Commenting on that ‘queer representation’ in You People
Netflix’s You People was released in selected, limited theaters around the United States on January 20, 2023, however, the movie dropped globally on their streaming platform on January 27. It was quite an anticipated release and it was marketed to a wide audience, claiming representation for a variety of diverse groups, including the LGBTQ community.
The film has quite a list of big-name Hollywood celebrities attached to its title, including the likes of Jonah Hill, who co-wrote the film and also starred in it, Eddie Murphy, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lauren London, David Duchovny, and Sam Jay.
It’s the story of Ezra (Jonah Hill), an average white dude who gets into Amira’s (Lauren London) parked car one day, thinking she is his uber driver. She isn’t, of course, but the two have an incredibly socially awkward exchange which eventually leads to a date, which then leads to a relationship.
Ezra is from a Jewish white family in Los Angeles and Amira is black. The two couldn’t be more different, yet they fall in love anyway. When they introduce each other to their families, those differences start to become the third person in the relationship, and suddenly, the question of whether a black person like Amira could ever be with a white person like Ezra is the elephant in the room.
However, when it comes to the queer representation, You People is scantily clad and the representation is only sprinkled throughout the story for the sake of visibility. Mo (Sam Jay) is Ezra’s bestie-slash-coworker. They work together on a podcast where they talk about all The Things™. Apart from the fact that this character is played by Sam Jay, there isn’t any real development of her storyline outside of tropey stereotypes. Mo is masculine presenting, hangs with the fellas, and is presumed to play for the rainbow team, yet no official use of the word lesbian is applied to her story.
Mo functions as a non-threatening support for Ezra to lean on when he needs advice (or a good old-fashioned calling out) on how to navigate the differences between himself and Amira because of their skin color.
In You People, apart from Mo, there is only one other queer character. Ezra’s sister, Liza (Molly Gordon) is also gay. Like Mo, however, her story is largely underdeveloped and her queerness doesn’t really serve any purpose other than token visibility. She has a moment when she meets Amira for the first time where she gay fumbles all over the lady, but she gets it together pretty quickly. She doesn’t really serve any queer function in the film at all, and the point of her character seems largely rooted in humanizing Ezra’s family so they don’t come off as entirely bigoted (because yeesh, they say some racist stuff).
So while the movie is a decent enough watch, if you’re queer and thinking you’re going to tune into You People for some outstanding representation – think again. The queer characters in this film are there for visibility only and don’t really do much except exist. We’re also not saying that every film featuring queer characters has to do something profound or exciting with them. However, this was marketed to the queer community so we do think some transparency regarding exactly what that ‘representation’ looks like is fair here.
Despite this, Sam Jay is great in You People, as she is in everything. It’s obvious that when this character was being developed, the writers had Sam Jay in mind. For that in itself, we recommend giving this one a shot.
You People is available to stream on Netflix now. Follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all queer stuff!
