in defense of troy bolton's gaydar
Okay, remember this scene from High School Musical 2?
We all love to clown on this, right? Like, “Haha look, this lunkhead basketball man is too stupid to notice how obviously gay the obviously gay guy hanging out with his girlfriend is. He’s not a threat, dipshit! He’s much more likely to steal your best friend!”
I watched High School Musical 3: Senior Year for E Flat Minor Summer, and then like, I couldn’t not watch the other two. So I watched the second movie, and then the first. Experiencing the trilogy in reverse order is not something I’d recommend, but it can be enlightening. So enlightening that I accidentally began overthinking these films within an inch of their lives.
You’ve seen the High School Musicals, but in case you haven’t, they’re about a basketball player named Troy and a genius named Gabriella who meet by chance doing karaoke at a ski lodge, and then Gabriella transfers to Troy’s school just in time for winter musical auditions. The school (East High, home of the Wildcats) has a rigid social caste system, and before she can be totally subsumed by her fellow nerds, Gabriella impulsively auditions for the musical, and convinces Troy to do so with her. They’re offered a callback, which so catastrophically disrupts the natural order of things that Troy’s teammate, Chad; Gabriella’s new friend, Taylor; and reigning drama club co-presidents, twins Sharpay and Ryan, all try to sabotage their audition, force them back into their respective niches, and drive them apart. It almost works! But through the power of song, Troy and Gabriella are able to transcend cliques and teach their classmates that anyone can (and should) do musical theater! This is the basic plot of all three movies, because it takes a little longer for some characters to grasp the message than others. And the last to get it? Troy himself.
In High School Musical 2, the gang gets summer jobs at the country club Sharpay and Ryan’s parents own, and instead of a school musical, there’s a talent competition. Sharpay, having seen Troy’s potential, is now hellbent on making him her new singing partner. She entices him with her family’s connections at the nearby University of Albuquerque, where he’d ideally like to land a basketball scholarship. She gets him a club membership, then convinces the manager to gatekeep staff from the talent show. Troy is so focused on impressing the U of A that he starts neglecting his friends and Gabriella. His teammates go right back to dunking on him (get it?) like old times, except now he kind of deserves it. Gabriella dumps him and quits her job, which is what finally clues him in to the fact that he’s been an active participant in his own downfall; he’s not just Sharpay’s hapless victim. In the end, Sharpay is thwarted not by Troy, but by her own brother, who has undergone a redemption arc and joined the rest of the class in developing their talent show act. Troy learns their song at the last minute and duets with Gabriella, rekindling their relationship.
High School Musical 3: Senior Year finds the gang putting on a show about… themselves? Whatever, it works in context. There will be Juilliard scouts in the audience opening night, because Sharpay, Ryan, student composer Kelsi, and Troy are competing for a scholarship. Troy’s like, “Hello??? I didn’t apply for this?????” Gabriella, sensing drama on the horizon, escapes to an admitted students summer program at Stanford. With prom, the musical, and graduation all imminent, Troy must pick a college, and convince Gabriella to come home so they can complete those milestones together.
Troy and Gabriella’s relationship is of particular fascination to me, because like, it’s not going to last, right? They are so very doomed. I mean, in High School Musical 3, they get a romantic duet called “Right Here, Right Now.” Because that’s the only time they actually work as a couple. In any of the movies. The second the moment ends, and they leave the scene, some thing or another is driving them apart. And their relationship just isn’t solid enough to weather that. All they have in common is musical theater and each other, and in the sequels, they have vastly different relationships to the former. Gabriella, what with her astronomical IQ, has internalized the franchise’s moral before the first movie is even over. For her, theater becomes just a fun hobby, a distraction from her studies, a way to bond with her boyfriend. For Troy, it’s one of two possible mutually-exclusive life paths. Or so he thinks. He spends the third movie waffling between attending the U of A on a basketball scholarship, and attending Juilliard on a theater scholarship. And then he chooses neither! Hooray! Troy reveals at graduation that he’ll be attending UC Berkeley, where he’s free to explore both options.
