My unexpected Pride icon: Jurassic Park's strutting, swaggering T rex is pure camp
'That's camp,' proclaimed my drag queen friend Vanity as we watched the T rex rip a tyre off a Jeep in the first Jurassic Park movie. It's 2012, 2am and we're in her bedroom playing our favourite Jurassic Park drinking game, where you swig every time you see a dinosaur.
'Is it, though?' I said, doubtfully, dipping a Walkers Sensation in some coleslaw.
'Course it is. All the gays love Jurassic Park. Don't be an idiot, Jones.' She pointedly slapped down the lid on the coleslaw as if that were the end of the matter.
I thought about it a bit and ultimately agreed with her. I absolutely loved Jurassic Park. And so did just about every queer person I knew. Jurassic Park, in fact, made me feel proud. Prouder than seeing a load of 00s popstrels perform at Pride parades, prouder than drinking in the street in Soho, prouder even than M&S's Pride sandwich. Granted, my judgment was a little clouded from the drinking game. But still.
I've since wondered if this was specific to my strange little bubble of pop-culture-obsessed London reprobates. But its surprisingly innuendo-ready quotes ('clever girl', 'hold on to your butts', 'dinosaur eats man, woman inherits the Earth') and unforgettable performances (human and raptor) are an enduring staple everywhere from drag brunches to bleary afterparties.
London's historic queer venue the Royal Vauxhall Tavern held a Jurassic Park cabaret night in 2023 called 'Life Finds a Slay'. In San Francisco last year, the Brava theatre hosted 'Jurassic Drag', two Jurassic Park nights celebrating various drag legends ('they've survived a hostile world and trekked the Earth collectively for more than 170 years … which we all know in drag time is roughly 250 million'). Also last year, the Canadian podcaster and academic Hannah McGregor published a feminist-focused queer memoir, Clever Girl, billed as 'a smart and incisive exploration of everyone's favourite dinosaur movie and the female dinosaurs who embody what it means to be angry, monstrous and free'. (An honourable mention goes to the British gay couple and their dog who went viral in 2020 for recreating scenes from the films during lockdown.)
It makes sense when you look at the first two movies. Their director, Steven Spielberg, has always had a propensity for the camper, more fun side of mild to moderate peril, flinging damsels into snake pits and children into shark-infested waters at the first chance he gets. He and the screenwriter David Koepp wield this impish inclination with gusto in Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park: The Lost World, whether it's a dilophosaurus wobbling her wattles or Julianne Moore gasping on glass over a gulch. Laura Dern is constantly in peril in the first movie – and for a lot of gay men, women in peril is a favourite genre – there is a stampede of psychosexual and misogynistic issues to dive into with that one. (Other notable women-in-peril franchises beloved of gay men include Scream, Buffy, Tomb Raider and, depending on Tyra Banks's mood, America's Next Top Model.)
Also, if you are a millennial gay man, Jeff Goldblum's tanned, heaving bosom inside a liberally unbuttoned shirt was definitely at least part of your sexual awakening. A special mention should go to Bob Peck as park warden Robert Muldoon, who sported short-shorts that would make even Lara Croft raise one of her perfectly plucked eyebrows. (The later Jurassic World films are notably sanitised, safe and sexless in comparison – like smooth, scaly iPhones.)
Really, though, if I stand up in the Jeep, take off my sunglasses and really look at it, the main reason I find pride in Jurassic Park is right there, rumbling and stomping in front of me: the dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs are deeply camp – their fierce, confident assuredness followed by their fiery, dramatic downfall. Their strutting, swaggering gaits. It's very drag, with their relentless energy and fierce joie de vivre, not to mention their various ruffs and feathers and talons and shiny teeth. They just served.
Some may say it's ridiculous to have an emotional affinity with 65m-year-old extinct reptiles, to which I say: why is it any more ridiculous than having an affinity with Strictly Come Dancing or Taylor Swift or raccoons? It's not. It's completely normal. Now, pass those night-vision goggles: we're going to Hampstead Heath.
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