June 9, 2022
'Nude Hot Men' in Movies, Fierce Female Heroes: How Pop Culture Guided James Scully's Gay Journey
Kilian Melloy READ TIME: 2 MIN.
"Fire Island" star James Scully recounted how pop culture informed, and helped ease, his gay youth as he was growing up in homophobic Texas.
"When I was growing up, there wasn't a lot of explicitly queer stuff, so I do feel like I was just grabbing little breadcrumbs from movies and shows when I could," Scully, 30, told Thrillist about his youth in San Antonio.
The "Heathers" reboot star pointed to the movies "When a Stranger Calls" and "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" as a source of strength and inspiration, saying, "In Texas, what I was getting at school was, 'You talk like a girl, you act like a girl, you look like a girl.'" But watching "any of those horror movies where it was one woman facing off against an adversary, I was like, 'Women are badass; why would I be bothered by being compared to them?'"
Another movie that became a wellspring of strength: "Troy," starring Brad Pitt and an "abundance of mostly nude, hot men," as Scully describes it. "How am I supposed to not be gay when this movie exists? What is my response to this scene with his naked butt supposed to be besides 'I want to sleep with Brad Pitt'?"
Classic kids' books like "Frog and Toad" have their place in Scully's queer canon ("Oh, in retrospect, many of the characters that we loved as children are pretty queer-coded"), as does the musical "Cats."
"I first saw it at my high school. The young man who played Rum Tum Tugger, Zachary Wilhelm, he's from Texas, too," Scully detailed. "I was like, 'Uh-oh. Do I think this cat is sexy? What's going on?'"
Moving right along, Michael Lombardi had a gay storyline on the Denis Leary firehouse drama "Rescue Me." Scully called it "unexpected" that "in this show that was packed scene-to-scene with the machismo of the firehouse... out of nowhere there was this sweet, very real gay love story happening." While watching those scenes with his family, he added, "a tense silence would fall over the room because I didn't want to respond in a way that would give me away."
As if the family didn't know, or at least suspect: "I think my parents were also side-eyeing me from across the living room," Scully said.
Kilian Melloy serves as EDGE Media Network's Associate Arts Editor and Staff Contributor. His professional memberships include the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association, the Boston Online Film Critics Association, The Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, and the Boston Theater Critics Association's Elliot Norton Awards Committee.