But why Berkeley specifically? Because Gabriella will be 32.7 miles away at Stanford. And in my opinion, it’s fucking bleak to posit that this relationship was Troy’s true calling, when we’ve just seen three movies’ worth of evidence that it’s not going to last. I can’t stop thinking about it. I would’ve sent that boy to community college.
See, it was fine to end the first film with Troy and Gabriella together, because it was a low-stakes, self-contained Disney Channel Original Movie. Until it wasn’t. It was so successful that Disney, correctly sensing a cash cow on the horizon, greenlit a sequel; then another when High School Musical 2 obliterated its predecessor’s viewership record. The third movie got a theatrical release, and a big dramatic [COLON] SENIOR YEAR just to make it crystal that this wasn’t your grandma’s High School Musical. No shit they had to raise the stakes. I actually must give huge props to the returning director-screenwriter duo of Kenny Ortega and Peter Barsocchini for not losing sight of who these characters were, even as they sang and danced out their feelings in increasingly elaborate set pieces.
So if you’re going to raise the stakes in each movie of your trilogy about high school upperclassmen, it’s a no-brainer to have them all freaking out about college. The specific problem here is that the Troy and Gabriella we’ve known for two films now probably wouldn’t (and shouldn’t?) survive as a couple beyond the realm of East High. Breaking them up would be a tragic ending, yes, but not a bad one, from a storytelling perspective. Unfortunately, these are Disney movies. I can’t imagine them greenlighting a Troy-Gabriella breakup. Probably the only studio note by this point would’ve been to keep them together. Can you imagine the fallout among middle schoolers across America in the event of a Troyella breakup? There would’ve been riots outside every Regal Cinemas. We would’ve been grilling Obama and McCain about their respective plans to address Troyella. And then there would’ve been discourse about how teenage girls were so vapid that they cared more about High School Musical than the financial crisis. It would’ve been so stupid.
Anyway. By making more of these movies, Ortega and Barsocchini accidentally pulled back the curtain on how fundamentally broken the focal couple is. Unless Troy manages to get it together.
Zac Efron imbues Troy with a distinct kind of madness that makes him more compelling than the average DCOM protagonist. You know that definition of insanity, falsely attributed to Einstein, about doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Since these movies are virtual carbon copies of each other, Troy’s chronic failure to internalize his own capacity to be multifaceted, while championing the same quality in his friends and girlfriend, is insane. This is why you root for the guy, even though the first two films of the trilogy are about how much he sucks. He may be a spineless class traitor, but he’s miserable and losing his mind the whole time! And he’s going to get over it in a really entertaining way that only makes sense to him.
So what the hell is wrong with Troy? Well, it’d be regressive to armchair diagnose a guy whose defining trait is his inability to cope with the fact that he contains multitudes. But every character contains multitudes. That’s kind of the point of the series. A jock can cook up a mean crème brûlée. A brainiac can break down on the dance floor. You can be both an athlete and a theater kid. Or a nerd and a theater kid. Or an asshole and a theater kid. Troy’s classmates have all taken solace in this realization by the end the second movie, (if not the first) but Troy’s identity is so fragile that he has a spectacular breakdown every time he has to contend with the multitudes he contains.
Troy - especially the Troy of the sequels - thinks in false dichotomies. He can’t do theater, he’s captain of the basketball team! He can’t live in the present, he has to plan for his future! My favorite thing about High School Musical 2 is that Troy learns absolutely the wrong lesson, and if you’ve seen the third movie, you know it’s going to bite him in the ass. He ditches his girlfriend and friends in an effort to get that U of A scholarship locked down, and then when everyone hates him for it, he’s like, “Fuck. I was so focused on college that I forgot to live in the moment.” But he takes it too far, and in High School Musical 3, he doesn’t want to think about college any more than he has to. What does he sing about during the first half of the movie? The championship basketball game! Prom! Prom again! Living in the moment with Gabriella! Twice! When it comes to college, he’s paralyzed by indecision, because he’s already seen how prioritizing basketball has hurt his relationship, and how prioritizing theater has hurt his friendships. He’s about to graduate, and he’s afraid to do anything. But he has to do something, because he’s about to graduate! And he can’t use Gabriella as a deciding factor, like he usually does, because she’s committed to Stanford. He has to make a choice completely on his own. Hence, “Scream.”
