"The Tender Bar": Gay Tease Hides a Homophobic Exterior

 

Speaking of gay teases, The Tender Bar, on Amazon Prime,claims to be about a man works on his professional and romantic life at his uncle's bar, while the 5-second long icon trailer displays two guys crusiing each other at said bar.  Obviously the man is gay, right?  

I was a little suspicious, so I did some background research.

Wikipedia doesn't give a plot synopsis, but it does list Ben Affleck as the star -- although his relationship with Matt Damon led to a lot of speculation that he was gay during the 1980s, he's actually homophobic.  Back in 1997, he said "A man kissing another man is the greatest challenge an actor can face."  I assume he meant heterosexual male actor.  So kissing a guy is much more challenging than acting in scenes where, say, you are raped or murdered.  

What if a hetero man has to kiss a woman he's not attracted to?  Wouldn't that be a challenge, too?  

Another star is Tye Sheridan, who I thought played Phil Dunphy on Modern Family, but that's Ty Burrell. Tye Sheridan played Cyclops in X-Men: Apocalypse.  Is Cyclops the one who developed a brief gay-subtext romance before his boyfriend was exploded?  No, that's Banshee.

Google Images claims that this is Tye Sheridan, but when you click on the link, it turns out to be Ben Hardy.  So I give up.

I watched the full trailer on IMDB:

1. Sometime in the 1940s or 1950s, a woman with an Andrews Sisters hairstyle and a 1940s-style car takes her son to live with a crotchety old man.  She tells her son: "You're going to law school," although he's only about ten.  He starts hanging out in the bar.  

2. Heterosexist moment: A bartender asks a patron, "Which sister?  The hot one or the crazy one?"  So it's not a gay bar.   Of course, it wouldn't be in the 1940s, at least not openly.

3. Another guy, maybe the Uncle, takes the boy in, shows him some books, and encourages him to become a writer. He starts banging away on an old Selectric.  (invented in 1961, so Mom must have dropped him off in the late 1950s; she just dressed 10 years out of date).  

 4. Uncle also gives the boy life advice, like: "Never hit a woman." So he's heterosexual, and he assumes the kid is, too, and the trailer wants us to be very certain of that.

5. The boy, all grown up, is entering Yale, class of 1986.  So he graduated high school in 1982.  But if he was 10 in 1959, he'd be going to college in 1967.  So Mom must have dropped him off around 1974.  Why the 1940s costume?  She must be the crazy one, not the hot one.    

6. He  meets a girl, and they have sex (by minute 1.33).  I don't need to watch anymore.

Out gay actor Ivan Leung has a handful of lines as Jimmy, the boy's classmate at Yale, but I doubt that his character is gay.  

All in all, a tease.  The two guys at the bar are apparently Uncle and Boy, just pretending that they are into each other.

And why is the bar tender?  I keep thinking Tender Trap, a 1955 movie about a man who accidentally proposes to two women at the same time.  I read an article specifically entitled "What is the meaning of The Tender Bar title?", but it just said that the boy liked it.

It's based upon a "memoir" by J. R. Moehringer, who, like every writer, debotes his first book to the story of a young man who wants to become a writer (it sounds claustrophobic, but they all do it).  

The word "gay" does not appear in the novel, but in one scene, Uncle Charlie tells a patron that if he finds Sigourney Weaver attractive, he must be "a homosexual."  Huh?  But she's a woman.  

So the memoir is homophobic.  

By the way, Moehringer was born in 1964, so Mom actually did drop him off at Grandpa's in 1974.  She just like to dress like the Andrews Sisters.