It’s Austen with a lot of “Who’s the ‘bottom,’ here?” jokes.īooster folds in little digs at gay prejudices - a hierarchy that declares “No fats, no femmes, no Asians” - and lip service about not wanting to “conform to this community’s toxic body standards.”
Some suitors - rich and/or handsome - will prove to be unworthy cads, others “rude” and “snobbish” but worthy of a reassessment. If we’re stealing from Austen, that means Noah will also meet someone. Erin telling them she has to sell the house she’s long invited these “poor gays” to stay in adds pathos and urgency to their “last summer” together.Īs Howie is 30 and “never had a boyfriend,” that becomes Noah/”Emma’s” mission - to get shy, sweet San Francisco Howie some action. They’re just five gay men, on the make from the minute they board the ferry (Shirts OFF!), ready to brave the “meat rack” of parties, drag/karaoke bars, beaches and sunsets. Noah and four friends - Luke ( Matt Rogers), Keegan ( Tomas Matos), Max ( Torian Miller) and Howie ( Bowen Yang of “Saturday Night Live”) - gather at the home of their doting lesbian mother figure ( Margaret Cho, of course) every year for a reunion/get-away and landlocked “cruise.” Plainly, Noah’s never visited Disney World in June.
Imagine “Fire Island,” New York’s gay getaway, as a version of Jane Austen’s Bath in the early 19th century - a vacation town where all the right people mix and mingle, court, flirt and perhaps “couple.” That’s what writer and star Joel Kim Booster does for the latest among many films to use that title - and yes, there was even a TV series titled “Fire Island,” too.įew locations are as evocative of what most everything set on “Fire Island” is about - gay love and the freedom to express it.īooster plays Noah, sort of Jane Austen’s “Emma” transplanted to “Pride & Prejudice.” Noah is our narrator/guide to this mash-up of Austen themes and characters rendered in bitchy, banana-hammocked, molly-popping strokes on some gay friends’ “last week” at “the Gay Disney World,” as he describes it.