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The Outs: Your New Favorite Kinda-Gay Web Series
Mitchell (Adam Goldman) shows Oona (Sasha Winters) his party cardigan. Please... like you don't have a party cardigan.
If there’s one thing I love more than hot men holding baby animals, it’s the new web series “The Outs.”
If you haven’t seen “The Outs,” keep reading because at this time, your life is incomplete. If you have seen it, also keep reading because the third episode just dropped and we’ve got it for you right here.
We caught up with Adam Goldman, director and writer for the series, to chat about his vision for “The Outs” and what it means to see gay characters in today’s media.
In a time when “gay” is a political agenda item and a social activist’s cause, Goldman is happy that he can create a story that features gay characters.
“Name me a TV show about gay people,” says Goldman. “People say ‘Queer as Folk,’ ‘Dante’s Cove,’ ‘Noah’s Arc….’
“We’re interested in gay not being a genre. It’s not a gay web series, it’s a web series about a pair of gay exes,” he says. “I bristle at the term ‘gay content.’”
“So, is it gay?” I ask him, wanting to know if “The Outs” is a gay (or not gay) web series.
“That’s not up to me. It’s frustrating, how to walk this line,” says Goldman.
For those who need to know before continuing, “The Outs” is pretty gay. It’s gay in all the best ways. The nuances of the show bring “gay” to life in a way that is much more real than clubbing, Grindr, coming-out stories, and other images portrayed and limited by mainstream media.
Jack (Right), played by Hunter Canning, is at a difficult point in his life when we meet him.
Caitlin Brooks, a 20-something account representative in Brooklyn where the series takes place is a gay man’s best girl friend to many-a-gay and a fan of the series.
“It is about time that there was a series about gay culture that didn’t do caricatures of different homosexual personas but instead just portrayed people that were gay.”
That “Oops, this is gay” quality is the driving force pushing “The Outs” onto our dashboards and newsfeeds.
Gay viewers will see representations of themselves in the “everyday” characters of the series that aren’t stacked, muscle-god body builders, they’ll get the jokes about the relationship a gay man has with his best girl friend, and they’ll share the feeling of angsty hope when on a date with a new dude.
And our straight brothers and sisters? They’ll laugh along and get a glimpse of modern gay life that isn’t hypersexualized, that isn’t Bravo-dramatic, that isn’t effeminate (not that there’s anything wrong with that).
Don’t get me wrong. “The Outs” is drama. Drama, drama, drama. But it humanizes the drama LGBTs might experience and levels it for a more neutral audience.
“There should be more stuff like this,” says Goldman about producing a gay webseries in today’s sociopolitical environment. “Sitting around watching Netflix, I want to watch something that doesn’t exist. There’s a void of [gay] characters.”
Preach, Adam. Preach!
Want to see more gay characters and more of “The Outs?” Of course you do, don’t be silly.
Visit TheOuts.tv to see the current episodes and to share them with friends. And if you have a few bucks in your pocket, head over to Kickstarter and consider dropping “The Outs” some funding. They’ll need about $8,000 to create the next three (and final) episodes and their campaign just started.
Watch Episode 3: Moon River below, and visit TheOuts.tv for the first two episodes.
