Unless you've been in a coma, or you're straight, you already know that they've gone and made a remake of "Fame." And somehow, they removed all the gay from a story about the performing arts. Maybe they should have called it "Lame."
Picture it. New York, 1980. Frizzy-haired Montgomery is a melancholy teen who's bummed about being the only homo at New York City's High School of Performing Arts (and he's not even one of the dancers.) While everyone else is out at the "Rocky Horror Picture Show," he sits alone in his room singing a weepy, warm-milk folk song about unrequited love.
Played by Paul McCrane – whose later career included about 3000 episodes of "E.R." where he played jerkface Dr. Romano, so apparently he got over his self-pitying phase – Montgomery cheers up in the third act when Ralph, the angry and presumably heterosexual Puerto Rican comedian, decides to spontaneously kiss him for no explained reason. Then Coco shows her perky little breasts and cries, and they all "sing the body electric" and bam, that's the end.
Talk to even the dumbest person you know about that original "Fame" and they'll go on at length about the statistical improbability of there being a 99.9% heterosexual male student body at a performing arts school. And they'll probably have charts to back up their assertions.
But at least Monty existed.
From the footage that made it to the screen in the updated version of "Fame" - the one with no explicitly stated gay character - it would appear that we're dealing with one of two competing scenarios:
Young audiences just don't care anymore. They've watched "High School Musical." They know the kid in the pink hat is a total homo without having to be being told. So they don't need it pointed out to them that the one peripheral "Fame" remake character who smiles a little bigger than the other boys, dresses up for Halloween as a character from "Velvet Goldmine," and has Adam Lambert's hair, is highly probably gay. We're at a triumphant, post-caring point in human history and this film is proof. Hollywood truly is ahead of the curve.
OR
This remake is set in a mythic heteros-only land of musical theater enthusiasts. It's that same country where all the conservatives really are compassionate and everyone loves cats more than dogs. The kid in the androgyne Halloween costume dancing with a boy in a Warhol wig at the school dance is just "eccentric," thanks to some visionary asshole Studio Suit and his "notes." Then the film hooks up nearly every other kid on screen in an opposite-sex pairing before telling this neutered lad—spoiler warning here—that not only does he not merit a plotline but that he also isn't even a good enough dancer to graduate. He goes back to the Midwest to a future of coaching six-year-olds to compete in exploitive child beauty pageants, finally knowing his place.
Oh yeah, and they don't sing about "the body electric" either. Jerks.
