Is he? Isn’t he? (Spoiler alert: he is.)Īnother plus is the importance of a loving friend or confidant. That is some pop trash dialogue there, the kind that sticks to your ribs like warm Cream of Wheat.īut as Allen and Kirk throw the magazine back to Todd, who says he’s going to toss it in the trash, you see in Todd’s eyes where the next 34 minutes are going to go. This is the moment, dear reader, where I nearly pounded the aperol spritz I was sipping and stood up to give this Schoolbreak special a standing ovation. I mean, the only reason I kept it around is because I knew you guys would be turned on by it.” “There’s a great weightlifting article in there. Kirk is almost certainly aroused repulsed. “This is a real fag mag, where’d you get it?” Kirk says to Todd. After some small talk about muscles, a magazine is discovered on Todd’s desk: True Men.
By 11 minutes into this special, these three are working out in Todd’s bedroom (imagine a bedroom big enough to fit a bed, a weight bench, a desk, and a closet full of homosexual skeletons). This is a plus I would not kick him out of bed for eating crackers.Īllen, Todd, and a real bro named Kirk form a trio of friends who are going to take us through the rest of the movie.
Todd looks like what John Mayer would have looked like in 1987. Turns out Allen’s set-up is a red anchovy herring, and the real plot is going to center on Todd, the high school soccer captain.
(I live for the scene where Allen tells a girl named Nancy, played by Carteris, that he’s looking at fish tapeworm.)īut oh how things are about to change. And sure enough the first 10 minutes all belong to Allen, who is subsequently ostracized for liking jazz and for preferring to look into a microscope than flirt with girls. Hold the breadsticks, Allen must be the gay one.
Then Allen drops a bombshell and expresses some sympathy for a pro basketball player who recently came out as gay. (This feels very Miranda for someone who ends up marrying Charlotte…) At this point it feels very much like a Sex and the City brunch, where the most controversial opinion is that Allen (Handler) likes anchovies on his pizza and doesn’t want his friends meddling in his love life.
well, what if I just told you the title: What If I’m Gay? (Honey, if you have to ask, you definitely are…)įive teenagers walk out of a movie theater and into a pizza restaurant. What if I told you the special starred a young Gabrielle Carteris (pre- 90210 fame), an extremely young Evan Handler (nearly two decades before he married Charlotte York in Sex and the City), and Hill Street Blues actor and NCAA college football champion Ed Marinaro as a high school biology teacher who teaches students about parameceum? Now that’s a cast!Īnd then what if I told you that a crucial moment of the plot is the discovery of a gay porn magazine called. One episode of Schoolbreak is among the first after-school specials to touch on being queer. And that’s where our journey takes us today.
Yes, they ran the eponymous Afterschool Special, but CBS also dabbled with teenage drama under the names CBS Afternoon Playhouse and, eventually, the CBS Schoolbreak Special. And TV network ABC wasn’t the only one in on the game, either. After-school specials are a real YouTube rabbit hole.