For many young queer people, attending a Lesbian Wedding is a highlight of our gay experience. It wasn’t possible for us to get married for so many years. Now that we can, It’s something to celebrate as loudly as possible. While lesbian weddings often contain the same pieces as a straight wedding, substituting a groom for a second bride normally changes things at least a little bit. In Anyone But You, however, they seem to have missed this memo, resulting in the straightest lesbian wedding to ever occur.
Anyone But You, the 2023 romantic comedy based on Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, stars Sydney Sweeny (Bea) and Glen Powell (Ben) as current enemies, one time lovers while they attend a destination wedding in Australia. Bea’s sister, Halle (Hadley Robinson), is marrying Ben’s friend’s sister Claudia (Alexandra Shipp). Ben and Bea know this going in, but are somehow both shocked and upset to see that the other one attended.
Claudia and Halle are madly in love, so much so that Halle has changed her mind about the foolishness of weddings and commitment. Halle’s previous ambivalence to labels is where the queerness in this movie ends.
As referenced earlier, Ben is at this wedding because he is a friend of Claudia’s brother. This high honor somehow qualifies him to be part of Claudia’s bridal party. In fact, the only two people standing on Claudia’s side of the aisle are her brother Pete and Ben. On Halle’s side is Bea and Claudia’s female cousin. The segregation of gender across the aisle combined with the fact that Ben isn’t even Claudia’s friend is very strange. While watching, I couldn’t help but feel like the part had originally been written for a man before Shipp got the part.
Obviously, Ben needed to attend the wedding for the purpose of the plot. It would have been hard for him and Bea to fall in love were he not there. However, It would have made far more sense for Ben to simply be an attendee, or even a plus one of Pete, than to be standing at the altar.
The lack of attention to the “lesbian” aspect of the lesbian wedding is not just subjugated to the ceremony itself. Throughout the entirety of the movie, Claudia and Halle only kissed twice, and neither time was it a makeout. Given that they were the ones getting married (and we saw them wake up together on their wedding day) it would be reasonable to see more than a peck. The gentleness and sexlessness of the couple is indicative of a wider trend of lesbians being painted with a floral, childlike sheen in media. I am begging Hollywood to realize that just as most straight people are somewhere in-between chaste and pornographic, so are lesbians.
Halle and Bea’s parents, too, were far more interested in the life of their straight child than their queer one. They consistently get sidetracked trying to set Bea up with her ex-boyfriend and discuss her academic pursuits. It’s clear that they care more about what Bea is doing than what their daughter that’s getting married is doing. This lack of care on the part of the parents is painful for queer people who just want to be recognized as equal. Halle was a second class citizen in the eyes of her parents. Anyone But You truly showed straight people how to make it All About You. In fact, the parent’s lack of affection towards their queer daughter might be just about the only recognizably lesbian thing about the wedding.
I enjoyed watching this film, but I found myself wishing they were attending a straight wedding instead. It was clear nobody in the writing room understood what it meant to be at an actual lesbian wedding, and there was no care given to Shipp and Robinson’s characters. Queer weddings on screen matter, but they only matter if they are done with care.
