In & Out (1997)

In & Out arrives from 1997 with a premise that remains a curious artifact of mainstream gay comedy. Kevin Kline plays Howard Brackett, a small-town Indiana English teacher who is outed on national television by a former student during an Academy Awards speech. The film's central subject is coming out, homophobia, and the disruption of a wedding. It treats homosexuality as the engine of the plot, not a subplot. The famous kiss between Kline and Tom Selleck lasts twelve seconds and was a genuine milestone for a studio comedy. The cast is almost entirely white, and the gay leads are played by straight actors. The representation is thematic. It is not a diverse ensemble.

The film's social conscience is warm and broad. It wants tolerance, and it stages that desire in a graduation scene where student after student declares himself gay, followed by family and townsfolk. The finale has the shape of a sermon, though the sermon is delivered with jokes and a Village People needle drop. Gender politics stay conventional. Joan Cusack's Emily is given dignity, but her arc is wedding anxiety and jilted woman. Racial themes are absent from Greenleaf. Climate concerns, anti-capitalist critique, body positivity, neurodivergence, and historical revision are also absent. The media circus is satirized mildly. No economic critique follows. Emily's weight loss is a wedding-prep detail, and the film's humor often rests on old-fashioned beauty standards.

What lingers is the earnestness. The film asks a small town to accept its gay teacher, and then everyone dances. It does not interrogate structures. It does not risk sexual candor. As a cultural document, it belongs to a pre-2010s mode of gay mainstream comedy: identity as revelation, acceptance as climax, and a warm group hug for Middle America. That is its charm and its limit. The film is friendly, well performed, and eager to please. It wants the gymnasium to feel inclusive. In that ambition, it succeeds enough to be remembered.