"Glamorous," "Red, White & Royal Blue," and the Queer Fun of Letting Go

These new pieces of queer media remind us of the pleasures of embracing the fun side of queerness.

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I don’t know about anyone else, but I continue to be excited by all of the great queer content that we’re getting on streaming services. While some of these have been frustratingly short-lived–looking at you Queer as Folk!--others have had a more lasting impact, racking up impressive streaming numbers or, at the very least, becoming a key part of social media discourse. What’s just as impressive as the amount of programming, however, is how diverse it is in terms of how it represents the sprawling, contradictory, frustrating, exciting, and euphoric of queer life today. For every heavy-hitting drama taking on weighty issues, there are fun and silly outings like Glamorous and Red, White & Royal Blue. Indeed, I would argue that the latter are more important now than ever, for they accomplish the feat of providing us escape from the pressures and shortcomings of our real world while also managing to engage with serious issues at the same time.

Glamorous, which premiered on Netflix back in June, focuses on Marco Mejia (Miss Benny), an makeup enthusiast whose chance encounter with cosmetic magnate Madolyn Addison leads to a new job, along with all of the potential and problems that entails. Along the way, he has to reckon with all the challenges that come with adulthood, whether these be professional (trying to find a way to save Madolyn’s brand from a quasi-hostile takeover by a rival company) to the personal (wrangling a love triangle between lovable dork Ben and finance bro Parker). As the season unfolds, Marco starts to learn more about themselves, what they deserve, and who they really are, all while looking fabulous.

Critics were quick to take issue with the fact that Glamorous is kind of a mish-mash when it comes to genres, with elements of soap opera (so many twists and turns and reveals!), romantic comedy, and workplace sitcom. Such a line of criticism, however, seems to miss the point entirely. Yes, Glamorous has elements of all of these things, and yes, they don’t always mesh together as well as they might, but the show is just so damn fun that you don’t really care. It’s a show all about the queer Gen-Z experience, with all of the confusion and sex and emotional drama that entails. And, quite frankly, don’t queers of all ages deserve a show that doesn’t aspire to be the next prestige drama but instead just leans into the absurdity of modern queer life? For that matter, don’t we deserve to have more of Kim Cattrall? 

Prime Video’s Red, White, & Royal Blue is similarly fun and ridiculous, though it is much more generically coherent. Based on the bestselling novel of the same name, it’s an enemies-turned-lovers rom-com about Alex Claremont-Diaz, the son of the President of the United States and Henry, second-in-line to the British throne. As one would expect of such a production, it’s essentially a Hallmark movie with a bigger budget, and while both Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine deliver strong performances as Alex and Henry, respectively, the film is relatively low-stakes (despite the elevated status of its two characters). It’s pure wish-fulfillment, and therein lies the pleasure. 

To be sure, there are some heavier moments in the film, particularly once Henry starts to fall in love with Alex. Unlike his happy-go-lucky American paramour, he realizes that he can never be with him in the way that they both so clearly desire, because the strictures of the Royal Family would never permit it. There’s a moment when they are both lying in the sun, and Henry leans up, and you can see on Galitzine’s face the agony of Henry’s predicament. It is, I think, the best moment of acting in the entire film, and it shows the enormous emotional cost this relationship has begun to take. Fortunately for everyone, however, such impediments are short-lived in the film, and our two handsome darlings get their happily-ever-after. Is it implausible that the son of the President of the United States and the secondborn son of a British monarch would get together? Absolutely, but we’re here for it. 

At first glance, neither Netflix’s Glamorous nor Prime Video’s Red, White and Royal Blue seem to have much that’s weighty or important to say about the queer experience or the fraught moment in which we find ourselves, a time when attacks on LGBTQ+ people, both at the legislative level and in the streets have become ever more common. However, this is precisely what makes fun, frothy productions like Glamorous and Red, White and Royal Blue all that much more necessary. These types of shows and films remind us that there is still something a little radical about the very idea of queer people having fun, that the queer experience isn’t all family trauma, coming out angst, and AIDS (all of which are, I hasten to add, enduringly important subjects for queer media). 

As queer people, it can sometimes be difficult for us to accept fun when it’s offered to us. For so long, we were taught that there was no place for us in Hollywood film or that, if there was, it was as the villain or the figure of tragedy, condemned to die before the final reel. For those of us who were trained in the academy, it can likewise be impossible to shake off the mindset that encourages you to always look for the problematic ideology at work within even the most innocuous text. For those of us who remain so imprisoned, there is something liberating about letting go of all of our established prejudices and allowing ourselves to be credulous watchers. When we do so, we can see entire new vistas opening up before us, ones in which we can just let loose and, like the characters in Glamorous and Red, White & Royal Blue, just embrace the lighter side of life. 

In this dark and perilous and frightening world in which we live, this is a blessing that many of us would do well to embrace.