This was pro-life-landia, the white utopia of Billy Graham. In my Chicagoland hometown, 12 miles away from the ivory tower of social conservatism called Wheaton College (where college students still take vows of abstinence until marriage), even my public high school principal was an avowed evangelical who viewed public education as a “mission field.” There was no space in this world for “homosexual” kids. For fuck’s sake, Top was in the title, and the moral of the story was this: The cocksure American boyman’s enthusiasm can conquer any obstacle. All of the significant male characters went by nicknames, like hookup aliases. Tom Cruise’s Maverick and their leading glances, to the term flyboy itself, to the rule of two dudes to a cockpit at all times, to the pee-pee shaped jets firing pee-pee shaped missiles-everything about that movie seemed a celebration of the American penis. From the James Dean sunglasses popped on and off for peacocking effect to the tight white T’s, to the helmetless motorcycle riding, to the jet engines flexing their flame cones for takeoff, to the rivalry of Val Kilmer’s Iceman vs. For me, the movie was a series of homoerotic scenes building to climax. Despite watching it literally hundreds of times as a teen, I had no clue of this. I’m told Top Gun has a plot, that it’s about a fighter pilot striving to be the best aerial dogfighter at the elite Navy Fighter Weapons School in California.
