The winner of PIFF’s Next Wave Award takes superficiality seriously
By Paul Sullivan
Joel Kim Booster was squatting on the corner of Carver and Bradford in Provincetown, wearing just a jockstrap. He held his phone to his ear. He had just been at the Gifford House’s underwear party, but the clock was about to strike midnight. He needed to be alone for this. It was Aug. 24, 2017, the world premiere of Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do.” The song dropped — and Booster was disappointed. Pitchy and petulant, it was an autotuned train wreck. “I just kept thinking, ‘Taylor, this is not my fault,’ ” he says. “ ‘I did not make you do this.’ ”
Booster wants the record to show— lest the Swiftie army come after him — that he’s come around to the song. “I would not categorize myself as a Taylor fan or a Taylor hater,” he says. “I’m the only person in the world who likes Taylor Swift the exact right amount.”
The song was meh, but that moment, Booster says, was special. People walked by Booster in his compromised position and saw him in the kind of underwear that makes you look more naked than if you were actually naked. “But no one batted an eye,” he says. “It felt so normal. That’s what I love about Provincetown.”
Booster is more of a Fire Island guy, though. In fact, he is the Fire Island guy. His 2022 comedy film Fire Island, which he wrote and starred in, was nominated for two Emmys and has been celebrated as a definitive portrait not just of that place but of what happens wherever gay men gather: the good, the bad, and the catty.
Booster is this year’s recipient of the Provincetown International Film Festival’s Next Wave Award and is one of the comedians featured in Outstanding: A Comedy Revolution, a documentary about the history of queer stand-up and the festival’s opening night film. “I’m humiliated when people call me a trailblazer,” Booster says. “The documentary is about people who actually blazed trails and made possible the freedom I have to act like an idiot.”
Booster was born in 1988 in Korea and was adopted at three months by a couple in Plainfield, Ill. When he came out to his parents at 16, they sent him to a mental institution. Upon his release, he slept on friends’ couches — his first experience with chosen family. He studied theater at Millikin University in Decatur, Ill. and, after graduation, moved to Chicago, where he began his stand-up career.
“I love stand-up because it’s one of the only true meritocracies,” Booster says. “People are either laughing, or they’re not. You can’t tell me I’m a diversity hire when I’m on stage crushing. People do not laugh because they’re woke. They laugh because you’re funny.”
A few years ago, during a visit to Fire Island, Booster cracked open Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It was uncanny, he says. Austen’s Hertfordshire, with its elaborate courtship rituals and punishing social hierarchies, was just like modern-day Fire Island. Booster set to work on a screenplay that modernized the novel for a generation of gay men who have spent adulthood burdened by student debt, their only relief the Instagram likes they amass for shirtless pictures of their perfect bodies.
Fire Island, like Pride and Prejudice, is biting. The film follows a group of down-on-their-luck friends, all gay men, who met waiting tables in Brooklyn. Booster plays Noah, the film’s Elizabeth Bennett, who analyzes the social customs of the gay party scene with surgical precision — and a bit of bitchiness. “In our community, money isn’t the only form of currency,” Noah says in the film’s opening voiceover. “Race, masculinity, abs — just a few of the metrics we use to separate ourselves into upper and lower classes.”
The film depicts gay vacation destinations not as escapes from the bigotry and violence of the heterosexual world but as hotbeds for reinventing prejudices in clever ways. The film works best as a chronicle of these internecine struggles. “I don’t know why we have this urge to discriminate within the group,” Booster says. “Getting a group of queer people together in a place — it’s a double-edged sword.”
Not even five minutes into the film, Booster takes off his shirt. His body is statuesque. Booster speaks ad nauseam — in his stand-up, in interviews — about his appearance. Being hot is a hard topic to make interesting (what could it be other than bragging?) but Booster applies the same intellect to his abs that Austen applied to ball gowns.
He discusses improving his body as “selling out to body fascism. I wanted to feel good about myself. So, I got hot. Suddenly, people who didn’t care whether I lived or died were being super nice to me. Now, I’m worried that people paying attention to me is contingent on me looking this way. Escaping the shackles of heteronormativity — only some of us are allowed to do that without judgment. Liberation has been made easier for some than for others.”
The movie’s pivotal moment happens in the bathroom at a Pines house party. The scene, Booster says, which features previous Next Wave Award winner Bowen Yang, is pulled from Booster and Yang’s real-life friendship.
“I’m really grateful to Bowen for allowing me to excavate so many of our tensions,” says Booster. Their mutual experience with racism, he says, does not mean they have the same take on wading through the politics of desirability. “Stop talking about this like we’re the same,” Yang’s character says, gesturing to their different body types. “Stop pretending like you don’t understand how the world works.”
This is the film’s bitter bravery. Fire Island makes plain that superficiality is an iron fist. Pettiness can be dictatorial in its governance of social relations. The saving grace, as with Austen’s Mr. Darcy, is in cutting past the surface.
“Maybe I was wrong,” Booster’s character says at the end of the film. “Maybe you’re not the idiot I thought you were.” This is Booster’s tempered version of redemption: that we are more than our judgments of one another.
