Recently released on Prime Video, Overcompensating follows first-year college students Benny (Mexican American Benito Skinner) and Carmen (Mexican-Syrian Wally Baram) as they perform their most inauthentic selves. They and everyone around them are hiding parts of themselves to fit in, but the main secret of the show is that Benny is gay.
Like an overcooked steak, have the juices run dry in stories of being in the closet? I can agree that it is tiring watching the same narratives, especially when they’re not done in a cleverly referential way. But the most concerning part about seeing the closeted storyline repeatedly is that it can sideline the depth of queer experiences. I’m not saying we should never see characters who aren’t out, but let’s not reduce LGBTQ people down to the drama of a secretive gay identity. The coming out story can make being gay “special,” but when they make it too spectacular and too heightened, they ironically also portray it as something to be ashamed of.
Queerness is not a marketing ploy and thankfully, Overcompensating doesn’t treat it as such. Instead, the program indicates the complexities of today’s policies and societal ideas on sex, sexuality, and gender. In other words, the current political landscape of far-right legislative and cultural control sheds a new light as to why Benny would stay closeted. Overcompensating satirically demonstrates the continued presence of anti-gay and anti-woman groupthink that is regressive at best and at worst, the mark of an emerging fascist rule. And the Prime show does it by revealing just how laughable the dominant powers’ hierarchy really is.
Benny peacocks as a straight person. He parties with frat and secret society boys he can’t stand, he refuses to be seen or connected with the boys he has a crush on, and he lies about his sexual encounters with women like Carmen. Benny’s betrayal reveals the scope of how much he fears being the butt of the joke. He understands, even if he does not agree, that to be gay is to be laughable given every snide remark, comical glance, and snicker the guys he associates with give whenever they interact with an effeminate or out character. Their anti-gay sentiment goes hand-in-hand with their anti-woman views. For Benny, that means he not only has to prove that he’s having sex with a woman, but also he must treat her as discardable. It is depressingly not surprising that these guys label Carmen a slut later on. They see sex as a way to demean her and build him up.
Now more than ever misogyny and the homophobia that goes with it are part of the campaigns, policies, and culture of the far-right. Even in a post-Brokeback Mountain and Glee world, we are still in a time when characters like Benny have to act straight or else be targeted by the numerous anti-LGBTQ bills causing harm to queer people. With the ascendency of the far right, the closeted storyline is newly fresh and bloody.
In this harsh reality, Benny resists. His humorous performance of heterosexuality is slippery, incomplete, and the actual joke of the show. It reminds us that the far-right is not stronger or unbreakable. They may have the power now but there are always fractures and dissents, ways in which people break with their rule.
Besides making a laughing stock of hyper-masculinity, Benny’s inability to truly perform as straight when he can’t hide his heartbreak over one of his male classmates strengthens his friendship with Carmen. Since she can understand without him having to come out to her, he no longer has to perform to every single person in his life, especially at the unwilling expense of Carmen. In the end, Overcompensating rightfully laughs at the comical construction of the powerful so those who are still trying to perform can catch a break.
