Ask the Flying Monkey! (August 3, 2009)

Have a question about gay male entertainment? Ask the Monkey! (Please include your city and state and/or country.)

Q: Are there any movies aimed at younger audiences that portray romance between gay couples? There are actually a lot of parents like myself who want to show their kids a movie with two people of the same sex falling in love in the fun way they show other kids’ movies. -- Marcy, Tacoma, WA

A: Have you considered Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild!?

That’s a joke. Seriously. Gays Gone Wild is the raunchiest gay movie I’ve ever seen, and not in a good way.

"This might have been a mistake."

Anyway, I actually love this question. Nothing makes me quite as annoyed as the idea that “gay” is synonymous with “sex” while “heterosexual” is not.

In fact, I love this question so much that I wish I had a better answer. I literally can’t think of a single movie that is as you describe. There are a few – Big Eden, Were the World Mine, Breakfast with Scot, and Beautiful Thing that are, if I remember correctly, mostly pretty innocent and romantic, but, in addition to being of varying quality, none of them are movies for “kids.”

There are also a handful of “straight” movies like Big Daddy, Night at the Museum, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and Bend it Like Beckham with very minor gay sub-plots, but none of them are for small kids.

So is there a family-friendly movie with a gay romance or at least a gay-friendly sub-plot? Apart from “gay couples” like Timon and Pumbaa in The Lion King and Miguel and Tulio in The Road to El Dorado, or ambiguously-defined characters like Ryan in High School Musical or Thomas in Pocahontas, I’m coming up blank. Anyone?

Still, the fact that this question is finally being asked makes me very happy indeed!

Q: I was wondering about the term HoYay. I get what the term means, but what I'm wondering is where did the word for it come from and how is it actually pronounced? -- Lisa, NY, NY

A: Hoyay is short for “Homoeroticism, yay!” and it originated in 1999 on the Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer discussion forums of TelevisionWithoutPity.com (back when it was called Mighty Big TV). Supposedly it started as a riff on something the character of Willow Rosenberg said: “Vampires, yay!” The term got a big Internet boost with the debut of Smallville in 2001.

Smallville's Clark and Lex may have set the hoyay standard

Next page! More on hoyay, plus who might play Freddie Mercury in a biopic?