nice story, but it wasn’t grounded in something more impactful than queerness.

Paint us a picture of gay life without a rainbow. Give us gay characters and gay plots that exist outside of LGBTQ+ museums. Maybe — grounded in the universality of human emotion — these queer stories will win museum placement when we look back in fifty years.