When you watch “Scream”, you’re like, “Well, this is the best song in the movie! Perhaps the entire franchise! Theater is surely Troy’s calling. He should go to Juilliard so he can begin turning in Glenn Howerton-level performances posthaste.” Whereas, when you see Gabriella’s preceding solo number, “Walk Away”, you’re like, “…So Stanford, huh!” (Gabriella’s not untalented or anything - she’ll absolutely shine as Rizzo when she has an unexpectedly light semester and auditions on a whim - but it won’t compel her to trespass and violate noise ordinances. Unfortunately. At worst she’ll get wistful, especially if Troy is in attendance, because High School Musical IS Grease. Sharpay even says as much in the second movie.) Anyway, the lesson Troy needs to learn is not that he should do theater exclusively, but that he can do many things! He doesn’t have to choose! And then the movie immediately undermines that point by sending Troy to Berkeley, because he really did have to choose something: Gabriella.
Gabriella has zero qualms about leading a double life beyond the first movie. A smart girl doing musical theater is simply not going to attract the same scrutiny as a sports boy doing musical theater, and I think it’s good that Ortega and Barsocchini realized it would be silly to imply otherwise. But as a result, Gabriella kind of has nothing to do in the sequels. Her angst is all tied directly to Troy and his existential crises, and I don’t love that from a feminist perspective. In High School Musical 3, she is not forced to choose between nerd school and theater school; it was always going to be nerd school. (Which - can I just say? - I do not find congruous with the Gabriella of the first movie. By her own admission, she “[doesn’t] want to be the school’s freaky genius girl again.” But hey, Stanford is Stanford, I guess.) Anyway, that’s why she gets to sing a catchy, gospel-infused little number about skipping town; meanwhile, Troy is breaking into the high school at night during a thunderstorm and Inceptioning the hallways just because Juilliard offered him a scholarship.
Again, I like that Troy rejects the basketball-theater false dichotomy, but I doubt Gabriella is his destiny, either. For one thing, she’s a human person. Without her, Troy straight-up goes insane, and I think if Gabriella had witnessed “Bet On It” or “Scream”, she would’ve been too spooked to rekindle the relationship. Best case scenario, she would’ve found him a therapist before she bounced. (And no, it would not occur to either of them that she also needs a therapist.)
Troy and Gabriella share a fatal flaw: avoidance. This is why they’re so compatible, yet so doomed. At the first sign of conflict, Gabriella will ghost Troy, and then sing a ballad to internally justify it. (In fairness, it’s his fault 67% of the time.) And Troy, who is not privy to this internal justification, will be like, “WHAT ABOUT US? WHAT ABOUT EVERYTHING WE’VE BEEN THROUGH?” Troy’s avoidance is a little different. He actually clings to his relationship with Gabriella, using it as an excuse to shut out every other stressor in his life. But he can’t avoid his way out of overcoming his avoidant tendencies! And they’re never going to be able to fix their relationship, because that would probably require them to have a serious discussion, and Gabriella’s going to flee before it can even happen! So doomed! They’re two sides of the same doomed, avoidant coin, except Gabriella avoids conflict, and Troy avoids himself.
The rest of the East High student body is incognizant of the relationship’s eventual, inevitable demise, because friends and foes; jocks, nerds, and theater kids alike, are constantly trying to break them up. Sharpay, to her credit, has no pretenses about the self-serving nature of her actions. She sabotages Troy and Gabriella because she knows they’re stronger and better at performing together, so she and her brother are in danger of losing roles to them. If the musical doesn’t work out, Troy and Gabriella can fall back on basketball and academia respectively, whereas theater is all Sharpay and Ryan have. Plus they’re rich! They’ve never lost out on anything before!
