Gayest thing on TV right now: High School Musical 2

Elementary school–aged children love High School Musical because they live in a world where, one day, when they're all grown up like the big kids, high school is going to be amazing: one dancing-on-the-cafeteria-tables production number after another. No swirlies. No beatings. Only complete acceptance of everyone’s unique selves and special talents, whether those skills be baking, singing, chemistry, cello, or propensity for wearing very gay hats. If things go wrong, they'll be righted by a musical number, hopefully one where the chorus goes, “We’re all in this together…something something…we're all stars, etc. Hey!” There, I just recapped the first movie for you in case you missed it. It’s a world where a movie like Heathers simply has no reason to exist.

Adult gays love High School Musical because they live in a world where, one day, when they invent a time machine, they will have the secondary-education experience they deserved to have, full of music so facile and dorky that it makes ordinary bubblegum pop sound like black metal, set in an environment so clean and sparkling and blazingly color-saturated it could cause cancer of the eyes.

When people talk about HSM, they talk about children—and sometimes the humming-along parents held hostage by those children. They don't talk about adults longing for something that never was. But that’s the secret weapon of this maddeningly addictive one-two punch of gleefully uncool TV movies: They know what you always wanted and never got, especially if you were a show tunes–starved homosexual.

I watched the first movie as homework. I wanted to know what this thing was that had turned my 10-year-old niece into a drooling karaoke-loving zombie. So one Saturday night, my partner and I sat down with dinner and TiVo and became unwitting victims. Somewhere around the part where the entire lunchroom exploded into a hundred teenagers spinning round tables and doing backflips while holding trays of food, I thought, This ain't so bad, really. And during the final number, where all wrongs were righted, all relationships healed, and all the cutest cast members paired up with members of the opposite sex (even that blond guy, who was the most gay-acting of all of them, especially since the official word is that all male cast members are 1000% heterosexual and possibly even—OMG!—dating female cast members), my partner said, “You know, I kind of love this.”