Arts & Culture

Gay Nerds, JP Larocque's award winning web series, will be coming to Toronto Reference Library in the Beeton auditorium on Monday September 28th.

Fans of MTV's "1 Girl: 5 Gays" will know JP as a series regular. He's also been busy as a columnist in Xtra, hosting the TO Webfest awards, and promoting Gay Nerds at Comicons, FanExpos and other geekfests across North America.

Gay Nerds follows the adventures of Ralphie, Lana, Sammy and Paige, four single twenty-somethings and their fantastic and horrifying dating lives that somehow eerily mimic classic Science Fiction and Horror movies. (Think of how the monsters in the first season of Buffy were physical manifestations of whatever inter-personal problem Sarah Michelle Gellar was facing that week.)

The parodies of classics like Aliens, The Shining and 28 Days Later are deadly not only as movie parodies, but also as time capsules of contemporary gay life.

             

Although the series is available online, the ensemble cast--Robert Keller, Alexandra Wylie, Ryan Kerr and Justine Moriz--play the leads with such a gleefully amoral zest, that Gay Nerds is definitely something better shared with a crowd.

Now the Venn diagrams. Slash Fiction, Ho Yay in Smallville, and everything Star Trek from George Takei to Zachary Quinto have established real cross-over credibility between the LGBTQ communities and Science Fiction fans.

So in the old days, the intersection between the Queer community and SciFi fans would seemingly limit the audience to people who were both gay AND nerds.

But in a world of Marvel beefcake, the Big Bang Theory, Kevin Keller, Steve MacIsaac's shirtlifter, the Toronto Queer Zine Fair and Jiraiya, that potential audience has expanded to embrace every shade of Gayness and Nerdom.

The universe of people who are neither gay nor nerds sometimes seems thin and tangential.

And this is a good thing. One gay friend tells me how the humanisation of the stormtroopers in The Force Awakens trailer was prefigured in the Clone Wars series. A straight dad regularly posts him and his kids doing cosplay; another shares his heartbreak missing out on a gig as a body double for Thor. A friend whose essays I helped edit calls himself my padawan.

And everyone knows more about Buffy than me.

And this is why you should come to Gay Nerds at Toronto Reference Library on September 28th at 7pm.

Because in 2015, the universe pretty much looks like this: