They/Them Is a Queer Declaration of War
John Logan’s slasher gives the middle finger to a society that condones child torture! (And Desmond is Amazing Throws Cute Shade at RuPaul’s Drag Queens!)By Wren Sanders
August 3, 2022
The role of the artist, we’re told, is to make revolution irresistible. These familiar paraphrased words echoed through my mind last week at the Outfest premiere of They/Them, John Logan’s new slasher film set at a conversion therapy camp.
In its original form, the quote from writer, activist and documentarian Toni Cade Bambara was less of a rallying cry than an observation. “The task of the artist is determined always by the… agenda of the community that it already serves,” she said in an interview with the scholar Kay Bonetti. “In this country… the artwork… that sells a capitalist ideology is considered art and anything that deviates from that is considered political propagandist.”
At a time when commercialized media and state-sanctioned censorship are converging to suppress LGBTQ+ expression, it’s revealing that the queer film event of the summer is a downright murderous affair.
Ahead of the Outfest screening, the festival’s executive director Damien S. Navarro offered an expletive-laced speech that drew snaps and screams from the audience. As he further riled up the crowd with broadsides against the right wing, my friend whispered, “Is he trying to start a riot?”
I laughed. I mean, wouldn’t you? I was in a room of Hollywood insiders and folks who’d paid nearly $100 to see a movie. We didn’t exactly look like we were about to flood the streets of downtown L.A.
Then the film started. And within minutes, I had swallowed my laughter.
Logan’s directorial debut is a romp from its first, exquisitely choreographed kill. The thrills keep on coming as we meet our protagonists — the campers and counselors of Whistler Camp. The latter contingency is led by camp director, Owen Whistler, played by an immaculately odious Kevin Bacon, who begins They/Them in earnest with a haunting welcome. “There’s nothing wrong with being gay,” he says through exposed teeth, continuing to describe the camp as a “safe space.” Subverting our expectations of Bible-thumping conversion therapy, Bacon’s monologue reveals Whistler Camp as something arguably more sinister: a place where queer and trans kids go to unlearn themselves via the language they used to claim their identities in the first place.
They/Them is therefore best understood not as a slasher-horror film, but as a slasher film and a horror film in one. The horror is the camp, full of psychic terror, whereas the slasher dimension of They/Them is the unabashedly pro-queer propaganda. It’s a shame most viewers won’t get the chance to see Logan’s Peacock-bound film in theaters because the experience was exactly what you might imagine: picture hundreds of queers erupting in applause after the conversion therapists get what’s coming to them. And that catharctic violence is just one of the movie’s many delights, which also include a deliciously cheesy musical number, the kind of Sapphic love scene we’ve been waiting for (more patent leather than silk chiffon), and a pair of dazzling breakout performances from Theo Germaine (The Politician) and Quei Tann (How To Get Away With Murder, Dear White People).
“Subverting our expectations of Bible-thumping conversion therapy, Bacon’s monologue reveals Whistler Camp as something arguably more sinister: a place where queer and trans kids go to unlearn themselves via the language they used to claim their identities in the first place.”
The project is not without a few missteps. Some on social media have questioned how closely the They/Them production consulted conversion therapy survivors. Perhaps more glaringly, the film has a fatphobia problem. Namely, everyone who speaks in They/Them is thin. And girlies, I'm talking thin-thin, like Out magazine covers from the early 2000s energy. The homogeneity makes for uncomfortable viewing, especially considering the role intra-camper attraction plays in creating some of the film’s tension — a point that left me wondering if the creators of They/Them think fat queers are hot enough for horror? In a film with such otherwise inclusive casting — and which does a meticulous job of giving most characters a backstory, a desire, and a standout moment – the omnipresence of abs felt tired at best. At worst, They/Them’s fixation on normative beauty risks reinforcing the heteronormative values it intends to slash in the first place.
