It Just Means We Were Right All Along
“I felt like it was a special scene, and I was lucky to be the one chosen to do it.” — Tim Bagley
Other than the Chloë Sevigny/Kim K edition of Variety’s Actors on Actors, there’s been little on my mind media consumption-wise this past week besides a scene from “Yes, And,” the eighth episode of Hacks Season 3. And while I’d love to go beat by beat through the former (a 41-minute fever dream that included both macro moments like Chloë asking Kim if she’s a cinephile and micro moments like Chloë casually shading Angelina Jolie), it’s Pride month, after all, so the latter deserves amplification.
Let’s first set the scene. Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) is supposed to make her annual pilgrimage to Palm Springs Pride, made especially opportune this year with her launch of House of Vance and the chance to get the gays on board early for this brand expansion. Unfortunately, she’s also supposed to accept an honorary doctorate at Berkeley. And though she promises she can do both, her limitations ultimately have her choosing higher education over targeted marketing. The CEO of Deborah’s company, Marcus (Carl Clemons-Hopkins), is left to pick up the pieces, as usual, and is growing increasingly dejected over his role at the company and the space he needs to really thrive. “I want you to hear me, but of course you don’t because you don’t fucking listen,” he tells Deborah over the phone, his frustrations starting to reach a boil.
This brings Marcus to a local bar where he encounters Reggie (Tim Bagley), a Deborah superfan who had asked Marcus earlier in the episode if Deborah would sign his bottle of Fen-Phen (he’s had it since the ‘90s, when she used to sell it). Marcus breaks the news to Reggie that Deborah isn’t coming. “She never misses Pride,” Reggie tells him, then quickly brushes it aside: “Well, can’t blame her; she’s had a hell of a year.”
Marcus, wanting to commiserate, counters: “Well, you can kinda blame her.” He’s pissed off. “She owes us so much and she’s letting everyone down, again,” he tells Reggie.
Marcus is speaking both as her employee and as an OG fan of hers, who knew and loved her even before the rest of the world got privy. “This is what happens,” Reggie explains. “You can’t stop being a fan now that she’s got more of them. We loved her before anybody else did. And she loved us before anybody else did. That’s not nothing. We just have to share her now.”
“Doesn’t that make you mad?” Marcus asks. “No,” Reggie counters, a tenderness in his voice. “It just means we were right all along.”
Reggie continues: “But nobody’s ever gonna know Deborah like we do. She’s a survivor. Like us.”
“You know, first time I saw her she was performing at a bowling alley. It was right after the divorce, but she was so funny about it and I was howling. She was at rock bottom but somehow it felt like she was on top of the world. She made me feel like I could be on top. Like I could laugh at all the sad things that were happening to me too.”
Marcus tells him that he’s glad that he doesn’t feel left behind. “Sometimes left behind is good,” Reggie tells him. “Cher wrote the ‘Believe’ album at 55. Did she show up at Pride that year? No. But we got the ‘Believe’ album. Sometimes good things come from letting go. And letting go is actually the theme of ‘Strong Enough’ from the ‘Believe’ album!” He chuckles, sips and delivers Cher’s signature “Snap out of it!” They both laugh.
I meme’d a snippet from the scene on my IG:
High-key one of my favorite moments from Season 3 of Hacks: An incredibly sweet, delicate and potent commentary on the transformative power of fandom, the wisdom of queer elders, the protectiveness LGBTQ+ people often feel about our queens and how loving something (or someone) is often about letting it (them) go. Not me sobbing on a Monday morning!
The comment section immediately lit up.
“I feel like this was the best explanation of diva worship I have ever heard.”
“HEALED me.”
“Britney stans understand.”
“For those of us that remember - the extremely subtle ‘all the sad things that were happening to me too’ just zoomed me to HIV/AIDS fear feelings all over again and made it all the more poignant.”
“I've never seen anyone touch on this topic on TV before.”
