His gayness was similarly used as a prop for silly banter rather than being a point of depth to drive his character’s sense of romantic or sexual aspiration. His primary function served to carry out tasks for his straight female friends, whether it be lending Cady his pink shirt or distributing candy cane grams to carry out Janice’s vengeful scheme. While Damian was presented as both confident and intelligent, as well as slinging his fair share of iconic one-liners (as did many of the main characters in the film), he still fell into the passé trope of the token gay sidekick.
The issue with the character of Damian was not that gay audiences couldn’t relate to him enough – it’s that we related to him too much. The character of Damian exhibited immense confidence in his sexuality at a young age and even carried with him the confidence to stand up to classmates who ridiculed him, whether it be tossing back a shoe at hecklers while holding a note performing on stage or chasing a Danny DeVito lookalike out of the girls’ bathroom. What is fascinating about Mean Girls is that it was one of the rare popular high school films to feature an out and proud gay character, giving gay fans a sense of representation. Consisting of a dynamic trio of Karen Smith, Gretchen Weiner and Regina George, The Plastics served as a coterie of mesmerizingly menacing matriarchs who judged the culture of chic in their domain of social life both in the fictional world of the film and the very real one of its viewers. Its legacy not only designated Wednesday as the official day of the colour pink for years before Nicki Minaj would ultimately redesignate it to Friday, but also provided young viewers a pristine – if unhealthy – idealization of what a power squad should be: The Plastics. Mean Girls, arguably the most lionized female-led cinematic bildungsroman of the millennium, perfectly encapsulated the gruelling transition of girlhood into womanhood given the complex power dynamics of the vicious, alpha-female-led ecosystem that is the American high school. What made us love them so much, however, was how they encompassed so much power and control within their social settings while still being unapologetically feminine and fabulous, a pipe dream for our then still closeted selves. Like us, they drank Diet Coke at 9 a.m., walked the mile in gym class instead of running so their hair wouldn’t get wet, and began planning their Halloween costumes in August. In depictions of teenagers in film and television, many gay men always felt the closest connection to the pretty, popular girls. For a long time, this was the closest we could get to seeing ourselves on screen, as gay characters were still considered taboo in mainstream media. Whether it be Judy Garland, Diana Ross or the Green M&M, these heroines have for their divine power been vouchsafed into the pantheon of gay icons. Gay men have always turned to strong women in media as pillars of strength in our community. Gay men who were too young at the time to watch Brian Kinney bareback his way through the existentialism of debaucherous nightlife in Queer as Folk, or pick up on the queer coding of nefarious vers-top villains in animated Disney films, instead grew to idolize the women who led the films of our adolescence. When queer people look back on the films of our youth in an attempt to reignite the prodigious joy of our inner child, we so seldom see depictions that would inspire us to be the proud adults our childhood selves dreamed we could one day become.