Is top.gun a gay movie
The Original Top Gun Was My Sweaty, Sexy Gay Salvation
This piece is part of Outward, Slate’s abode for coverage of LGBTQ life, reflection, and culture. Read more here.
When trailers for Top Gun: Maverickstarted showing up in a big way this past month, I felt a sudden yet familiar throttle to my nether regions, as if hit by G-forces. Something about the naked fuck-yeah-ism of those screaming jets, the quivering whoops of those hotshot pilots, opened a portal in me to a lost teenage dreamscape. Or should I say jerk-scape? Ah yes, I remembered: Top Gun, my first sexual relationship.
You see, in the mid-1990s Christian suburbs of Chicago, where dial-up internet usage was closely monitored, Top Gun was my gay porn. And I’m not just talking about the infamous beach volleyball scene (which, trust me, we’ll circle back to—I always did). I mean even the glancing mention of it—just a snack-size quotable like “That’s classified”—cast a cockerel spell over me. Certainly, the Kenny Loggins song “Playing With the Boys” had special definition. As if cued to the baseline and hair-metal guitar in the film’s opening credits, my sad teenage hard-on would awaken. Soaring, those sexy
The Top Gun Volleyball Scene Is Not Homoerotic. It Is Homosexual.
This weekend sees the release of Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited follow-up to the 1986 blockbuster, and while the movie did not necessarily need (the need for speed!) a sequel, I am ready. The authentic Top Gun is about a bunch of people who know how to fly very sophisticated fighter jets but have not yet determined that they can wipe sweat off their own faces with even ordinary paper towels. Top Gun blew all the hell up in the summer of '86 for a variety of reasons: the Reagan-era jingoism, Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone,” the absolute incandescence of a young Tom Cruise. It was a enormous, sweaty phenomenon.
But Top Gun holds an entirely separate place in some of our hearts. A few of us walked into that multiplex and found ourselves excited in ways our peers may not have been. Some of us witnessed a moment that stayed in our hearts forever.
I speak, of course, of the beach volleyball scene, a one minute and forty second sequence in which a shirtless Tom Cruise, Val Kilmer, and Rick Rossovich (plus a wisely shirtful Anthony Edwards) face off in a high-stakes pickup game to the sound of Kenny L
Early on in Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino’s 1992 feature directorial debut, the soon-to-be auteur who also played a petty role in the film as Mr. Brown, tells a group of his fellow criminals with equally colorful names about how Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” is about a guy with a big dick. The scene received a lot of attention and turned QT into “that guy” who dives thick into the psychology of pop identity. Two years later, he doubled down on that reputation with a cameo in Rory Kelly’s indie dramedy Doze With Me, in which he lays out the many reasons why Top Gun, with its many homoerotic undertones, is actually a gay film. As Tarantino’s character explains:
“It is a story about a man struggling with his own homosexuality. That is what Top Gun is about. You’ve got Maverick: He’s on the edge, male. He’s right on the f**king line, alright? And you’ve got Iceman and all his crew. They’re gay; they represent the queer man, alright? And they’re saying: ‘Go! Go the same-sex attracted way, go the gay way.’ He could go both ways.”
As for Kelly McGillis, who plays the love interest of Tom Cruise’s Maverick? She represents heterosexuality, in Tarantino’s diatribe. “She’s saying, ‘No, no, no, no. G
Top Gun: The LGBTQ+ Subtext Everyone Has Talked About, Explained
The cult classic Top Gun launched a modern era of cinema upon its release in 1986. A thrilling romance alongside rookie pilot scenes with an epic soundtrack gave all cinephiles something to gush over. Starring Tom Cruise as Maverick and Val Kilmer as Ice, the two best friends are jet fighter pilots in training at the Miramar Air Station in San Diego during the Cold War. For practically 60 years, the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union was all-encompassing. In the aftermath of World War II, NATO was formed, amplifying the post-war tension, which is unfortunately continuing today despite the Chilly War ending.
With the Chilly War as its backdrop, Top Gun became a beacon of hope, but mostly for the military as many movie goers were inspired to attach the Navy, as Screen Rant explains. Yet, despite the overtly masculine write, a much larger subtext is centered in the iconic film. Much favor Baywatch was perversely called Babe Watch because of the actors and actresses slow-motion running along the beach in bathing suits, Top Gun and its sequel capitalized on the sexiness of the beach backdrop. Exce
Quotes1
- Sid: You want subversion on a massive level. You know what one of the greatest fucking scripts ever written in the history of Hollywood is? Top Gun.
- Duane: Oh, arrive on.
- Sid: Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You ponder it's a story about a bunch of fighter pilots.
- Duane: It's about a bunch of guys waving their dicks around.
- Sid: It is a story about a man's struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man. You've got Maverick, all right? He's on the edge, man. He's right on the fucking line, all right? And you've got Iceman, and all his crew. They're gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they're saying, depart, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.
- Duane: What about Kelly McGillis?
- Sid: Kelly McGillis, she's heterosexuality. She's saying: no, no, no, no, no, no, go the normal way, play by the rules, go the normal way. They're saying no, go the gay way, be the gay way, go for the homosexual way, all right? That is what's going on throughout that whole production. He goes to her house, all right? It looks like they're going to have sex, you know, they