Meet the Straight Boys Going Gay for Zendaya

Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers is the rare film that features an actual love triangle, as in a three-sided figure with all points connected; most others that pretend to this setup are really tracing a love vertex, in which one central point connects to two others that do not. In the new pas de trois setting silver screens and social media feeds ablaze with the raw charge of attraction, tennis aces Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) battle it out on the court not just for trophies and bragging rights, but for the regard of their mutual crush object, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya). And yet, for all their competition, something—maybe the phallic churros waggled in each other’s faces, maybe the phallic Coke bottle Patrick idly grazes against his lips, maybe the literal phallus Patrick shows off to Art during a sesh in the steam room—suggests a roiling homoerotic tension between Tashi’s two “little white boys.”

Challengers operates under the logic of porn, wherein everything is made to sound like innuendo-laden foreplay to the main event—in this case, athletics rather than intercourse. But are the boys both using Tashi to launder their desire for one another? Or do the three of them comprise a discrete unit, Tashi’s presence essential to an equation with fragile balance? Is this all a game to them?

As with anything else, inquiring minds are best served by turning to Reddit for answers. The approximate dynamic of Challengers plays itself out every day on the subreddit r/gayforcelebs, where posters construct and engage in scenarios riffing on a theme: two men join in sexual activity at the behest of, to earn the approval of, or simply while imagining a female celebrity. (At the risk of stating the obvious, be forewarned that the links contained in this essay will send you into NSFW territory.) The board currently boasts almost 58,000 subscribers, with a wide variety of approaches and wants under the umbrella of this specific kink. And while the upvotes on a popular post usually hit a ceiling around the mid-three figures, they also rack up a higher average of comments than seen on some more heavily-trafficked boards. Transatlantic offshoot r/gayforcelebsUK has only 3,500 readers, but the fact of its existence says something about the prevalence of the original board.

Read more at The Daily Beast.