“Challengers” Is a Horny Fanfiction Girl’s Dream

I am thirteen years old, fresh out of seventh grade, and it’s my greatest dream to watch, no make, two boys kiss, though I haven’t put it into those exact words just yet. In the backseat of my aunt’s SUV, on a drive to a lake in Vermont, I listen to “Closing Time” by the soon-to-be-forgotten band Semisonic and think about Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter kissing—based on a piece of fan art my friend showed me on her family computer in her parents’ basement. This piece was, for some unknown reason, also called “Closing Time.”

The lyric “I know who I want to take me home” hits me particularly hard. Not because I want to be taken home by Draco or Harry, but because I want them to want to be taken home by each other. It’s a confusing feeling, a new fantasy that doesn’t exactly involve me as a person, as opposed to my other current romantic fantasy (that Heath Ledger will kiss me on the lips after a pillow fight in the school gym). I finally understand, I think, what it is to yearn for someone, to long for them in an adult way, beyond the crushes I’ve had on boys at school. Harry and Draco are not even my favorite characters from the series (which is my entire life in the early 2000s up until JK Rowling’s justified cancelation). First the fan art, then the song, stir a feeling within me that, unfortunately, will never be un-stirred.

Two years later, I buy a Brokeback Mountain t-shirt at Hot Topic and wear it to school. I’m a freshman in a small town in rural Iowa. I assume I will be teased— it’s 2006 and historically not a great year to be gay—but I’m not, presumably because 1) most of the other teenagers don’t know what the shirt’s referring to, and 2) I am not a gay man, so the overall message seems to confuse anyone who might understand the shirt. I am a straight, bookish CIS white girl and, despite feeling out of place in my farming town, I swim in privilege. The gay boys at my school, who are all closeted until after high school, vehemently do not wear gay lover merchandise. The only person who spots the reference is a new girl who tells me she likes Brokeback Mountain too. We go on to be friends for the next fifteen years, welded together, so fittingly, by our teenage horniness for watching Jake Gyllenhaal and, love of my life, Heath Ledger have sex in secret.

Fast forward nearly twenty years, and here I am, thirty-two years old in the year of our lord 2024, talking about the movie Challengers in the basement of my adult best friend, Rebecca’s house.

“It is the story of one woman bravely making two hot men kiss,” I say, only half joking.

My friend turns to her husband.  “It’s all we wanted,” she says. I continue to make friends well into my adulthood based on a manic thirst for fictional characters and, apparently, men kissing. Ideally, a combination of both. “You don’t understand,” Rebecca explains. “We worked so hard to make boys kiss.”

I listen to “Closing Time” again in my car driving home and think about Patrick and Art from Challengers, trying to make myself feel something. Preferably, horny. Well, not horny exactly. But filled with that same teenage yearning.

After seeing Challengers in theaters, my partner, Spencer, and I sit at a brewery and debate who’s hotter: Mike Faist or Josh O’Connor. “Josh O’Connor has that crooked smile,” Spencer says as if that settles the debate. Spencer is bisexual and only came out publicly as an adult. I finish an entire glass of brewery sangria, which is not good, and decide being married is the best thing ever. I wish someone had told me at thirteen, fourteen, when I so desperately longed for a boyfriend (or two!), that being married to a man would someday include discussing my favorite topic: cute boys.

As I talk about Challengers, in the brewery with Spencer, in Rebecca’s basement, and then furiously over Facebook Messenger with my high school best friends, I think fondly of the gay male romances that shaped me. It’s like reflecting on old boyfriends, long-gone lovers of my youth. Except, unlike old boyfriends, I still feel the fire of that attachment without lingering adolescent embarrassment. My ideal love story, unfortunately, still remains me, a straight high school girl, and two fictional men exploring their sexuality, one preferably played by Heath Ledger.

But there’s still the elephant in the room: that I am not a gay man. I’m not even a gay woman. I realize now that I’m a voyeur. Not in the Gay Telese’s The Voyeur Motel way—I have never made a peephole to watch unknowing women undress; I have never bought binoculars to catch my neighbors have sex. It makes me uncomfortable to even imagine overhearing a friend having sex. But that does not exempt me from my own greedy desire to watch. And specifically, to watch men kiss. I’m an outsider foaming at the mouth with my desire to observe, to co-opt. I ask myself: Is this appropriation? My horniness for Art and Patrick in Challengers? Why am I filled with an extra thrill when we see Patrick swiping on Tinder through both men and women? Why do I want so badly for him to be gay (or at least bi or pan) and, specifically, for him to be gay with Art?

It’s important to note that Challengers director Luca Guadagnino is an out-gay male director. It is, ultimately, a queer story by a queer filmmaker. But it does not escape me that the most tantalizing and literal selling point of the film is Zendaya-as-Tashi’s observation. The iconic poster, an image that will live with me for the rest of my days, is Tashi watching Art and Patrick literally reflected in her glasses. Where the story departs from something like Call Me By Your Name—Guadagnino’s 2017 film, which is also a gay romance, and also derailed my life in the most beautiful way at the time—is in Tashi’s observation, and ultimately her orchestration, and this is where I, in turn, feel seen.

Guadagnino is a queer male director, but Challengers is not told from the perspective of a gay (or straight) man. Sure, it flirts with the POV of Patrick and Art, watching them watching Tashi’s perfect, muscular legs in her tennis skirt. But isn’t the audience of Challengers watching less because we want Tashi, but because we want to be Tashi? And then we would use that Zendaya-Tashi magic to make Mike Faist and Josh O’Connor kiss in front of us? Art and Patrick are Tashi’s naughty paper dolls, her Draco and Harry, pushed together like two Ken dolls and finally made to kiss.