I want to talk about Chad and Taylor for a second. Let’s do a Chad and Taylor interlude. So Chad is Troy’s lifelong best friend and basketball teammate, and Taylor is the first friend Gabriella makes when she transfers to East High. These friendships have totally different foundations, and therefore should have totally different stakes, but as soon as Troy and Gabriella break the mold, Chad and Taylor are equally determined to reset the social order. Taylor’s basically like, “Never thought I’d die fighting side-by-side with a jock,” and Chad’s like, “What about side-by-side with a boyfriend?” and then they become a couple, based on nothing but their mutual love of sabotaging their friends’ happiness. Thought experiment: are they doomed?
Well, here’s another question. You don’t need me, or even Kenny Ortega, to tell you Ryan is gay, but is he the only queer character in the trilogy? Widespread fan conjecture will tell you no, Chad is bisexual. The case for Bi Chad is neatly contained within High School Musical 2’s “I Don’t Dance”, wherein he loses a rather sexually charged argument to Ryan about the differences (or lack thereof) between sports and theater, and then they trade outfits because…? This video, which I love, goes further into it, positioning the entire series as an extended coming out metaphor. I definitely agree that theater could represent a sexuality crisis for Chad, but not necessarily for the rest of the cast. The textual purpose of “I Don’t Dance” is to teach Chad, the last jock standing, that athletes can do theater, goddammit. They may as well have had the rest of the cast singing, “DID YOU WATCH? THE FIRST MOVIE?” from the bleachers. The queer subtext is simply a gift from the gods that I shan’t question.
“But if Troy’s gaydar is so functional,” you may be asking, because this post was about Troy’s gaydar at one point, “why doesn’t he know that his lifelong best friend is bi?” Because said lifelong best friend doesn’t know it either, until this one musical number for which Troy is not present! He has a lot going on in the second movie, okay? He has to scrimmage with those toxically masculine basketball players from the University of Albuquerque, so that he can later have a breakdown of biblical proportions about it on the golf course! Obviously!
Anyway, if Chad is bi, assuming he doesn’t run away with Ryan, he can still date Taylor. Not doomed! Unless…
Allow me to undermine my own personal gaydar, because it took me until this 2024 revisiting of the series to be like, “Wait, is Taylor in love with Gabriella?”
Like, you can see why a closeted bisexual jock like Chad might drastically overreact to his teammate/closest friend’s foray into musical theater, but what the fuck is Taylor’s problem? She meets Gabriella. She finds out Gabriella is smart. She recruits Gabriella to compete in the upcoming scholastic decathlon. Gabriella auditions for the school musical with her boyfriend, whom she met before Taylor. Taylor is so alarmed by this that she’s immediately willing to work with her sworn enemies - the jocks - to sabotage Troy and Gabriella’s callback audition. Why? She hates Sharpay just as much as anyone; why shouldn’t she want Troy and Gabriella to best her on her own turf? Yet, in all three movies, (because they’re all the same) Taylor is like, “HMM, TROY SURE SEEMS LIKE THE WORST. MAYBE YOU SHOULD GHOST HIM.” And then Gabriella does it, because ghosting Troy is her favorite thing in the world! I rest my case. Why did this take me so long to pick up on?? Jesus Christ. I gotta get my head in the gay.
Lesbian Taylor is as compelling as Bi Chad; possibly even more so, since she never gets to explore her sexual orientation metaphorically through song. She doesn’t get to explore anything through song! #LetTaylorExploreSomethingThroughSong. It doesn’t even have to be lesbianism; she can just self-reflect on what drives her to adhere so rigidly to the established social hierarchy at East High, and panic when her brand new friend that she’s known for like, three days, refuses to do the same. But that’s so gay, though! Maybe she and Chad are doomed!
