Hope My Boyfriend Don't Mind It: Tamara (Jeremy Haft, 2005)

Jude Doyle -

Before you luxuriate in the toxic sexual ooze of the 2000s, book announcements:

Be Not Afraid #2, the second issue of my horror comic series with Lisandro Estherren, comes out on July 17. If you're on the fence, you can see a preview of it here and read some reviews of the first issue, which people actually liked for some reason.

Also: My non-fiction book DILF: Did I Leave Feminism is due out October 14. You can pre-order that anywhere you get books. The best way to support your local bookshop is to use Bookshop.org.

It’s important for you to know, up front, that I do not have any sort of endorsement deals or brand partnerships for this newsletter. The reason it’s important for you to know this is that, lately, this has been less of a “newsletter” than it has been a long-form advertisement for the streaming platform Tubi. 

Here’s the deal: I have seen a lot of movies in my lifetime. I have subscriptions to multiple streaming platforms, each with their own array of content that is both (a) recent and (b) usually okay. Every night, when I get up on the treadmill or down on the couch, I ask myself what do I want to watch tonight? And every night, without fail, I skip all of the options made available to me by all of those streaming platforms, and I watch one of the several thousand long-forgotten direct-to-video horror flops available for free on Tubi. 

There is a vast archive of low-budget and nigh-unwatchable horror content on this platform — every decade, every style, every country of origin — with the one constant being that all of it somehow stars Eliza Dushku. Even on the rare occasion that a movie doesn’t star Eliza Dushku, you feel as if she were present, or at least involved. She hovers over all of it, the patron Goddess of the direct-to-video arts. 

So it is with the necessary offerings and propitiations to the genius loci of Tubi dot com, the great and powerful spirit of Eliza Dushku, that I present to you this, the Pride edition of Things Jude Found On Tubi: Tamara, a movie in which a Wiccan nerd punishes her bullies by making them have hot gay sex. 

Surely there must be more to Tamara than this, you say, and to this I answer: Not really! But it’s going to be a short newsletter unless I expand on it, so let’s try.