Sometime in the summer of 2007, I helped one last customer buy office supplies, logged out of the register, and told my boss I was going to lunch. I was 17 years old and working at Staples. I hated it, but I loved that our store was right next to Hollywood Video in a strip mall. I had fallen into a nice little routine of eating a slice of pizza at the store next door and then renting her DVD of a movie that my parents would not have approved of.After all, I 17;The world of R-rated movies is finally mine, and no parental accompaniment is required.
On this serendipitous day in 2007, I took a chance and took a peek at the store’s meager LGBT movie section. (And by “section” I mean “half the shelf.”) I always walked right past it, hoping no one noticed that I tried to glance at it out of the corner of my eye. . But this time, as soon as I stopped, someone pulled me in.
The movie was called “Eating Out,” and the DVD cover featured someone I recognized: Season 1 “American Idol” finalist Jim Bellaros. I watched the show with his parents and loved Jim’s voice. And one night I remembered his father turning around and asking me indignantly. “Why do you always like gay stuff?” The answer was obvious, but neither of us were ready for it at the time.
Was dad right?! Jim Bellaros is actually gay?!
I had to see this. I no longer remember that moment itself. He must have fainted. All I know is that when I rented Eating Out from Hollywood Video, it was the first time I came out as gay and the first time I took off my closet mask. Thing. I slipped the DVD into the pocket of my khaki cargo pants and felt it pressed against my leg for the rest of the shift, knowing that I had to watch something exciting and dangerous when I got home. It reminded me of what not to do.
Eating Out, the first in a five-part film series, premiered 20 years ago today at the Phoenix International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. The story is about a straight man named Caleb (Scott Lunsford) who is tired of dating. Caleb pretends to be gay in order to date Gwen (Emily Brooke Hands) after his gay roommate Kyle (Bella Ross) tells him that gay men actually have it easy sleeping with girls. It’s a comedy of errors and misdirections, a mix of sexually confused mishaps and pranks. I loved it then, and I love it now.
“I can’t stand it,” director Q. Alan Brocka told IndieWire on a recent Zoom call. I told him I disagree. The script is snappy and the actors all have great comedic timing, even though it’s clearly low budget.
Jim Bellaros also told me that he felt the film was outdated. “If you hear some quips or one-liners now…well, that doesn’t mean much now,” he said. But that’s part of the fun, and part of why “Eating Out” survives.
For example, instead of calling someone a “bitch,” Kyle says he’s the “real Meredith Brooks hit single.” If gays were the target of that joke in 2004, you can bet they’ll still be getting it in 2024.
The film was shot in 10 days on a budget of $43,000 and was created after Brocka met Michael Scholl, head of Arithmetic Entertainment. The DVD company was about to go into production. As long as he can guarantee at least two shots of full-frontal male nudity to the video store, he could guarantee an advance of $60,000.
Brocka kept the script he wrote in film school at California Arts in a drawer. The main reason for that script was because I wanted the cute boys in my screenwriting class to read something raunchy. He sketched what would become his 17-minute phone sex sequence in “Eating Out,” and his classmates ate it up. Inspired by his ’80s campus comedies like “Porky’s” and “Revenge of the Nerds,” he filled out the rest of the feature, but Schorr soon produced When I asked if there was anything I could sell, I remembered the script.
“In the original script, there was no full-frontal nudity in ‘Eating Out,’ and I thought, why not?” Brocka recalled. “Are there boobs in other movies? These will be our boobs!”
Brocka and Scholl thought they could make a quick and small profit and planned to split it. Surprisingly, “Eating Out” surpassed her $2 million in DVD sales and topped the LGBTQ+ video charts for many years.
“There’s a place for everything. There’s a market for everything,” Velaros said he quickly realized. “We didn’t have to be Hilary Swank in ‘Boys Don’t Cry.’ Our whole story is about this doom and depression and suicidal thoughts and this place that doesn’t accept us and this spiritual struggle. I don’t think it has to come from trauma. [being closeted] may cause. I think there’s beauty in the way we live our lives, and there’s also a very frivolous kind of sexual empowerment that comes from being who we are. ”
Bellaros appeared on “American Idol” before that, chronicling her early experiences with men on LiveJournal. His appearance on what suddenly became the most popular TV show in the country drew attention from the gay press. FOX offered to pull his Livejournal off the web, which he did. “I didn’t really think about it at the time,” Bellaros said. “I was just going to be very cooperative and do what the major networks told me to do.” He came out to The Advocate a few months after the season ended, and for years remained the only He was an “Idol” alumnus, and was also one of the only visibly “out” people in the entertainment world.
At the same time, Brocka was writing a compilation of “Idol” for the same magazine. “Jim was kind of giving off all the gay vibes,” Brocka said. “I know you’re thinking, ‘He must be one of us!'” When he finally came out, I was so excited and excited. ”
Years later, when it came time to cast Eating Out, Brocka wrote what he called a “fan letter” to Bellaros, begging for a meeting. Bellaros was unsure whether to pursue pop music and hoped to appear on Broadway instead. He jumped at the chance to star in the film, saying the script was “a really funny take on queer American Pie.”
After the premiere of Eating Out, Brocka spent a year touring the film on the festival circuit. “I traveled all over the world and went to film festivals, and the halls were full of people who had never seen a movie like this on screen,” he said. “After the Q&A, people laughed, swooned and flocked to the actors. It was an amazing, incredible ride.”
But critics were unkind. “I was used to the negativity around ‘Idol,’ and I got a fair amount out of it,” Bellaros said. (Ah, that Simon Cowell…) “I think people wanted our movie to be different from that.”
Brocka also remembers negative content, including a TV Guide review that personally insulted Lunsford, called him names and even suggested he die. “It’s not a great movie, but it just spoke to people the way we wanted to be spoken to,” Brocka said. “I created something that people want to see and hear.”
I needed to see and hear that too. Later that night, as I watched the movie in my quiet bedroom, I felt like I was peering into my future. Sure, “Eating Out” is an over-the-top, stilted, and stupid version of the out gay life, but it’s also our first glimpse into a world where being queer is the default and straight people are the butt of jokes. . When I eventually went to college and started meeting other gay people, life wasn’t exactly like “dining out”, but I discovered something unexpected. Almost every queer person I met somehow knew about these movies as well.
“I want to tell queer kids who are watching this that not only are they excited, but that it’s acceptable, that it’s sexy, and that we can talk about these things and that we can I want them to understand that they have these experiences,” Brocka said. It’s not just me. ”
“I love that they are fleeting and will be there forever,” Bellaros said. “I look back on it with pride. Whether people want to celebrate it or not, I think it’s because these movies exist that we get to see so many great movies today. ”
Brocka agreed that Eating Out especially opened doors for his own filmmaking career. The first “Eating Out” had an all-white cast, but the Guam-born director said he pushed to include people of color in later films like “Boy Culture.” He pointed out that Bellaros was the only out actor in the first film. “But by the third movie, all the main characters were gay. It was changing that quickly.”
He is currently putting the finishing touches on a feature film called “Love & Lockdown.” The film is a romantic comedy about a trans man trapped in his home in the Philippines during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
Bellaros has been away from gaming for a while, but he’s also branching out into the world of entertainment. He released a banger called “Take My Bow” in 2023, which reached number 5 on the UK club music charts alongside songs by Kylie Minogue and Calvin Harris.
Most of all, he’s happy about being able to “focus on the creativity that I can bring to the world instead of staring into the darkness,” and says, “It’s so easy to do.”