How Top Gun Became A Gay Classic – /Film

It’s truly fascinating how unbridled the homoeroticism of “Top Gun” is. For a movie made by mainstream Hollywood in the midst of the AIDS crisis, it’s a remarkably warm depiction of male friendships that cannot help but take on the steamy and giddy air of queerness. Google “Top Gun Gay” and you’ll get a hefty 1,390,000,000 results. This reading isn’t something that audiences later projected onto the film through fan theories and nostalgic reconsiderations.

Everyone called it out in 1986, from critics to audiences. In her review, critic Pauline Kael said that “the movie is a shiny homoerotic commercial […] It’s as if masculinity had been redefined as how a young man looks with his clothes half off.” Quentin Tarantino would famously give voice to the theory that the film is actually a gay love story via a typically Tarantino-esque monologue in the movie “Sleep with Me.” Neither he nor Kael are wrong.

There are so many scenes of sweaty muscled men strutting around one another like prowling peacocks, clad in nothing but towels that seem ready to fall to the floor at a moment’s notice. The guys play volleyball in the scorching sun in a scene set to the Loggins song “Playing With the Boys.” It’s hard not to be taken in by lines like “you can be my wingman anytime” and “I want somebody’s butt, I want it now!”