The first time I was called a dyke, I texted a friend about it and laughed it off. I was a closeted lesbian teenager living in a country where equality is a foregone conclusion, and so sometimes I soaked up insults like they were little tokens of recognition. At the very least, this violence reminded me that I existed: undesirable, unacceptable, but still seen for who I was. I was unaware of the insidiousness of shame back then, and how this queer feeling finds a home in the most unexpected of places: a nonchalant text, telling all my friends that I am very much proud of being a lesbian, and eventually, making sure everyone knew I was super okay with being the token lesbian academic, friend, sister, cousin, the list goes on. Deep down, however, all I could fantasize about was what my life was like before I found out about my sexuality — when I was just me, before crushes on girls, and everything else I was, came tinged with a bit of disgust.
It didn’t occur to me that self-acceptance could be ugly and unforgiving (and that maybe it should be). I wanted it to be clean, something prelapsarian, before that apple was eaten and all of humanity went to shit. I overperformed pride thinking it would make me forget how unwanted I felt, but shame ultimately demanded to be dealt with. The loneliness came back. Shame sat by the couch and patiently waited for me to turn on the television.
This complicated binary between gay shame and pride is what HBO’s comedy series, The Other Two, tackles with relentlessly hilarious precision. While the show is mostly a satirical indictment of showbiz and modern gay life, it also cleverly makes gay shame the devastating subtext behind everything Cary Dubek (Drew Tarver) does. From the exposure of his butthole pictures on Grindr to willingly being “gay-baited” by a celebrity who strangely resembles Harry Styles, shame stubbornly sticks onto Cary — and it is most telling in his insistent denial of shame’s existence. Beneath the show’s satire is a story of a gay man whose residual feelings of shame are made worse because the world is all too eager to promote an image of gay pride that Cary might not be ready for.
Created by Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider, former co-head writers of Saturday Night Live, the show follows Cary and his sister, Brooke (Heléne Yorke), as they attempt to make nepotism work for their respective floundering artistic careers after their younger brother, Chase (Case Walker), becomes a viral internet sensation overnight. Cary is barely making it as an actor, only managing to land auditions for insignificant roles like “Man at Party Who Smells a Fart” — an apt analogy for the self-deprecating way he views himself. The show portrays the bigotry and latent homophobia of the media industry as actively complicit in Cary’s ongoing struggle with shame, as his journey to be recognized often coincides with the highly publicized reminder that he is only ever the “gay son” or “gay brother” in the Dubek family. In a horrifying yet stellar moment in “Chase Gets the Gays,” Cary’s potential agent (played perfectly by the wonderful Kate Berlant), gleefully yells at him: “I am gagging for you, faggot!” The camera slowly pans to Cary as his face transforms from wide-eyed excitement to a numbing shock. It is in this exact second that Cary realizes that his sexual identity — the very one that he can’t bring himself to articulate till his early twenties — is casually thrown around like a joke, or worse, reduced to a clickbaity message acronym (ASAP-F!) that is said with such ease by the straight majority. His fears are confirmed: there is no way he can navigate showbiz without being forced to capitalize on his very progressive sexuality somehow, even if he hasn’t quite accepted himself yet.
These fears are also present when Chase releases a song titled “My Brother is Gay and That’s Okay!” which momentarily catapults Cary into queer icon levels of stardom. He gets recognized as the gay brother while buying toilet paper! A random gay kid on the street tells Cary that the song helped him come out to his mother! But the heartwarming nature of these moments is crudely undercut, as Cary attends to these scenes wearing trousers so loose that his penis is sticking out — an ironically phallic symbol of Cary’s powerlessness over his own sexuality and how it has been used to generate clout without his consent. His wardrobe malfunction, then, cleverly reveals a heartbreaking mismatch between how Cary sees himself and how the world wants to see him.
While the public exposure of Cary’s sexuality is utterly terrifying to him, this very same hypervisibility is a profitable currency for an industry that he desperately desires to succeed in. Like clothing that never seems to fit, the industry which appears most welcoming of queers is predicated on virulent homophobia that treats gays more like symbolic capital than actual people. This episode devastatingly concludes with Cary accidentally thanking a potential date for saying they didn’t know he is gay — a Freudian slip that reveals Cary’s internalized homophobia, contrary to what everyone else around him believes.