Anyway, if that’s the case, Troy’s gaydar? I’m still comfortable saying it works. He barely knows Taylor. It took eighteen years (Jesus) for this to occur to me, an actual gay person. There is simply not enough room in Troy’s stress-addled brain for the idea that his girlfriend’s best friend might be a lesbian. I’m not even confident he knows Taylor’s name.
But if Troy, the owner of eyes and ears, supposedly perceives Ryan - Ryan - as a threat to his relationship, there must be something else going on there. To prove the functionality of Troy’s gaydar beyond a reasonable doubt, we must find another explanation for why he might’ve had such a Real Housewivesesque reaction to Gabriella and Ryan’s friendship.
Like I said, 67% of these movies are about how Troy sucks, and then learns not to suck in whichever particular regard he has sucked for the majority of the runtime. In High School Musical, he learns not let his friends dictate his life, and not to disparage his girlfriend in their presence, because they might point an extremely obvious webcam at him and livestream it to her. (I do believe Troy has a working gaydar, but I don’t believe he knows what a webcam is.) And in High School Musical 2, he learns not to neglect his friends and girlfriend just because Sharpay dangles a basketball scholarship in front of him.
Speaking of Sharpay, it’s finally time to talk about Sharpay! I love Sharpay! You love Sharpay! Sharpay is a perfect character! And she kind of mirrors Troy. She’s his Wario. Like Troy, she has the exact same character arc in each movie, failing to retain whatever she learned last time. “You are so dedicated,” she tells him in the first film, “just like me.” This is why she spends High School Musical 2 ditching her comparatively low-key twin brother for the equally high-strung Troy at the slightest provocation. They learn the same lesson about the dangers of sidelining your closest friends. In the third movie, they each get a protege who nearly upstages them in the spring musical. Then, when neither of them winds up at the college they anticipated, Sharpay reveals she’ll be attending Troy’s former dream school. Every interaction between them is extremely uncomfortable, which I always assumed was supposed to be one-sided sexual tension on Sharpay’s end, but now I think it’s some twin flame shit. Troy does not like Sharpay because she interferes with his personal life and is mean to his loved ones. But could it also be that she reminds him too much of himself? His favorite person to avoid?
Sharpay is also Ryan’s literal evil twin. He is kind, mild-mannered, and confident; she is conniving, histrionic, and insecure. (AND WE STAN.) Ryan has internalized the franchise’s moral by the end of High School Musical 2, but Sharpay needs another movie and an evil doppelgänger to really figure it out. So if Ryan is Sharpay’s foil, and Sharpay is Troy, then Ryan is also Troy’s foil.
Throughout the series, not once does Ryan depart from his niche. He’s a theater kid. He turns his sole sports experience into performance art. He knows who he is, he just needs to learn not to let Sharpay boss him around. Once he’s out from under her thumb, he choreographs an entire musical on his own and is rewarded with a Juilliard scholarship. Ryan starts and ends the series as the most self-actualized of the six main characters. Troy, the least.
So in that scene I showed you a million years ago, where Troy gets pissy because Gabriella has the audacity to hang out with Ryan in his absence, I don’t think Troy sees a romantic rival. On the surface, he sees one of his enemies from the prior film infiltrating his friend group, but beyond that, he sees his antithesis. He sees a guy who knows exactly what he’s going to do with his life, who’s rich, whose biggest concern is winning a talent competition at the country club that his parents own. Who, most importantly, does not stress Gabriella out.
Troy stresses Gabriella out like, a lot. He doesn’t do it maliciously, or even really on purpose, but each of these movies has a Gabriella ballad about how she has to break up with him because the relationship isn’t worth the emotional turmoil. Troy is only present for one of those ballads, (he even participates in it) so he’s totally blindsided the other two times. This is what always gets him to finally plumb the depths of his own psyche, because without Gabriella, he can’t avoid it any longer.
