I Wanted It To Be You: On Queerness and Romantic Comedy

Hanging in Kat’s Deli, a world famous jewish delicatessen located at 205 East Houston Street in Manhattan, is a sign that reads “This Is Where Harry Met Sally… Hope You Had What She Had!” The sign is a reference to the most famous fake orgasm in American history performed by Meg Ryan in the 1989 romantic comedy film When Harry Met Sally… and the subsequent punchline “I’ll Have What She’s Having!” delivered by director Rob Reiner’s Mother, Estelle. The film would go on to become one of the touchstones of the romantic comedy film genre, a film genre that would eventually ruin my concept of love and desire. 

I’ve loved romantic comedies since I was very young. Romance and horror were my primary genre fixations as a child. I’ve watched a metric ton of romantic comedies and I always cry like I’m supposed to and laugh when cued. I’m highly susceptible to all of that feel good bullshit, I suppose you could say I’m a romantic, a sucker, basic as fuck. I love a resolution that involves kisses. Give me prat falls and obviously incompatible marriages, give me amicable un-couplings and needlessly complicated climaxes. 

I’ve watched Nora Ephron’s filmography ad nauseam. The famous lines from films like Empire Records and Clueless are tattooed on the folds of my hippocampus and will stay with me long into old age. When I still lived in a house with cable television, I was so addicted to “love” that I would watch You’ve Got Mail anytime I saw it was on, and this was in the early 2000s when You’ve Got Mail was broadcast by TNT on a 24 hour loop. All of this formed an impossible expectation for what my future might be like, especially as I began to realize that I was queer. 

Queerness didn’t exist in romantic comedies for a very long time. When I mention this people tend to shout “but but but My Best Friend’s Wedding” which is a delight, but that form of queerness is toothless and neutered, there in name only. Being young and queer means always being reminded that the life you need is wrong, inappropriate for audiences. I knew this because I would never see my desires played out in films or on television. There are very few films to this day that focus on happy queer people. Even now in 2019, a top 100 Queer Films list would feature almost every explicitly queer film, we don’t have that many. So growing up, I did what I had to do, I would substitute myself into heteronormative narratives or contort stories to be what I needed them to be. 

I would imagine myself Princess Buttercup in The Princess Bride, throwing myself down the steep hill after having pushed my true love Wesley to his potential death. When watching Sleepless in Seattle I thought: What could possibly be queerer than falling in love with someone after hearing their sob story on a radio show from across the country? 10 Things I Hate About You was a Hard Femme will they wont they extravaganza. Heath Ledger and Julia Styles were both queer. It’s all right there, you don’t have read that deep. 

No one was making queer stories, or at least none that I could access on cable television, so I would just edit what I was watching to suit my needs. I would meander through my adolescence, consuming romance, editing it to my specifications, and wishing I was a different person. A straight person. Growing up the only overtly queer narratives I encountered focused on the tragic and hid any joy queer people were capable of. Being queer was almost always depicted as a shallow slog toward an early grave. Queerness in film could only lead to loneliness and death. It seemed like in all likelihood I would in fact never have “what she had.”

The shame I felt about my queerness was far more ambient then is often shown in maudlin tales of queer suffering. It wasn’t necessarily attached to some specific moment. I wasn’t given a “talking to” and my family wasn’t overtly homophobic. It was never part of a very special episode of my life or at least not one that I can remember. Happy queers just didn’t exist in my life or in anything I was watching. It’s almost as if the world filled a potpourri diffuser with guilt, doubt, and fear and then left it in my house. A self loathing scented Glade Plugin. You almost forget it’s there and then suddenly it’s inundated all of the spaces in your life and you don’t even notice the source anymore. 

My spirit wasn’t always entirely crushed, at my best I could still dream and fantasize about movie style romance. I decided that, though I wasn’t sure if I would ever marry, because at the time, as a queer person I could not, I knew I wanted to be proposed to a lot. Proposals seemed like a lot of fun. I think this belief is based on having watched an exorbitant amount of proposals while having no idea what happens after people get married. In most films, after the climactic confession of love and desire, after the proposal, the story just ends. The two leads have finally expressed their true feelings for each other and it’s time to roll the credits, cue the Van Morrison song, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here. 

They tell you in writing fiction to avoid the falling motion that occurs after a climax, don’t take too much time wrapping up story threads or you’ll lose your audience. But what happens when your climax was spent on coming to terms with your sexuality? Is the rest of your life just that falling motion?  Remember when people were lambasting Peter Jackson’s famous romantic comedy The Return Of The King for having 15 endings? It seems that no one is interested in sticking around to see what happens to beloved characters after the primary conflict is resolved. No one cares what happens once you get what you want. 

I worry that perhaps it was easier when my desires were slightly more desperate. When my needs were full of crisis and drive. When I finally came out it was so clear what needed to happen for me to survive, I was a queer person and I wanted to love and sleep with other queer people, and I needed to be honest with myself and others about who I was. But now, in my marginally stable adulthood, I often fear that I am past my climax. 

I have to work daily at interrogating and dismantling this fear. It bothers me. I know that this conflict comes from a place of privilege and I’m trying to make peace with that. Therapy has been instrumental in this process. What I am beginning to understand is that my true desire these days is to desire myself as much as I once desired romance. I want to want more of myself. The love story of my life has always been about realizing that I love myself and I am not done learning how to do that yet. The more I think about it, I can see how the “will they won't they” scenario in my life has always been between me and my own idea of me. The missed opportunities, the pointless arguments, the pratt falls, and desperate confessions have all been reflective. 

I want to invest in myself in ways I’ve been told our outrageous and inappropriate. I want to be selfish and impulsive. I want to continue to discover myself again in a new era of my life. I want to look in the mirror and be shocked out how lucky I am to exist in my brain and my body. I want to roll around on my bed listening to Tweet’s classic love song Oops (Oh My) while I rip my own stockings. In order to approach this process with my post romantic comedy indoctrination brain, I’ve created a thought exercise that anyone can use. Let’s do it together. Say this with me.  

I am flying across the country, I am crashing the party, I am interrupting the wedding, I am running through the rain. I am desperately ringing the doorbell to my gorgeous brownstone that I inexplicably am able to afford. I am hoping that I am home, that I haven’t left forever. I am soaking wet and the music is swelling, and then I answer the door and I see myself standing there. I am telling myself that I need me and I love me. I am telling myself how smart and gorgeous I am. I am telling myself that it’s me, it’s always been me. I am sorry that it took so long for me to figure out. And then, as I hear these words that I’ve needed to hear myself say for so long, I smile and say “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.”