If the first season of The Other Two is about Cary struggling to accept being out to everyone, then the second season further expands this struggle by showing how Cary navigates being an acceptable gay man. Ready to embrace his sexuality, Cary now has a boyfriend named Jess (Gideon Gluke) and they spend their days dreaming of marriage and living out Dan Savage’s It Gets Better campaign. To top it all off, Jess is horrified that Cary would prefer sex to… cuddling while watching HBO. They pride themselves on being monogamous, and as Cary and Jess happily say:
“The gay community is not just about sex. It’s not all blindfolds and butt plugs. A lot of nights now, we don’t even have sex. We just kind of cuddle and watch TV.”
The implication behind this statement, of course, is that they are unlike the other gay men who are into casual hookups and one-night stands. Having internalized the pastoralizing discourse on promiscuity that emerged in the wake of the AIDS crisis, Cary’s self-loathing for his gayness now manifests in an almost manic performance of heteronormativity. It is bleak to watch, but any queer viewer would know what this particular type of shame feels like. After all, homophobia is a special kind of hate that thrives on the brutal devaluation of our love.
Far away from the trappings of showbiz, we also realize in “Chase Drops his First Album” that Cary’s late father found “the gay stuff very, very hard” to deal with — this primary rejection forms the heart of Cary’s internalized homophobia, where he desperately tries to attain an approval that will never come. This unspoken desire to be accepted by his father comes to a head in Cary and Jess’ encounter with a gay couple, Troy (Tuc Watkins) and Eddie (Noah Galvin), whom they have mistaken for conservative father and gay son respectively. To be fair, the couple really did pretend to be father and son on Pat Dubek’s (Molly Shannon) talk show to earn sympathy cash from a straight public that feeds off homosexual tragedy. The type of gay stories that sell are those of tear-soaked tragedies, and that feeds into how Cary tries to appear happy in a relationship he isn’t really sure is working out for him.
Literally interrupting the couple’s attempt to upload pictures of their buttholes onto Grindr for a threesome, Cary tells them that his relationship with Jess is like a normal straight one, which elicits palpable looks of disgust from the couple (who are actually married with children). We cannot help but feel heartbroken for Cary as he clearly desires to convince his dead father that he is still good for his love. Towards the end of the episode, Cary eventually confesses to Troy that his father stopped talking to him after he came out, and he had hoped if he had just been around to see how normal being gay was, perhaps things could have been different. For a second, Troy sets aside his frustration at Cary and gently tells him how normal he is (then blows him a kiss on the lips!). The hilarious generational divide makes way for a tender moment where Cary, in a way, gets faux approval from his father and allows viewers to see how much of gay assimilation comes out of the very real wounds left behind by decades of homophobia. These wounds, however, gradually fester and demand to be felt.
Like the butthole picture that Cary accidentally reveals to Julianne Moore and Busy Phillips in “Chase and Pat are Killing it,” the tight lid of denial that Cary keeps on his self-loathing begins to wear out, which culminates in his explosive confession to Jess that maybe he “want[s] to be a sex boy” instead of whatever sanitized version of heteronormativity they are both pretending to love. It is a cathartic moment both for Cary and queer viewers as shame is finally dealt with, and recognized for what it is — something to be accepted, not wished away in dreams of assimilation and sexual purity. The eventual revelation of his butthole pictures to the whole world feels oddly appropriate and narratively inevitable: it is Cary saying this is who I am, and there is no going back.
As Cary’s butthole makes its international debut, his role in a potentially career-changing movie is reinstated. Finally knowing who he is coincides with big break as an actor, almost as if suggesting that Cary’s struggles — apart from job precarity and the hellish media landscape — is in part, due to his acute fear of being seen as he is. The Other Two doesn’t reductively equate coming-out with liberation, but rather, shows a remarkable amount of compassion for gays who are unsure of their place in the world. Far from mocking Cary’s awkward efforts at respectability politics, it gives us a sobering portrait of a man who was denied his father’s love as a child, and now believes he deserves less of everything. Our pain will always be there — I know mine is — but it is something to be recognized, both by the media and ourselves, in order for us truly accept the joyful parts of queer existence.
