[Pride 2020] Outside Of Laramie: Joy Ride (2001) As Gay Panic Horror

As far back as I can remember, I’ve always loved road horror movies. It seems to me to be the most quintessentially American horror genre, our obsession with manifest destiny and westward expansion come back to haunt us, to punish us for thinking we deserve to drive at will across vast expanses of barren desert, to speed toward the ever-distant horizon in our gas-guzzling automobiles, without a care in the world. Who do we think we are? What hubris.

And yet… I’ve never taken a cross-country road trip, even though I’ve always wanted to. As much folly horror movies suggest with road trips, there is something romantic about the idea. Something elementally persuasive about spending a few weeks on the open road, experiencing the country from its interstate highways and exploring the network of society that built itself up around the roads. When I was little, my family lived in Indiana for a year. We used to drive back and forth to New York to visit family, and those cramped 12-hour minivan rides were a horror all their own, so perhaps I’ve always felt a pull to do it right this time, just me and a friend or two, setting our own pace, taking our time, seeing the sights instead of focusing on the destination.

After a few months of prideful ignorance from backwards neighbors, we moved back to the eastern side of Pennsylvania, closer to the safety of life on the coasts. Indiana lived on in my memory as a haze of unhappiness; a yearlong experiment in a way of life my family wanted no part of. And then, as I grew up and realized I was gay, the middle of the country — those wide-open, mostly-unpopulated states where the road-horror movies are set — took on a new sheen of danger. I am white, so I recognize that my privilege would likely afford me an easier time than queer people of color; still, in certain parts of the country I feel tremendous pressure to pass as straight and nonthreatening, still require an effacing of self I’m not comfortable with the older I get.

So now I’m obsessed with perversions of Americana, of familiar and comforting iconography like gas stations, diners, convenience stores, and neon-lit motel signs made to seem horrifying and strange. This subgenre still stands in the long shadow of the Bates Motel from Psycho. It winds its way through the battle between two different kinds of nuclear families in The Hills Have Eyes, and we see it every time a car full of college kids is warned out of the area by a grizzled old creep at a fuel pump, from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to Cabin in the Woods. My favorite in the genre, though, is 2001’s Joy Ride, which confirms everything I’ve ever feared about how people like me might be treated were I to step out of line while traveling through the heartland.

Joy Ride tells the story of Lewis (Paul Walker), a college freshman who buys a car so he can travel to Colorado to pick up his hometown crush Venna (Leelee Sobieski), planning to drive back to New Jersey together. Along the way, he calls his mother, who asks him to swing a few hundred miles out of his way to bail his older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn) out of jail. By way of thanks, the prank-happy Fuller has a CB radio installed in Lewis’s car. Before long, on the way to Colorado, they start messing with local truckers over the radio.

Fuller cajoles his younger brother, who clearly always idolized him, into putting on a woman’s voice over the radio and pretending to be a female trucker named “Candy Cane.” Paul Walker adopts a high-pitched, seductive lilt that sounds more like Patrick Swayze in To Wong Foo than what you’d expect a female trucker to sound like, and passing the microphone back and forth, the brothers act out a plan between “Candy Cane” and “Black Sheep” to meet up at a motel that night. It’s a strange scene, effectively a seduction between brothers for the benefit of anyone who might be listening.

A moment later, a voice crackles over the radio. This is Rusty Nail, a lonely trucker who liked Candy Cane’s voice and wants to try his hand at seducing her for himself. Lewis goes along with it, play-acting a sexually-frustrated woman giving in to the trucker’s phone-sex fantasy, like what Fuller says, “you’d do in a chatroom.” It’s, again, uncomfortably sexual, but this time our discomfort comes from fearing what the trucker might do when he finds out he’s been getting aroused by a man.