What’s significant about High School Musicals 2, compared to its predecessor, is that Troy himself is the biggest stressor in Gabriella’s life. He is well aware of that, and he hates himself for it. He thinks he’s the worst guy in the entire world, which is not helped by the fact that he was absent for Ryan’s redemption arc. Without context, Troy extrapolates that he’s become such a shitty person that his friends would genuinely rather hang out with their old foe. And then when he realizes Ryan is actually super nice and friendly now - just a fellow victim of Sharpay - Troy pivots to hating himself for how easily manipulated he’s been. If Ryan can distance himself from his literal evil twin after 16+ years, why can’t Troy after just a few weeks? Because Ryan actually has a self to distance. Troy, as Chad says in the third movie, is “like, five different people.” He’s an incohesive collection of miscellaneous atoms labeled BASKETBALL and THEATER and GABRIELLA. He’s afraid of being something he’s not, but he doesn’t know what he is.
So there you have it. Troy is not jealous of Ryan’s nonexistent romantic tension with Gabriella, but of his self-actualization. Thus, I would confidently wager Troy’s gaydar is functional. Not the best ever, but it works. I probably should’ve been able to determine that without first extensively psychoanalyzing the entire guy, but where’s the fun in that?
In summation, Troy knows Ryan is gay. It might be the only thing he does know. That, and Gabriella’s mom makes the best brownies in the entire world. He’s had them!
Wow, what a definite conclusion I’ve come to. Thanks for reading, everybody! Happy Pride Month! This post is now ov-
Troy is the last to get it, right? He suffers the most, and the longest, for his inability to comprehend the High School Musical series’ overarching lesson that one need not confine oneself to a single extracurricular activity. But like, his classmates kind of end up confined to their original extracurricular activities. For example, all three characters with theater backgrounds - Sharpay, Ryan, and Kelsi - are content where they are. And I know that a franchise called High School Musical is obviously going to paint theater as the pinnacle of self-expression. The nerds can’t play basketball about their feelings, nor can the athletes take math tests. It’s just practical. But let’s ignore that. Who gets the coveted Juilliard scholarships at the end of the third movie? Ryan and Kelsi. Which is fine; Troy would’ve spontaneously combusted with angst if he’d been selected, and Sharpay is evil. Looking at this optimistically, Ryan and Kelsi get to live their dreams! But pessimistically, they are rewarded for sticking to the status quo. You know, the thing the first movie was specifically about not doing! Gabriella, ever the freaky genius girl, goes to Stanford. Taylor goes to Yale. Chad goes to the University of Albuquerque to play basketball. Sharpay also goes to the University of Albuquerque, but only because she didn’t get the Juilliard scholarship, and she’s going to help out with future East High musicals in her free time, anyway. And then she’s going to star in a spin-off movie about her journey to Broadway. It seems like everybody really was okay with their niche except Troy.
For all his anguish, Troy is, counterintuitively, the freest character in the series. In a world where exploring new things is the ultimate form of liberation, isn’t complacency with one’s original place in the social hierarchy kind of a prison? The High School Musicals pay lip service to the idea of nonconformity, but only practice what they preach in the case of Troy. Which is why it’s so tragic that he turns around and declares Gabriella his destiny instead. And it’s like, my guy!!! Your relationship is doomed. Your relationship is doomed because your significant other is uncomfortable with how much of your personal happiness you’ve put on her shoulders, just because she’s self-actualized and you’re not! And you think you can use the relationship to achieve self-actualization by proxy, but that’s not how it works! Why do you think the word self is in there? Gabriella’s not going to save you! If you’ve decided your destiny is a relationship, it has twice as much chance of failing, because there are two people involved!
All that to say, the inevitable reunion movie should be about Troy and Gabriella getting divorced. Or almost getting divorced, but then renewing their vows instead after the rest of the gang intervenes with the power of song. The cycle, the fundamental tragedy of High School Musical, can begin once more. This is not the start of something new. It’s the perpetuation of something broken.
Oh, and also, to vindicate me, Troy can have a throwaway line where he asks Ryan how his off-screen boyfriend is doing. Fin.