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By Abby Monteil
To quote one of my favorite gay memes in recent memory, “well-behaved bottoms rarely make history.”
That’s essentially the premise of Bottoms, writer-director Emma Seligman’s highly anticipated follow-up to their 2020 film Shiva Baby. Now, after months of publicity stills in which stars Rachel Sennott and Ayo Edebiri appear mildly befuddled in various locations, we’ve finally got our first trailer for the queer fight club sex comedy of the summer.
Sennot and Edebiri play, as their principal calls them at the top of the trailer, “ugly, untalented gays” who are desperate to hook up with some girls before heading off to college. So when star football player Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) and his jock cronies begin terrorizing the lower echelons of their high school, the duo come up with the perfect solution: start a girls’ self-defense fight club and maybe, just maybe, catch their popular girl crushes’ attention in the process.
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As any young queer who’s earnestly begged for a hot woman to punch them in the face or hit them with a car online can attest, there’s something inherently horny about hyperbolically equating homoerotic desire with hypothetical, gonzo violence. The subtext was right there in the original Fight Club movie, and with Bottoms, it’s messy sapphic text.
As the film’s official Twitter account put it: “Want to get punched in the face by hot girls? WELL GET IN LINE.”
Bottoms also stars Havana Rose Liu, Kaia Gerber, Miles Fowler, Ruby Cruz, Marshawn Lynch, Dagmara Dominczyk, and Punkie Johnson. 
In a May interview with Entertainment Weekly, Seligman said that although Bottoms satirizes and takes inspiration from classic coming-of-age comedies such as Wet Hot American Summer, she and Sennott — with whom she also co-wrote the film — decided not to revisit those kinds of movies too closely.
“We didn’t rewatch Superbad or American Pie because I think we didn’t want to be influenced by them,” Seligman said. “But definitely we feel like queer women hadn’t gotten their due from a teen sex comedy.”
You can catch Bottoms in all its messy, bloody queer glory when the film hits theaters on August 25.
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