What’s so gay about Sex and the City.
Feature by Tim Brookover.
The girls are back in town. After its six-year run, the HBO series Sex and the City wrapped bittersweetly in 2004, but Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte have returned with a big-screen version of the story of four smart gals in Manhattan. In a summer of Iron Man, Speed Racer, the Incredible Hulk (again?), Indiana Jones, and other manly characters, this chick-friendly flick may be the best antidote for testosterone overdose (along with the ABBA-travaganza Mamma Mia, of course).
Even better, queer readers: Sex and the City is probably the gayest show at the multiplex this summer—and not just because of the pop assertion that the oft-libidinous characters portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker (Carrie), Kim Catrall (Samanta), Cynthia Nixon (Miranda), and Kristin Davis (Charlotte) are actually stand-ins for young gay men. No, there are other good reasons. Consider:
• The writer and director, Michael Patrick Gay, is gay (and as the executive producer of the HBO series and one of the long- time writers, he knows the Manolo-trod territory).
• Sex and the City creator Darren Star is gay.
• Two gay actors who played gay in the series return for the movie: the comic Mario Cantone as Charlotte’s sharp-tongued wedding planner and Willie Garson as Carrie’s best guy pal.
• As any tabloid or celebrity-blog reader knows, Cynthia Nixon announced in 2004 that she is in a relationship with a woman.
• The cast also includes Candice Bergen, reprising her role as the severe Vogue editor, and Jennifer Hudson, who won an Oscar for her star turn in Dreamgirls, the biggest movie for the gays last year.
The action picks up four years after we left the four friends. “I think the worst thing of all would have been to keep the girls frozen in time, picking things up right where we left off as if we’d just seen them all yesterday,” director King told the New York Times before the movie opened. The action swirls around Carrie’s impending wedding to Mr. Big, her on-again, off-again love interest (portrayed by Chris Noth), but the other characters also deal with storylines of their own, some astoundingly grown-up and emotionally honest. However, contrary to anguished web rumors, Sex and the City doesn’t end in tear-stained melodrama, King also revealed to the Times. Nobody dies.
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