RomCom Rewrite

On Disability After Dark‘s podcast #101 Andrew Gurza rewrites a classic romcom with disability in mind. He picks ‘You’ve Got Mail’ & makes a good plot out of it, but some of the ‘issues’ he’d see addressed come across more as polemic than entertainment – i.e. banning straws. The struggle for accessibility may not play as comedic either – but it’s certainly worth finding out.

This sort of rewriting is something I’ve been doing for years. You know things like: fantasizing that Tarzan would have more fun with the hot Zulu King than that plain Jane he gets stuck with. What was really up with Tony Randall as the ‘straight’ best friend is so many 50’s, 60’s comedies? But of course gays didn’t exist then.

At one time heterocentric entertainment was literally the law. In Hollywood for decades the Hays Commission would force films to remove any mention of divergent sexuality from scripts or edit it out of already filmed footage. In books, queer characters were only acceptable as tragically flawed figures who inevitable had to die by the end of the book.

What if it was Greg Brady who had a crush on the football team captain? What if Bud, on Married With Children, was caught with a copy of Mandate (a gay men’s pin-up magazine) under his bed & not Playboy? Why couldn’t Buffy and Faith ever consummate their clearly sexual attraction? Pop music: why not, say, ‘For Emil wherever I may find him’. Or ‘Mark’s tee-shirt waved in the breeze as Roy Orbison sang.’

So when Andrew rewrites those heterocentric fantasy, wish-fulfillment, romcoms into a stories where real people can be a part of things I’m with him 100% ‘When Harry Wheeled Salvator’ ‘American Crip Pie.’ (I use ‘crip’ as Andrew uses it freely.) We need stories where disabled folk aren’t seen as brave but as sexy.

I’d go further because queering romcom isn’t such a difficult step. There is already a mid-budget niche of good-looking gay gays & gals fumbling in their search for true love. I’d love to see big budget superheroes, or male action figures like James Bond or GI Joe – have a same-sex love interest. Why not Superman with Larry Lane; Iron Man with Pecker Potts. I say male because female-on-female is still more acceptable for general audiences.