Overcompensating

Do we still need coming-out stories?

Overcompensating (Amazon Prime)

Nostalgia is funny. How can you ache for an era that was never yours? I didn’t have the “college experience,” nor was I butch enough to pass for a frat boy. But I was nostalgic watching Overcompensating, about a closeted jock. The title can be about the show itself; it’s compensating for media Queers were denied for so long. We never got a Gay American Pie.

Benito Skinner skims from all of his online personas to craft a surprisingly gentle and naive freshman, even borrowing the ’90s trope of 30-year-olds playing teens. It’s set in the early 2010s but feels Y2K and also modern. The fuzzy anachronism works, allowing the show to be a spoof with an emotional, earnest core about the lack of Queer stories and the damage of the closet.

I wish it were like ’90s network TV, when shows spanned a season to settle in, as sometimes it’s trying to be too many things. But I cut it some slack. Gays already tend to be hyper-critical of our shows and movies. We cannibalize our own media, preferring our stories be told in surrogates, usually sassy, sexy women. But there’s plenty of that here too, doting on its female leads and its love story about a fag and his hag.

Frankly, a show about a rich, closeted white boy with abs shouldn’t feel new in 2025, but it does. We just have to ask ourselves why we still need these coming-out stories. Overcompensating makes the question heartfelt and hilarious.

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How media shapes the way we see the world and ourselves, POST & Analog Cruising.