The Movie - Trailer

In the first episode of the HBO series Looking, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) went out into one of San Francisco’s many public parks to hook up with a guy he met on Grindr. It did not go well, in part because Patrick wasn’t really interested in something so fleeting and illicit. One of the aspects of Looking that made it so frustrating for gay critics in particular — and there were a LOT of things that frustrated many gay critics about Looking — was that it seemed to adopt Patrick’s naiveté about sex, about relationships, about people, about the world. Surely, the one narrative program about gay protagonists on TV wasn’t advancing the notion that Grindr culture was a symptom for  a lack of romantic fulfillment, was it? And yet there was Dom (Murray Bartlett) in the pilot, sexing up a young Grindr trick (Broadway’s Andrew Keenan-Bolger) and feeling glum about it afterwards.

I bring up this remnant of thinkpiece fodder from yesteryear because with Looking: The Movie, Andrew Haigh and Michael Lannan have wrapped up the series in a way that casts those early episodes definitively as first chapters in a story that ends with its characters having learned to chill the hell out and celebrate the myriad of gay relationships available to them. With that comes a sense of generosity, sincerity, and yeah, a little bit of wisdom, too. Not to mention an A+ sex scene that now gives Looking claim to the TWO best rimjob scenes in all of television history. As legacies go, I’d take it.