In this ’82 comedy, Ryan O’Neal plays a cop in a fake relationship with his gay partner—what could go wrong?
Welcome back to our queer film retrospective, “A Gay Old Time.” In this week’s column, we’re revisiting 1982’s Partners, a forgotten mainstream buddy comedy about a straight cop and a gay cop.Last week, with our conversation around 1982’s Parting Glances, we discussed how that movie fit into a certain trope of the time period within queer film: the naturalistic and voyeuristic look at the queer community, made by queer filmmakers for queer audiences, as a way of fighting against the toxic narratives that the outside world was throwing at us.
These films made up a small, independent, and very niche filmmaking trend.This week we’ll take a look at the other side of the same coin.
Another trope with queer narratives that seems to have been a pattern at the time, but one that existed in more mainstream films aimed at a broader audience: the hesitant immersion of someone from the outside into the gay world.
We’ve actually tackled this trope before in the column, with films like Cruising (with whom this week’s film shares the most DNA),The Gay Deceivers, and Philadelphia.Subscribe to our daily newsletter for a refreshing cocktail (or mocktail) of LGBTQ+ entertainment and pop culture, served up with a side of eye-candy.In these films, a straight person (typically a man set on their prejudiced beliefs) is forced to either interact with or pose as someone from the gay community.
