Kudos to everyone involved in the current movie comedy, In and Out.

Not only does it contain the best - and funniest - Hollywood treatment of American homophobia to date; it has a subplot dear to the hearts of Fat Admirers everywhere.

Though you probably know the basic plot already from saturation advertising, I'll repeat it here. Kevin Kline, a middle-aged high school English teacher in small-town Ohio, is publicly outed at the Academy Awards when a former pupil (Matt Dillon) accepts the Oscar for Best Actor. This happens mere days before Kline's planned wedding to Joan Cusack, a fellow teacher who has lost over seventy-five pounds to be "good enough" for Kline. Dillon's announcement sends shockwaves throughout the town.

Much of the movie concerns itself with the comic reactions to this revelation, as all the characters (Kline included) grapple with the question of "Is he or isn't he?" Pretty funny stuff, with a lotta laugh-out-loud moments. Scriptwriter Paul Rudnick (Addams Family Values, Jeffrey) is a master of off-center comedy, and he's created a barrage of sympathetic characters here. But the prime piece of interest to this site revolves around the Cusack and Dillon characters.

A rigorous follower of Richard Simmons videotapes (one of which is used to great comic effect midpoint in the movie), Cusack's character has staked all her happiness and self-esteem on her recent weight loss. She believes that her loss is the only way she can make herself acceptable to a man like Kline (that she's wrong in more ways than one is just part of the multiple ironies in the flick). When Dillon's Brad Pitt-styled character shows up in town to rectify the situation he's inadvertently created, the two meet for the first time since her weight loss. He admits that he'd always found her attractive as a plus-sized woman.

The last scene we see of the two finds them at a wedding reception table, Dillon feeding the Cusack character Cheetos.

This is a fairly small part of the movie (though it fits under one of the movie's central questions: Who do we live our lives for?) But I was cheered to see it. Dillon's character is not at a loss for Hollywoodish companions - when we first see him, he's accompanied by a painfully thin model named Sonya - but he's attracted to the Cusack character for both physical and intellectual reasons. It's the first decent portrayal of a straight FA that I can remember seeing in a mainstream American movie.

The first openly FA character I can recall from movies was gay. In the farcical The Ritz (1976), portly comic actor Jack Weston hides from gangsters in a gay bathhouse. One of the comic complications that the character runs into is a chubby chaser who finds him attractive. Because chubby chasers were so unknown to the mainstream audience at the time, playwright Terrence McNally even included an explanation of the orientation within the script. There was no acknowledgment, though, that this was anything but a "gay thing."

Round about the same time, in a much less mainstream corner of the film world, the phrase "chubby chaser" was also being tossed about. In John Waters' Female Trouble (1975), super-sized Divine seduces one of the flick's male characters, asking him at one point if he's a "chubby chaser." Given that the heroine of Waters' underground satire was being played by a transvestite, though, it's understandable that the term would again be hemmed into the confines of gay sexuality. Straight FAs? You've gotta be kidding!

So what does it say when the first straight FA in a mainstream entertainment makes his appearance in a film focused on the comic complications of outing? Perhaps being gay and being FA in this country are comparable outsider states. It'd be a better world if we didn't make any distinction between being In and Out - but, then again, what would we do for comedy?

September, 1997

Copyright 1997 - Oakhaus Designs

---Wilson Barbers