Yahoo Movies Why Britney's Crossroads endures as a gay cult classic
Crossroads spoilers follow – and they're extremely gay.
The (snubbed) Oscar-winning movie Crossroads – now making its streaming debut on Netflix – begins with three young girls named Lucy, Kit, and Mimi burying a "wish box" together in their small Georgia town.
The plan is to dig it up on the night of their high-school graduation, but when we jump forward a few years later, the girls are no longer speaking to each other. Still, that doesn't stop them from reuniting one last time to fulfil their old wishes and become friends all over again in the process.
In the 20-plus years since Britney Spears made her (proper) acting debut, Crossroads itself has now become a time capsule of sorts that speaks to a more innocent time where sweet movies about female friendship could perform well in cinemas without being dumped onto streaming first.
For gays of a certain age, the kind who put Britney posters on their wall to deflect inquisitive parents, Crossroads is also a time capsule to an era that's not that innocent (yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah).
Being queer at any age in the early noughties wasn't ideal for a huge number of reasons – even the word "gay" itself was a slur back then – and it didn't help that positive queer representation was practically non-existent, especially in the mainstream.
To see our experiences reflected back at us on screen and stage, baby gays had to go that extra mile and turn to cultural icons, usually women, who also didn't quite fit into what society expected of them, regardless of – and even because of – their success.
What that essentially means is when gays hit puberty, they immediately seek out one pop star who they will dedicate the rest of their lives to, one "Mother" who they will defend over their own actual mother.
Like earlier generations did with Cher, Diana Ross, and Barbara Streisand, countless gays of the early noughties followed this rite of passage and chose Britney.
By the time Crossroads arrived in 2002, Britney was still in a more innocent phase of her career – not a girl, not yet a woman – yet it's easy to forget how controversial she was deemed by the media still, even back then.
Being Miss American Dream since she was 17 wasn't everything it was cracked up to be, but if anything, all that hate and negativity directed her way only made baby gays and adult gays alike love Brit more.
Crossroads was inevitably caught in that crossfire, facing a barrage of negative reviews from men, shockingly enough, who wrote the movie off as "one long, chick-flick slog".
(The movie still went on to gross $61.1 million worldwide on a $10‒12 million budget without even taking into account last year's extra two-day run to celebrate Britney's memoir, The Woman in Me.)
But Crossroads was never made for old straight men, regardless of how much they perved over Lucy in that first underwear scene. What director Tamra Davis created with Spears, Zoe Saldaña, Taryn Manning and her mostly female team was always made for the girls, gays and theys.
Cheese and camp go hand in hand like knives and dancing or denim formal wear at a red-carpet ceremony, which means the adorable yet cheesy friendship beats at the heart of this movie are camper than a tent wholesaler.
In Britney's first scene, she sings along to Madonna in her underwear with a cowboy hat on, which by all accounts registered a 9.3 on the Mother-quake scale if scientific reports from the time are to be believed. And what about when Britney finds out her actual mother is Samantha from Sex and the City?
Or when Lucy reads out a poem to Ben that suspiciously sounds like the lyrics to 'Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman'?
All camp, all brilliant, we're sure you'll agree, but what's so impressive about Crossroads is that the intervening years have somehow made it even more camp than it was when the movie was first released.
For example, time – and a little help from IMDB trivia – has revealed that Madonna was originally intended to play Lucy's mother instead of Kim Cattrall. This makes that photo of Madge hanging over Lucy's bed the exact kind of insane deep cut that gays love to point out to other gays during their weekly? annual Crossroads rewatch.
And did you know that Robert De Niro – of all people – played a huge role in making Crossroads happen?
As legend has it, the legendary star was working with Anson Mount on City by the Sea when Lucy's future love interest received the Crossroads script, which he found to be "cheesy" and "lame". The Shark Tale star, clearly a man of impeccable taste, convinced Mount to take the part, and even read Britney's lines with him to help prepare (via E! Online).
How utterly silly and ridiculous and just perfect for the mythology surrounding this camp masterpiece.
But that's not to say Crossroads is just pure fluff. Among all the wishing and cutesy sing-alongs, there's also an undercurrent of pain and sadness, especially when it comes to Lucy's abandonment and Mimi's sexual-assault storyline.
Britney herself was also struggling more than anyone realised at the time. Writing in her recent memoir, Spears explained that she found it hard to separate herself from the character, so she was actually quite "relieved" when Crossroads ended up being "the beginning and end of my acting career". Never mind all the other issues she faced that would later come to light.
Watching Crossroads, you'd have no idea about any of this, and that's yet another aspect of the movie that speaks to gay audiences now, all these years later. Because if there's anything universal about being queer, it's that feeling of pretending you're okay when you're not, of hiding yourself to fit in and make yourself small so you're deemed "acceptable" to others.
Knowing all this as adults further cements the reputation of Crossroads as a gay cult classic, making it even more relevant in the years that have passed since teenage us first watched the film, pretending they're only into it because Britney's hot and not because she's Mother.
In that sense, revisiting Crossroads now on Netflix really is like digging up a time capsule, not just with the noughties era fashion and music, but also with everything that comes from living through all that as a young gay kid at a difficult time. Yet that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Like Lucy, Kit and Mimi, young queer people watching Crossroads also wished for a better future back then in 2002. For some of us, that future has now become a reality, but even for those who still struggle, there's something reassuring about revisiting a movie that brought so much comfort during hard times.
That's why Crossroads will always endure as a gay cult classic, even when Netflix inevitably removes it and we're back to rummaging through charity shops for that one last DVD – or heaven forbid, a VHS of Britney's cinematic masterpiece.
Crossroads is available to watch now on Netflix.
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