‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ : a personal take on how Kevin Smith’s film affected a 12-year-old queer kid’s coming-of-age

Chasing Amy, the third film from actor, comedian, and writer  Kevin Smith was considered a critical and commercial success in 1997.  The film is about a male comic artist (Ben Affleck) who falls in love with a woman (Joey Lauren Adams), to the displeasure of his best friend (Jason Lee). Intriguing as it was, it didn’t sit well with everyone in the queer community 

Judith Kegan Gardiner in the book Masculinity Studies and Feminist Theory, described Chasing Amy as representative of a “fairly repulsive genre of films” that features a “heterosexual conversion narrative” that is “set in motion by the desire of a heterosexual person for a seemingly unattainable gay person.”  On the other hand (heterosexual) Quentin Tarantino considered Chasing Amy his favorite movie of 1997!!

Now queer filmmaker Sav Rodgers has made an intriguing about how Chasing Amy affected him as 12-year-old boy in Kansas coming of age and to terms with his own identity.    In “Chasing Chasing Amy”  Rodgers is more than aware of how Smith’s film had such a polarizing effect on the queer community at large, but he claims it was a real-life raft for him. As he examines the film and its making as a cornerstone of LGBTQ+ cinema, Rodgers finds himself at a complicated crossroads. 

 As the film heads off to Tribeca for its upcoming world premiere Rodgers said “This movie that saved my life also holds a controversial history in the queer film canon. I hope Chasing Chasing Amy and its making shows that things can be complicated, as can people, and the relationship we have with the movies we grow up with can be that, too.”