Celebrating 300 episodes last month, the pair released a three-part, six-hour special counting down the 300 most important songs in “the great global songbook”. Random phrases become “rules of culture” and are repeated in unison, such as “movie magic is HUGE in Hollywood” and “there should be no straight art”. “Las Cultch”, as it’s affectionately known, is a show with its own language built in. Still, the pair still make time to (usually virtually) record Las Culturistas every week for the listeners (or readers, as their subscribers are called). Since moving to the west coast, it has been harder for Rogers and Yang to spend time together IRL. Getting to create this film with a majority queer cast and crew was an emotional experience for all involved. “Our community is so not monolithic – it’s very vast and it’s extremely diverse.” “There are still a lot of people out there who think ‘gay person’ and they see a very specific image in their mind and it’s an antiquated, whitewashed image of what a gay person is,” Rogers says. It was important to weave these nuanced aspects of gay culture into the film. “Something that’s also timeless, unfortunately, is being colonised in terms of your desires and being told your entire life: this is what you should want and this is what you should value,” he adds. The need for social mobility, the longing to be desired – these are timeless emotions. Here, the Austen comparisons become clear. In a pressure cooker environment like Fire Island, it’s inescapable. Rogers describes it as a “clear caste system that comes with having a lot of money, having a great body, being white”. “Race, masculinity, abs: just a few of the metrics we used to separate ourselves into upper and lower classes.” He may be ripped, but as an Asian man, he still feels invisible. “In our community, money isn’t the only form of currency,” Noah explains in the film’s opening minutes. Among all the sex jokes, Grindr hook-ups and partying (in one scene, Rogers’s Luke violently vomits in a vase), there are nuanced conversations around gentrification, as well as prejudices within the gay community. Upgraded to feature length, the idea was given room to really show what a queer romcom could do. No matter the size of the role, Rogers commands the screen, bringing a brightness and joy to every performance.
For Rogers, there have been appearances in Shrill, Awkwafina is Nora from Queens and Search Party, as well as voicing the excellently named character of Twink in Netflix’s LGBTQ+ animation series Q-Force. The pair co-host the podcast Las Culturistas, in which they discuss the highs and lows of pop culture, as well as their lives and careers, the latter of which has been on the up for both. It was here that he also met his long-time collaborator, Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang. In the end, Rogers came out while studying at NYU aged 19.
“I couldn’t ever say to anyone, ‘Hey, why don’t we go there for a day,’ because I think that would give me away.’” “I was always a little afraid of them and nervous about them,” Rogers says.
He was aware of Fire Island Pines and Cherry Grove – little pockets of the resort that had been a queer Mecca for decades. But Rogers knew this wasn’t the whole story. “JWoww from Jersey Shore was a bartender there, you know what I mean?” he tells me. Raised in nearby Long Island, the comedian and actor saw the area as a standard holiday resort, the kind of place you’d go with your family. When Matt Rogers was growing up, he had a lot of holidays on Fire Island.