In one of Club Kid’s most vulnerable moments, Arlo asks his newfound, unhinged party promoter father, Peter, “Why do you cry?”
He answers with hesitation: “I don’t really like myself a lot of the time.”
As soon as these words were uttered, tears welled up in my eyes, and then they streamed down my face and wouldn’t stop for the duration of the film.
History has shown that I like a healthy, ugly cry while going to a film, but this sobbing incident was straight-up hideous. It stuck with me well after the end credits and into my next therapy session.
I spent half an hour in tears talking to my therapist about Club Kid and how it was a commendable feature directorial debut for Jordan Firstman and how it brilliantly taps into an indescribable loneliness felt by members of the LGBTQ community.
My therapist has a lot of patience.
I would like to thank Firstman for giving me therapy fodder and for affirming the aforementioned loneliness that many queer folks feel on various levels. It’s inexplicable. It’s an intersection of pain and pleasure. It’s a collision of hedonistic and austere.
Peter (Firstman) is a prototype party queer that exemplifies the title of the film. He spends his snorting lines, untz-untz’ing and living his best nightlife with a crew of New York’s finest.
Following the Adam Sandler’s Big Daddy template, Club Kid finds the character of Peter (Firstman) with a surprise preteen son, Arlo (Reggie Absolom), on his doorstep.
Being a gay man, he does not remember having sex with a woman — and then he remembers that one specific wild and fun drug-induced night threesome in a back room of a club… as one does.
To the untrained eye, Firstman can easily be mistaken for a Pokémon evolution of Billy Eichner, which is easily understandable. One could write him off as a comedic actor that leans into sharp humor that cuts with the perfect amount of self-implicating, yet queer charm. He was a delight in I Love L.A., Search Party, and Ms. Marvel, and it was great to see him venture into the film festival world with Rotting in the Sun.
Firstman has made a name for himself in a very specific comedy circle of cool kids and has now graduated to auteur without compromising his coolness.
Alongside Absolom, a wildly adorable cherub-faced, woodland creature that breaks your heart into a million pieces every time he cries, Firstman manages to create a very personal film that says, “You’re going to be OK.”
Firstman’s feature directorial debut rises above the competition with its sweet, shimmering disco ball-encrusted heart. With a fantastic ensemble that includes Cara Delevinge, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Diego Calva, Colleen Camp, Eldar Isgandarov, and Saturn Risin9, Club Kid pulsates like a strobe light of love amidst the chaos of queer loneliness as it jockeys for position as the prominent feel-good movie when it comes to this year’s awards season. (MVPs are definitely Isgandarov and Camp!)
Club Kid is a fine film, but I saw it more as a self-help film for queer people going through some major life shit. Firstman doesn’t dwell and wallow in the sadness under a shiny gloss of queer life. Instead, he embraces the cure that many queer people think they don’t deserve: love. This brings us back to the scene where Peter says he doesn’t like himself.
Published in Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2022, Eddy M. Elmer, Theo van Tilburg, and Tineke Fokkema wrote a study titled Minority Stress and Loneliness in a Global Sample of Sexual Minority Adults: The Roles of Social Anxiety, Social Inhibition, and Community Involvement, which essentially tells us what we already know: connection with other people helps combat loneliness, a philosophy that continued to resonate with me as I sobbed throughout the entire movie.
Perhaps it is the Aries in me that connects with Peter and Arlo’s story, specifically with the loneliness journey. (Yes, I am about to get astrological, so get ready.)
I don’t know if Peter is an Aries, but the first sign of the zodiac deals with loneliness by not wallowing in it by going into action to make them feel better because their self reliance. We see Peter doing that with his club promoter life and his life with his beautiful chosen family.
However, Peter is slow to admit his loneliness and that comes out in other ways— confrontation with friends, restlessness, and sometimes irritability. He feels unseen and that nobody can match his energy. Until he meets Arlo and then later Oscar, Arlo’s social worker, two people who make him feel independent without feeling isolated.
Being surrounded by people doesn’t mean they are connected. In fact, it can mean the exact opposite. Throughout the film, it is clear that Peter has a chosen family that loves and supports him. But he has an emotional loneliness that cannot be affirmed by his existing relationships. Arlo fulfills a platonic love in Peter’s life, while he finds a romantic love with Oscar (Calva), Arlo’s social worker. These are two types of love Peter wasn’t necessarily looking for, nor do I think he knew he deserved.
The love Peter receives from Arlo and Oscar affirms his value. This narrative has been told many times through a heteronormative lens, but through a queer lens, it hits on multiple levels.
For many, queer identity comes with baggage: internalized self-hatred, fear of judgment, shame, social anxiety, rejection, and insecurity. Peter is self-aware of all this, but he helps cope with the occasional bump of K — something that may be all too familiar with folks in the LGBTQ community. In fact, filling the void of loneliness with sex, drugs, and self-indulgent fun is always a philosophy that worked for everyone.
Club Kid made me cry because it made me realize everything that was wrong with me as a single gay adult man. It also made me cry because it made me realize that I am going to be OK as a single, gay adult man.
If you strip away the A24 edginess of it all, Club Kid is essentially a wholesome tale about a father reconnecting with his son and, in essence, learning to love himself more as a result… that’s pretty goddam beautiful.
