I Watched Jurassic Park (1993) For The First Time

I was unprepared for Jeff Goldblum as the original Aloof Butch Lesbian.

I recently watched Jurassic Park (1993) for the first time and was shocked to uncover my very own fossil tucked inside it: the first known major motion picture portrayal of a now-ubiquitous queer character — the Aloof Butch Lesbian. Like most of you, I assumed this leather-wearing, sunglass-bearing, swagger-daddy sprang fully formed onto our TVs in the form of Shane McCutcheon on The L Word (2004). Oh ho, but no! I was as wrong as an eccentric billionaire handing over complete control of his apex predator park to a financially compromised IT guy!

I did not watch Jurassic Park growing up because I was a very sensitive child and it took me two full years to recover from my original dinosaur trauma, The Land Before Time (1988). I did not watch Jurassic Park at sleepovers, years later, because I was a very gay teenager and preferred to spend my pajama time with my friends doing hair-brushing trains. I’ve seen bits and pieces of Jurassic Park over the years, in the form of GIFs and through the fingers of my hands covering my eyes. And my wife does growl, “RUN!” like Laura Dern, and croon, “Clever girl” at me like I’m a velociraptor at least once a week, so it’s not like I’m completely ignorant.

I was, however, wholly unprepared for Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Ian Malcolm, the original Aloof Butch Lesbian. I should have identified him right away. Looking like if James Dean got straight out of bed and let a helicopter style his hair, three-too-many buttons undone, all black everything, necklace down to his navel, absolutely radiating “I’m Bad For You” energy, pontificating existentially, grandstanding sarcasm, charismatic “uh” artfully placed between complements, literally got a doctorate in Chaos.

Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park is the poster Che Diaz has hanging in their closet. On Hinge talking about: “I don’t have the emotional stamina for intimacy, but I savor the unpredictability in complex systems.”

And you know what the real kick in the teeth is? It works! It works and even Steven Spielberg knows it works! Because there’s not a lot of time to think about sex when even the killer animal expert in a matching khaki short set and one of those Australian outback hats with the curled side-lip is getting munched on by grudge-holding theropods. But it’s Hollywood, right, so you gotta at least introduce the idea of sex. And do we lean on the goddess Laura Dern for that? The stunning and heroic main woman in the film? Like every other action movie on the face of the earth? Like even Twister? No! Steven Spielberg has Jeff Goldblum undo all his buttons and then props him up on a table like goddamn Princess Leia!

It doesn’t even matter that he literally said he was “married occasionally” less than three hours ago. It doesn’t matter that he’s a man-child. It doesn’t matter that he’s for sure biting his bottom lip in all of his Instagram selfies, posing in the exact same way every time, with his arm bent back behind his head so you can see the tattoo on his tricep, the hint that he’s scratching his own neck shyly. It doesn’t matter that he’s sending exactly two signals: anarchy and a profound need to be the little spoon. In fact, those signals are scrambling your brain in a shockingly arousing way that you will never be able to understand. And that is the Aloof Butch Lesbian.

She’ll lace your fingers together and spin an absolutely nonsensical metaphor and you’ll kiss her to shut her up even though you also kinda want to punch her in the guts. You won’t regret it and then you will regret it (thoroughly) and then she’ll wink at you on your wedding day to someone else and you’ll remember — oh so fondly — the time you almost got murdered together by a Tyrannosaurus rex. You’ll smile back and tip your champagne glass and nod your head. Your stomach will swoop and you’ll think, only to yourself, “My god, life really does find a way.”