{"id":177676,"date":"2025-06-12T06:20:10","date_gmt":"2025-06-12T06:20:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/177676\/"},"modified":"2025-06-12T06:20:10","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T06:20:10","slug":"my-unexpected-pride-icon-fast-furious-is-my-favourite-camp-classic-life-and-style","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/177676\/","title":{"rendered":"My unexpected Pride icon: Fast & Furious is my favourite camp classic | Life and style"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am a 42-year-old lesbian who can\u2019t drive. And, since I\u2019m baring all, I will add that I loathe people who drive extremely fast in obnoxiously large cars. Which, unfortunately, seems to be every third person in the US. In short, I\u2019d wager I\u2019m probably not the target audience for the Fast & Furious<\/a> films.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure I don\u2019t need to explain the blockbuster franchise to you: the first instalment came out in 2001 and the series has generated billions. But if you are somehow unfamiliar with them, the basic premise is that a ragtag team of misfits and street racers travel around the world, driving cars fast and furiously, beating up baddies.<\/p>\n

Paul Walker and Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 6. Composite: Guardian Design; Universal Pictures\/Allstar<\/p>\n

Target demographic or not, I\u2019m a big fan. Ever since I watched The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) on a plane I\u2019ve been obsessed with the films. Which, I will concede, are very stupid (my four-year-old could come up with the \u201cplot\u201d for a typical F&F movie). But they are also great fun. And extraordinarily gay.<\/p>\n

First, there\u2019s the fact that they are completely over-the-top. As camp as they come; the drag queens of the cinematic world. In F9 they send a Pontiac Fiero to space for God\u2019s sake: the film is so gay it defies gravity. F7, meanwhile, features one of my favourite super-camp scenes<\/a> (don\u2019t judge): Dwayne \u201cthe Rock\u201d Johnson is in hospital with his arm in a cast but realises he has to drive fast cars and beat people up so busts open the cast by flexing his huge biceps while announcing, \u201cDaddy has to go to work.\u201d I mean, come on, talk about the performance of gender.<\/p>\n

Speaking of performance, there\u2019s also the Rock\u2019s name. There is something just a tinge lavender about a man called Dwayne Douglas deciding to go by \u201cthe Rock\u201d instead. And then you\u2019ve got Mark Sinclair, who plays Dominic \u201cDom\u201d Toretto in the franchise. Mark\u2019s stage name, of course, is Vin Diesel. I would absolutely give myself a name like that if I was going to be a drag king. Vin Diesel, Von Biceps, Tommy Testosterone \u2013 something along those lines.<\/p>\n

As any fan will know, ultimately Fast & Furious is about family. Dom Toretto says the word \u201cfamily\u201d about 100 times in each movie and he doesn\u2019t mean his nuclear family. Rather the word refers to his ride or die crew of friends \u2013 who happen to be a very diverse bunch. It\u2019s cheesy, yes, but this emphasis on a chosen family is also quietly radical and queer-coded.<\/p>\n

The \u2018family\u2019 in Fast & Furious 7. Photograph: Universal Pictures\/Allstar<\/p>\n

I came out more than 20 years ago, when the world was a lot more homophobic than it is now. My family has always been supportive but I know plenty of people who haven\u2019t been so lucky. A 2013 Pew study<\/a> found that about 39% of LGBT Americans have been rejected by a family member or close friend because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Finding your chosen family, and redefining what \u201cfamily\u201d means, has always been part of queer culture.<\/p>\n

I feel particularly conscious of what \u201cfamily\u201d means at the moment, as my wife and I raise a four-year-old. She is our only child but she has a number of half-siblings through the sperm donor, and we are in contact with these families: we are all woven together now. We spend a lot of time talking to our child about how every family is different, and try to expose her to different types of families. Still, looking at the world through her eyes, I have become hyperaware of how ingrained the idea of the heterosexual nuclear family is in society. According to a 2023 study<\/a>, only 47% of Americans see a married gay or lesbian couple raising children together as completely acceptable. The idea that a proper family consists of a married mum and dad with two kids (preferably one of each gender), is reinforced in everything from cartoons to commercials.<\/p>\n

Fast & Furious would never be described by anyone as \u201cwoke\u201d. And yet it has always had diverse talent in front of and behind the scenes \u2013 one reason it\u2019s been so popular across many demographics<\/a>. In 2015 Vin Diesel noted that<\/a>: \u201cIt doesn\u2019t matter what nationality you are. As a member of the audience, you realise you can be a member of that \u2018family\u2019.\u201d This is the beauty of F&F: it doesn\u2019t try to hit you over the head with political messaging, but it does constantly reinforce the idea that love is love.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I am a 42-year-old lesbian who can\u2019t drive. And, since I\u2019m baring all, I will add that I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":177677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[77,3943,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-177676","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-movies","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114668951122592153","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=177676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/177676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/177677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=177676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=177676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=177676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}