Opinion: The Queer, Feminist Magic of "Bottoms" by Ava Weinstein

Photo Credit: TV Insider

I spent the first sixteen years of my life convinced I was straight, assuming that if some sort of gay awakening hadn’t happened yet, it just wasn’t in the cards. Then I went to summer camp, and in an entirely stereotypical fashion, left with a wholly different understanding of my identity. That was the same summer that Bottoms came out in theaters. For me and my fledgling queer identity, there was no better time for a raunchy, bloody, gay teen movie. 

As I tried to figure out who I was and where I might fit in the queer community, I turned to queer-themed media. I rewatched the episode of One Day at a Time where the family’s teenage daughter, Elena, comes out to her mom. I attempted to start watching The L Word, thinking it might give me some sort of clarity (it didn’t). To my dismay, nothing felt newly meaningful or relevant. But something about Bottoms resonated with me, at a time when I was still trying to find the confidence to call myself “queer.” It has the same kind of angry feminist energy that I usually exude; the kind of unapologetic queerness that I am surrounded by among friends and within the theater department at school; a humor similar to that of one of my comfort shows, Broad City.

Bottoms isn’t a preachy feminist manifesto. It promotes itself as “a movie about empowering women (the hot ones).” From the start, we’re aware that the particular flavor of empowerment we’re about to see has more to do with landing a cheerleader than female solidarity. Occasionally, it includes the crafting and detonation of a homemade bomb (useful for getting revenge on a cheating, douchey quarterback named Jeff).

But the fact that it isn’t some self-serious depiction of the hardships of womanhood and the prevalence of male chauvinist pigs is what makes me love it so much. It’s angry and it’s fun and it’s rollicking and at its core, it’s a special type of feminist manifesto: one where women are allowed to do violence.

The last scene is a glorious display of what a gay girl fight club can do. It’s a joyous, bloody takedown of an entire testosterone-fueled football team. And no one can tell me that the image of a ragtag band of teenage girls led by two virginal lesbians standing in the middle of a football field, spattered in blood and surrounded by the fallen bodies of their victims, isn’t the peak of empowerment. That’s female solidarity. That’s the anger that recent feminist movements have been missing.

But Bottoms not only appealed to my feminist sensibilities. It showed me queer joy on the big screen (girl-gets-girl and everyone’s happy) at a time when I desperately needed a depiction of queer teens that I could look to.

Maybe that’s why I chose the day we went to see Bottoms to tell my friends that I wasn’t their token straight anymore. Late at night while we were traipsing back to the subway station, swooning over Ruby Cruz’s Hazel Callahan, I disclosed my summer revelation — which, at that point, was hardly more than a month old. That day, after weeks of confusion, I was able to say it out loud. By way of Bottoms, the first piece of queer media that felt like my own, I had finally started to find a foothold.