I agree with that last sentiment, especially because it’s not just the older gay imparting wisdom on the baby gay. In fact, there’s an especially poignant nuance that comes from the fact that Marcus, too, is a long-time fan of Deborah’s, with the key difference being that Reggie is an OG — and it’s that OG status that gives Reggie a perspective crucial to what divides their otherwise similarity. “I liked the randomness of two men of different generations in a gay bar having an honest and empathetic exchange,” Bagley tells me about the scene. It’s that empathy that allows this scene to really cook. Reggie’s not offering advice. He’s not asking Marcus to consider an alternate perspective. He’s simply presenting the long game of diva worship, and the impact that his early devotion had on him today, and why it allows him to overlook that which Marcus is stuck on.
It’s a conversation Bagley is very familiar with as an out gay man in his sixties. “I have my icons that I am very loyal to, who I support no matter what horrible decision they might make,” he explains. “I have gone to bat for them, and have found myself in conversations where I’m fighting for them as if it was personal — even though I don’t know them. I don’t know what that is. But I do feel that gay people tend to be loyal to our icons. I think a part of that has to do with being survivors, and being grateful for those who are our allies and who celebrate us. I always love it when the gay community embraces someone and then the rest of the world eventually discovers them. I’ve seen that many many many times. That all feels very authentic to me.”
Back in 1999 on the school playground at Markham Elementary, saying anything less than celebratory of Sarah Michelle Gellar could result in an ass whooping. Okay, maybe not an ass whooping, but a terse word for certain. Gellar was my chosen love, and nobody was going to disparage her in my presence. (Not that anyone would, but that’s besides the point.) This to say, like many LGBTQ+ folks (but I think especially so for gay men of a particular age), there are certain attachments we feel to our divas in them recognizing and defining our existence, our strength, our idiosyncrasies, our devotion in a world that often overlooks or otherizes us.
But there’s also something specific about female comics (think Joan Rivers, Wanda Sykes, Kathy Griffin) who endear themselves to gay men via what was once (and still is, but to a lesser extent) a shared struggle toward legitimacy and recognition. “There are people that have particular resonance because they do what Deborah (and I think a lot of other comedians) do, which is make comedy — make something joyful — out of struggle or out of a painful experience,” says Paul Downs, who co-wrote the episode with his fellow co-creators Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, as well as writer Samantha Riley. (He also credits out gay writers on the show Andrew Law and Guy Branum who helped craft this specific scene.) According to Downs, the writers have always been interested in the idea of what it means to be a fan, and, in this instance, the life cycle of a fan.
This made me wonder if this form of parasocial relationship exists today, when many fandoms corral around a superstar who’s often playing from the top (think: Beyoncé, Gaga, Rihanna, Taylor, etc.). That, and the fact that we are living in an era, as observed by Jia Tolentino in her excellent 2018 review of Robyn’s Honey for The New Yorker, “in which the boundaries between pop and indie, widely beloved vs. artistically credible, have dissolved more or less completely.” Add to that the fact that LGBTQ+ existence, particularly for gay men, is a lot more accepted and normalized within broader culture than it was even a decade ago.
I ask Downs about this. “Whether it’s Taylor or Beyoncé or whoever, sadly, the inherent centuries-old misogyny that’s engrained in people still exists,” remarks Downs. “And because of that, they do represent the survivors of that. And you still see the hate that people [of the Taylor/Beyoncé-level fame] put up with. And I think people like Taylor and Beyoncé thriving in spite of haters, that still exists, but yeah, it’s not the same as it was for a Judy Garland or a Cher or…” A Deborah Vance, I can’t help but blurt out. So perhaps it does still exist today, albeit in a different form, but I still think the ubiquity of fandom today has overtaken the sanctity of gay male diva worship of the past. Yes, and (the episode title!) maybe that’s not a bad thing. Yes, and maybe the recognition this episode provided is soothing nonetheless.
“I remember on the day we shot this scene, I walked in feeling really grateful that I got to be the actor to say these lines in this particular scene,” Bagley recounts. “I felt like it was a special scene, and I was lucky to be the one chosen to do it.”