SA releases its first queer romcom
Romantic comedies tug at many people’s heart strings.
They are warm, fun and just as satisfying as comfort food on a winter’s day.
The genius of the genre can be seen in its main element — love.
In a monumental move, SA released its first queer romcom — No Hiding Here — with a talented cast that sparkles like the colourful wardrobe and charming small town location.
No Hiding Here follows the misadventures of a bumbling schoolteacher Sam (played by Earl Gregory) who has to deal with his actions after humiliating closeted pop star Caleb (David Viviers).
While the movie sticks true to the wonderful world of romcoms, its most appealing quality lies in being a fossil feverishly decorated with feather boas and sex jibes that could only have resulted from hours of infantilising episodes of RuPaul’s
Drag Race in an effort to amuse the class clown at the back of the classroom.
But that’s the least of the issues with the ambitious film.
At its very centre, No Hiding Here’s archaic tropes feature a problematic interracial coupling between its lead LGBQIA+ stars. he 2018 hit Inxeba exists as one of the only SA movies where the main characters are gay, black and their relationship is explored.
It’s a heavy movie that plays on the fascination cinema has with the trauma in gay relationships, similarly to Oscarwinning romantic tragedy
Brokeback Mountain.
No gay couple exists with the hopes of coming out alive or even together.
SA’s cinema creates experiences of queerness that become the canvas of its writers and directors’ dark fantasies.
The abundance of interracial queer couples is a jackpot for productions looking to ensure they secure viewership of people who feel unseen.
This token minority trope guarantees that marginalised black SA audiences have a character to relate to while their intended liberal white audiences don’t have to watch something that reproaches their privilege.
Instead, they are the cool advantaged group that should totally be accepted for how modern and woke they are.
White gay men have been at the very top of the social food chain often eating up all the attention that is needed by the other letters of the queer alphabet.
Many of these issues find them sky-high and unbothered by the violence of white gay privilege and they, in turn, erase the experiences of other members in a stance similar to white feminism.
To make matters worse, rather than face the many politics of queerness, the movie appeals to the lingo and needs of queer folk for profit.
No Hiding Here drizzles political and philosophical terms about how they woke-bait to the point that it allows the white characters in the movie to seem inclusive and openminded by brushing the existing issues under the carpet, especially with the romantic interest of this movie.
Caleb’s privilege is especially ignored when exercising his privilege with the film’s comic relief, Molly (Louren Loubser).
The character struggles with being slut-shamed by the townspeople.
Taking the reins on this issue she crafts an image of herself where she owns her sexualised image.
This huge responsibility is glazed over as part of the ensemble’s subplots and becomes the lyric to Caleb’s coming out song at the end of the movie, a critique that many white gay men are being criticised for when taking from black culture and profiting from it.
This global issue has even resulted in imagined black English, which is the result of misusing African-American vernacular English to the point where it delegitimises the language.
Escaping the importance of exploring queer couples of colour, No Hiding Here exists like the setting of its movie which is a utopia of whiteness.
By defining its lead character as one whose experiences of race politics can be brushed under the carpet, the writing team gets away with continuing a type of queer erasure by allowing this movie to centre on stereotypes, clichés and political apathy.
No Hiding Here becomes a movie that highlights the passionate need for white privilege to see itself as the solution to the country’s diversity problems.