Representational shortcomings aside, the film is at its strongest when it rewires the tropes of typical slasher fare, substituting the real-world horror of transphobia for gore galore. In one early sequence, a camper called Alexandra (Tann) is shown taking a shower. As she shampoos her hair, the camera zooms, then lingers, teleporting us back to similar moments from classics like Psycho. We cut to outside, where a wobbly point-of-view shot approaching the camp bathhouse announces imminent doom. The door swings open. Alexandra screams. But there is no knife, no hatchet, no sawed-off shotgun, only a TERFy-looking counselor, her face twisted into a gnarled glare. A shot later and Alexandra is being hurried to the boys’ dorm in one of the film’s most genuinely terrifying moments.
At the Ace Theater, one of the most common lines heard during pre-screening chatter was that They/Them was the “queer Get Out.” Moments like Alexandra’s shower sequence constitute some of Logan’s best support for this comparison. Yet it’s They/Them’s proximity to real-life torture that gives it a shockingly aggressive force.
There’s no denying the truth at the core of Get Out; that there exists a deep and deadly current of racism among the country’s Obama-voting, black-square-posting white people. That stark realism, though, runs out when the film reveals its full self: a diabolical plot to transplant the hero’s brain into the skull of the villain. One may read this twist as a metaphor for the ways in which white Americans profit from Blackness while sanctioning the disposal of Black bodies. Yet for all its potent symbolic value, Peele’s horrific procedure is not legal, let alone a widespread, politically-defended reality of life in the United States.
The same cannot be said of Logan’s subject.
As of this writing, conversion therapy, or the practice of trying to force people to change their sexual orientation and/or gender identity, is fully legal in at least 22 states. Roughly a third of queer and trans American minors live in places where they could be forced to undergo a range of horrifying tactics, ranging from old-fashioned shaming to the literal torture known as aversion therapy, which can involve the coerced electrocution of a “patient’s” genitalia.
The Schadenfreude of They/Them, then, is to imagine what it must feel like to watch the movie as someone who practices conversion therapy. These are real people, with names and addresses, people whose demise Logan’s film gleefully depicts. I hope they’re scared. I hope they take a second to rethink exactly who they’re fucking with.
All of that said, as thrilling as it was to see conversion therapists beaten to a bloody pulp, cheered on by the hungry cries of fellow queers, Logan’s movie is not written as a call for revolution. It offers little vision of a more harmonious society. Its moments of ebullient revenge outshine and arguably contradict its closing message — a vaguely empowering call for self-determination. But that’s not really the point. I didn’t attend They/Them looking for principled analysis; I came for some catharsis. And let me tell you, I got it. As the closing credits rolled, I didn’t think about my favorite lines of dialogue; I thought about Logan’s bloody climax.
Today, at this very moment, in the year 2022, there are grown-ups whose entire jobs involve forcing children to believe that who they are is grounds for eternal suffering. And this galling reality doesn’t even crack the top-tier of fiendish right-wing-led attacks on our community. They are taking far more than our health care, our access to bathrooms, and the ability to play sports. Their plan, as the scholar Jules Gil-Peterson has argued, is to make our lives not just unlivable, but unimaginable; to enact a genocide in slow-motion.
And what are liberals doing about it? Long-gestated anti-discriminations bills, long-shot trans “refugee” laws, and a whole bunch of pronouns-in-bio-type moral high grounding. Republicans are coming for our throats while Democrats use our blood to write fundraising emails. In this reality, the tone of They/Them feels almost as if it arrives from a separate timeline altogether, one in which liberals view protecting trans kids as a matter of inviolable necessity, not a pithy campaign slogan.
Back in our universe, no riot followed the screening I attended — shocker, I know. Yet as the audience left the theater, a sizable crowd did form on the streets. In it was an unmistakable frisson of excitement, a sick sense of satisfaction. Queers of all ages had stopped to relive the spectacle, relishing its most diabolical twists.
And in our numbers, I felt a sense of calm wash over me. As it turned out, Whistler Camp’s phony “safe space” had birthed a real one.
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What BBQ-free alternate reality are they living in and how does someone get there?