I don’t think it’s wrong for the movie Challengers to sell this specific fantasy, nor for me to buy what it’s selling. I also don’t think it’s wrong to feel titillated or moved deeply by love stories beyond our own orientation. In fact, I’d find it offensive to suggest otherwise. So after saying all that, why do I still worry it’s wrong to enjoy it so much? Some part of me suspects it comes from the fear that straight women like me need to place themselves at the center of every narrative, or that I can only relate to stories if I see myself directly in them. But I’m not convinced those things apply here. Maybe it’s just because I feel the need to understand why I like to watch to begin with.

I make my high school best friend, Tacy, read the pitch for this essay after we attend a mutual friend’s baby shower. She pauses, taking it seriously, then nods. Yes, she wants to read this essay, she says. Yes, she feels seen. “I think it has to do with the fact that at that age…” she starts, referring to us from middle school to high school. “At that age, you’re figuring out your sexuality, but there’s safety in romance, and sex that doesn’t involve you.” She’s so smart, I think. An expert in the field if ever I saw one, the former owner of a life-sized cardboard cutout of Legolas. Another of our high school friends also had a true-to-life Legolas cutout, and I can only assume we made the two of them kiss after a long night of eating jalapeño poppers and looking at Tumblr. We were not cool in high school.

“There’s also a sense of yearning,” she says. The return of my favorite word. “Because, especially in the early 2000s, gay male love stories felt so forbidden.” Tacy thinks, then thoughtfully clarifies. “When you’re a girl at that age, everything you want in terms of sex or romance feels new and a little bit taboo.” She’s right. It’s easy to see yourself in this forbidden, hidden love story of two gay men. Even if you’re not really any of those things.

Female sexuality or desire was not discussed at my high school nor in the media I was being served at the time. I would not wear a t-shirt that advertised that I personally wanted to have sex with Heath Ledger, only sharing that I thought it was cool if that happened with another man in a movie. Brokeback Mountain, as opposed to Challengers, is a film where the women are actively and intentionally shut out of the fantasy. If I’m so obsessed with stories where I can see myself, I wonder why I never really cared about Michelle Williams’ character, who presented an uncomfortable, more relatable version of myself—a mousy straight woman from the middle of nowhere who also wants to have sex with Heath Ledger and is left betrayed and sexually unsatisfied.

What does it say about female sexuality that of all my close female friends, none of us pined for Hermione, a fellow know-it-all with weird hair, to get absolutely railed by some hot, male wizard? It’s scary to place yourself in that fantasy as a teen girl, both literally and figuratively. There’s fear in being perceived as a sexual being, fear in what would happen if people knew about your desires, fear that those desires might put you in danger. I remember girls at my high school who had bad reputations, the kind of girls my parents might euphemistically call “fast” or “loose.” It wasn’t that my friends and I were less horny, less thirsty for adolescent love and attention. We just publicly cloaked it in the safety of boys, borrowing their privilege and often hiding behind it. And then, in turn, ignored our own privilege exerted over the actually gay or queer boys in our high school class. We could talk about boys kissing all we wanted, because there was no risk that we would ever be treated as badly as a gay teenage boy in smalltown Iowa in 2005. It was weird and bad, exhilarating and horny all at the same time—as most of being an adolescent is.

In Challengers, I see myself, as well as all the friends I forged in the trenches of Tumblr and FanFiction.net. At no point did I fear for Tashi’s safety in a romantic or sexual situation. She controls the fantasy that so fed my adolescent years; she’s everything I couldn’t allow myself to imagine in seventh grade listening to Semisonic. In fan fic terms, she is the queen of the self-insert.

Though in the brewery afterward, Spencer and I agreed that this fantasy the movie is selling is also where it falls short: it never delivers the throuple. There is not a threesome on screen despite the film’s advertising showing again and again Art, Patrick, and Zendaya’s Tashi on the hotel bed together. It disappointed us both that we don’t get to see the three of them, for lack of a better term, in action. I tell Tacy these complaints when we talk, and once again, she blows my mind. When I say I’m sad there’s no throuple, she says: “But Emily! There is.” As if she’s shaking my shoulders, eyes wide at my appalling ignorance. Did I not watch the movie? Did I not see that orgasmic shout from Tashi that ends the film? This is a threesome; it’s happening right there on the tennis court. I have missed the obvious, and I am thrilled. I think, again, that Tacy is smarter than me.

The film (spoiler) does not need to show the climactic threesome that, according to Guadagnino, follows the film’s final tennis match. Our imagination fills in the details. What my friends and I wanted, in middle school, in high school, as horny little goblins raised on the internet was, and is, to watch Zendaya watch them, and we’re more than happy to imagine it ourselves.

My favorite part of the film is the three-way kiss between all leads on a hotel bed, slobbery and complicated in its choreography. The scene morphs into something more exciting for both us and Tashi. A two-way kiss between just the boys. These two boys that will take the entire film to accept their real love, lust, and most importantly, yearning for each other. Tashi pulls away, lying back on the bed, looking as good as anyone has ever looked on film, to observe.

In this moment, more than the sexual fantasy, I see the fantasy of power. She doesn’t back away from her own desire and, in turn, her own orchestration. She knows she is the main character. As she leans back on the bed; the boys continue without her. I see more clearly than ever: there can be power in the watching.