Ya, agreed to an extent. Though I don’t personally put too much stock into “queer baiting” as a concept, as it implies an intention from the writers to deliberately trick the queer community into watching the show. I think the more likely scenario is actually that a heteronormative writer’s room just thought it would be funny if two straight dudes fell on each other or had to go through couple’s counseling and wasn’t thinking about how queer people would perceive it at all. That seems even more apparent when reading Mackie’s response, as he seems to be speaking directly to who he perceives as the intended audience for the show—straight dudes.

>but the overarching problem will always be discomfort and sexualization of male intimacy in our culture

We definitely need to get over our discomfort of male intimacy as a culture, but I actually think the first and most important step for that is to completely discard the “no homo” mindset and fully embrace that a deep and intimate relationship with another man will inevitably share a lot of similarities with the relationships of gay men, who are also having a deep and intimate relationship with another man. We need to fully deconstruct our society’s belief that male intimacy is the sole domain of gay dudes and become completely comfortable with embracing our friends in a way where we don’t care whether people think we’re gay or straight. That will also inevitably lead to the realization that the belief in “sexualization of male intimacy” as a problem is itself a product of that same dynamic we just deconstructed.

I don’t disagree at all that emotional openness being seen as gay is a core component of toxic masculinity, but the best response to toxic-masculinity-fueled accusations of gayness is simply to be unbothered by accusations of gayness. The issue is the toxically-masculine viewpoint of gay = bad.

Also I more or less disagree that people see close male relationships as ONLY being gay. I personally don’t think that, for whatever that’s worth.

Fair enough—I mostly disagree with Mackie’s point so that tracks. I just don’t see what the issue really is with interpreting a close male friendship as maybe being gay. It doesn’t invalidate the friendship in any way and I feel like he’s in some ways taking gay relationships a bit too seriously and inadvertently misrepresenting what they might actually look like in reality.

Like this comment he made about homosexuality is a little weird

> something as pure and beautiful as homosexuality

Gay dudes that are dating each other often have a deep friendship that in a lot of ways might resemble a deep friendship between two straight dudes. That’s all I’m really saying here. Like cool, they didn’t end up being gay and that’s fine—I just take issue with the implication that thinking they were gay really means anything or lessens the impact of their bond or really just says anything at all about straight male friendships. It’s just kind of a fragile and insecure take and I found it a bit disappointing.

Quote from the article:

> “So many things are twisted and convoluted. There’s so many things that people latch on to with their own devices to make themselves relevant and rational,” Mackie said. “The idea of two guys being friends and loving each other in 2021 is a problem because of the exploitation of homosexuality. It used to be guys can be friends, we can hang out, and it was cool. You would always meet your friends at the bar, you know. You can’t do that anymore, because something as pure and beautiful as homosexuality has been exploited by people who are trying to rationalize themselves. So something that’s always been very important to me is showing a sensitive masculine figure. There’s nothing more masculine than being a superhero and flying around and beating people up. But there’s nothing more sensitive than having emotional conversations and a kindred spirit friendship with someone that you care about and love.”

Honestly kinda a weird and confusing take from him. I also want more sensitive straight guys, but there’s literally nothing remotely problematic about wondering if two sensitive dudes wanna fuck each other. I think he’s really overthinking it here and to be honest he does come across as pretty defensive and a little resentful of anybody that thought they might be gay—but whatever it’s just some random quote and doesn’t really matter much.

Also I can’t speak for everyone, but I personally just thought they might be gay because of that scene where they land on top of each other and also the therapy scene where they intertwine legs—which I personally read as similar to the romantic tropes you might see between a man and a woman. Me thinking they might be gay had nothing to do with their sensitivity or how deep their friendship was, I just genuinely thought the writers might be setting that up by including those tropes.

Edit: Curious what people disagree with here that is causing them to downvote. Feel free to leave a comment if you wanna have a discussion.

This is such a pretentious and out of line article—just the epitome of trash, click-baity journalism. The author literally went to a site specifically meant for parents to discuss whether media is appropriate for their young children and bullies and chastises them for having an opinion. He takes a handful of reviews and twists it into this narrative about how parents these days are way too sensitive and demand too much or something—completely ignoring that this is their curated space to have nuanced discussions with like-minded people. They’re not review bombing IMDB or demanding the studio take the movie down or something. The reviews aren’t even particularly outrageous either.

At the risk of sounding super lame—this just feels like active parenting. Parents should be monitoring what their kids watch more than ever. And we probably shouldn’t have been allowed to watch half the stuff we saw as kids. Idk what’s currently happening in Charlie Brown though, just more of a general comment on kids media.