Mean Girls, the 2004 comedy written by Tina Fey was so much more than a story about four high school girls, it was a witty and intelligent portrayal of teenage life and the social issues faced by teenagers. Starring Rachael McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Lacey Chabert, Mean Girls was particularly responsible for launching one certain person into popular culture. And that person was Glen Coco. It also starred Lindsay Lohan.
Surprisingly being a gay man is quite like being a teenage girl in high school and as such we can learn a lot about gay life from Mean Girls.
Here is the list of 5 WAYS THAT MEAN GIRLS IS LIKE GAY LIFE
1. “I’m new. I just moved here from Africa”
Mean Girls is the story of Cady Heron, a young girl starting at a new school and navigating her way through cliques, personalities and the unspoken rules of adolescense. Slightly aware of her own attractiveness, she’s immediately spotted by the popular group and taken under their wing. The popular girls teach her their high school ways and after a while she becomes a fully fledged member, wielding her own manipulative powers. In the end personalities cross, truths are revealed and mayhem ensues.
And so too goes the story of young gay guys entering the gay “scene”. Unknown gay boy leaves the suburbs and moves to the big city. Slightly aware of his twinky good looks he’s immediately adopted by the popular gays who teach him the ways of partying, sex, socialising and cliquey-ness . After a period of intense drama, cheating and backhanded bitchniness the popular group falls apart and the young gay boy, having slept with way too many people returns home or is forced to move to a new city.
2. “Being with the plastics was like being famous… people looked at you all the time and everybody just knew stuff about you”
Just like high school, the gay community can feel quite small and after a while everyone seems to know everybody’s business. There also exists that “popular” group of gay guys, or “scene queens” in gay speak, who everyone knows about. They seem to be perpetually on holiday (somewhere warm) and when they are in town they’re probably drinking cocktails at a fabulous restaurant or lounging in speedos by someone’s pool. Although you don’t know them personally, thanks to social media, you’re kept well updated on all aspects of their social lives.
3. “I used to think there was just fat and skinny. But apparently there’s lots of things that can be wrong on your body”
Have you ever met a gay guy who is 100% content with his appearances? Probably not. Sure he might look like an adonis to you but chances are he hates his body. Whether it’s small calves, an underdeveloped 6-pack or a slightly less defined left arm, apparently there’s a lot of things that can be wrong with gay men’s bodies. No matter how much time is spent in the gym, we’re never content.
4. “On Wednesdays we wear pink”
If you want to fit in with other gay guys then you have to dress like other gay guys. This usually means dressing as “straight” as possible. Any sign of unique style or a shirt that’s slightly too flamboyant and you immediately become unsexable (and sex is the ultimate goal right?). Oh and always remember, in gay clubs we don’t wear tops.
5. “Halloween is the one night a year when girls can dress like a total slut and no other girls can say anything about it”
Halloween for gays is more of an occasion to dress as your ultimate sexual fantasy than it is to dress in traditional “scary” garb. This is often achieved by taking a mucho sport/profession/superhero such as policeman, footballer, pirate etc and making it as slutty as possible. Some may say that gays dress like total sluts on most Saturday nights but nothing is more slutty than a gay on October 31st. In Sydney there’s even a gay party called “Halloween Whores”.
THE MODERN GAY GUIDE TO LIFE 
It’s time for things to change, and there’s definitely the potential for things to change.
This is ‘not’ just an affliction of ‘human nature’ at play here.
Well done for writing the article (although similar has been published over-and-over-and-over again previously).
Trust your audience will see it as an opportunity to stop and take stock of their behaviours, attitudes and friend-ship groups and take on transforming, if not the ‘entire gay scene’, at least their little part of it that they can influence.
Bullying comes in all colours, shapes and sizes.
Yeah, because straight people NEVER exhibit these traits. FAIL ARTICLE
Hey Jeff, thanks for reading and for your feedback. “Mean Girls” is about straight people. The point of this article was to take the straight themes from the movie and give them a humorous gay twist. I’m sorry that you didn’t appreciate the irony.
The article is a win in that it calls us out for the negative behaviors we tolerate and in many ways encourage within our own community. Looking to straight people as validation, justification, or for money see monkey do equity is nothing more than distraction from the point the author has made. We as a community can do better than behaving like mean girls. How other communities live is up to them. We as the gay community can choose to live with a different set of values than the flash in the pan social lives and treatment of other people as disposable objects show us to be. This is true of every scene queen star du jour or the jaded wannabe/former scene star who profess disgust for “the scene”. No one is ever enhanced by tearing down someone else. Instead both are diminished. So I applaud the author and rather than looking at the behaviors of other people I will take a critical look at myself and ask if this is the type of person I want to be.
i feel sorry for the (gay?) person who wrote this, thinking in general that gays are like mean girls, making fun of each other, having body image issues, moving to the big city getting used and abused and then returning to their village defeated, dressing “str*’, etc. I suggest this person to get better friends to treat him kindly, see a therapist to start feeling better about who he is and what he looks like, and get an education so he wont have to rely on his twinky looks to get accepted.