Unfortunately, they get out of CB range before Lewis can admit to being a man, so they think that’s the end of that...until, that night, they pull over at a roadside motel. Fuller heads inside to secure a room, and Lewis is left in the car, where the radio squelches back to life. “Candy Cane...come in, Candy Cane...”

When Fuller returns, he convinces Lewis to continue the charade, inviting Rusty Nail to meet Candy Cane at the motel. They direct the trucker to meet them in Room 17...the room next to where they’ve been assigned, which is currently occupied by a real asshole of a guy who body-checked Fuller on his way out of the motel lobby.

That night, right on schedule, the brothers listen as a truck pulls into the parking lot. A hulking form skulks past their window, and they can hear a knock on the neighboring door. Ears pressed to the wall, the brothers listen as the occupant of the room argues with the trucker, and then a scuffle. A gasp. A thud. The next morning, the motel is crawling with police; the neighboring guest has been found face-down in the highway median, his jaw ripped clean off.

Spooked and run out of town, the brothers head for the Wyoming border. They make it as far as Laramie before the radio crackles to life again. “Candy Cane... anyone out there know Candy Cane?” It seems Rusty Nail has followed them from the motel, and the brothers are nearly out of gas. Lewis remembers he saw a sign for a gas station outside Laramie, so that’s where they head.

On October 6, 1998 — six months before the script for Joy Ride (then called Squelch) was finished — gay college student Matthew Shepard was lured into a truck by two men. At their trial, one of the men claimed that they had only intended to rob him for drug money, but when Shepard made a sexual advance toward them, they flew into a fit of murderous rage. They beat him, pistol-whipped him repeatedly, and then tied him to a remote fence post on the outskirts of Laramie, where they left him for dead. He passed away from his injuries several days later in the hospital. The case and resulting trial drew a frenzy of national media attention the following year, as Joy Ride was entering production, sparking a national debate about violent homophobia. Killer Aaron McKinney’s lawyer claimed a “gay panic” defense, a legal defense which alleges the perpetrator experienced “temporary insanity” caused by an unexpected homosexual advance, so put off by the thought that they were driven to kill.

Lewis and Fuller, too, have their first showdown with a truck driven by someone who intends to kill them at a fence post on the outskirts of Laramie. Having fled the gas station, the two are chased off-road by a man in an ice truck, finally coming to a stop at a fence in the middle of nowhere. The truck driver raps on the window...returning Lewis’s credit card, which he’d left behind at the gas station. Just as the brothers breathe a sigh of relief, an 18-wheeler slams through the smaller truck, and the chase is on. Rusty Nail has found them, and he wants to teach them a lesson.

Joy Ride, then, is not just a film about a murderous trucker who sets his sights on two brothers for the fun of it. It’s explicitly a film about a man so disgusted and ashamed at the idea that he was getting off to another man’s voice that he is literally driven to kill.

In Out in the Dark, director Bruce LaBruce (Otto or, Up with Dead People) says that he has a theory that all horror movies are on some level based on homosexual panic. I’m not sure about all horror — though I’d be open to the idea — but homosexual panic definitely simmers through the entirety of Joy Ride. It’s in setting the initial confrontation a few miles “outside of Laramie.” It’s running through the uncomfortable scene where Fuller puts on porn in the motel room while Lewis is asleep, talking to his passed-out brother about what he likes sexually before redirecting his affection onto the beautiful girl staying in the room next door. It’s certainly in the scene where Rusty Nail humiliates the brothers by forcing them walk naked into a truck-stop diner, as though the ultimate form of degradation is not just to be seen naked, but to be seen naked with another man.

And so when I watch Joy Ride, I’m torn between the film’s glorification of the open road — its gorgeous scenes playing out the romance of crossing the desert “just us and the windshield” — and its confirmation of everything I fear about certain people in certain places in the middle of the country. That’s why I watch horror. It’s a safe way to confront the liminal spaces, the in-betweens, the grey areas where I might not be welcome, and to emerge on the other side unharmed…but not necessarily unchanged.