GLR January-February 2026

TELEVISION

The Best Little Boy on TV

F IFTY YEARS was a long time ago, but if Benito Skinner’s video series Overcompensating is any indica tion, the psychic lives of gay men in their twenties remain largely unchanged today. It was in 1973 that Andrew Tobias published The Best Little Boy in the World pseudonymously under the name John Reid.

ing freshman orientation, Carmen pegs Benny as the “valedictorian,” the “home coming king,” and the football player who once chased cheerleaders—check, check, and check—but her gaydar, as a college first-year, is still undeveloped. Scenes at the fictional Yates University were shot at the University of Toronto, incidentally, but

C OLIN C ARMAN

OVERCOMPENSATING Created by Benito Skinner Amazon Prime Video

not a lot of studying goes on there. “That was weird,” says Carmen after Benny kisses her in a Domino’s Pizza parking lot. When he finally comes out to her, she is so unfazed by the news that she teaches Benny a crash course in Gay Culture 101, from navigating Grindr lingo and pride to using “Sashay away” in a sentence. “I’m a fag hag now,” she tells an out gay classmate excitedly, adding: “Did you know that no one died at Stonewall? Crazy!” In the eight episode arc, the series improves exponentially with the arrival of pop star Charli XCX who, alongside actor Jonah Hill, also served as executive producer. That a Grammy winner like Charli XCX would play a college venue is absurd, but she does engage in a bit of self-parody. Benny’s older sister Grace is the stage manager, tasked with making sure Charli’s dressing room is stocked with all her favorites: tequila, hummus, and poppers. Other gags, in the wake of #MeToo, are generational and spot on. Grace’s boyfriend Peter paddles a jock-strapped Benny dur ing rush week. Amid chants of “Go Homo!” Benny begs for more: “Thank you, sir, you have my consent for another!” College is just the right setting for ceaseless striving, which takes us back to The Best Little Boy in the World. In a new in troduction to the memoir (written in 1998), journalist Andrew Sullivan wrote that he identified with what he termed the “ BLBITW ’s crushing superego ... emerging out of the same roots of self-fear.” All those awkward “fumbles with girls” and “ado lescent inanities that occupy everyone’s twenties” are magni fied because of our “overcompensating underpinnings.” In other words, to underperform as a heterosexual means the fledgling gay male must over perform in every other capacity. That’s a lot to process in a thirty-minute episode, but Overcompensating manages to update the dilemma of the BLBITW in the sometimes funny, sometimes stupid, format of the TV sitcom. Overcompensating is further proof that the BLBITW is alive and,well, not so well. During a visit to Benny’s home, Carmen observes: “This whole house is a shrine to you,” to which he replies: “No, it’s a shrine to the version of me that they’re proud of.” Finally conscious that he is not and never has been like other boys, Benny has checked all the boxes but one, which is the biggest of them all: Who am I versus what others want me to be? Or, in the words of Tobias (now nearing eighty): “But where?” Now that Amazon has greenlit a second season of Overcompensating , all the BLBITW ’s out there are asking that same question. Will the pattern keep repeating itself? Or will Benny cut the Gordian knot of twentysomething gay identity and liberate himself once and for all?

It remains the archetypal tale of the all-American gay boy striv ing to be the golden boy, the overachiever par excellence. “I grad uated from Yale. With honors, naturally,” writes Tobias. “I had been a moderate big shot on campus. The future was golden. Everyone told me I could write my own ticket. But where?” Skinner may know where. Discussing the success of his brainchild, he told CBS Mornings that he was “overcompensat ing for something pretty obvious” when he was an undergradu ate at Georgetown. “When I was thinking about writing this show, I thought, ‘So is the girl to my right and all the people around me.’... For me, it was obviously ‘I’m going to be straight,’ but the feeling is universal ... feeling like, ‘I’m not enough.’” As is the case with many Millennial wunderkinds, the

Benito Skinner and Rish Shah in Overcompensating .

32-year-old rose to fame via social media, specifically Insta gram. With the handle @bennydrama7—the seven is his uni form number from his Idaho high school—Skinner impersonated such figures as Drew Barrymore, Shawn Mendes, and Queer Eye ’s Antoni Porowski. With Overcompensating , Skinner is finally playing himself, or a version of himself—a heartthrob whose adoration for queer-coded culture (e.g., Glee and Britney Spears) puzzles his fellow frat brothers. The “girl to my right” likely inspired the character Carmen, a charismatic Latina from New Jersey who clings to Benny with hearts in her eyes. His Clark Kent jawline and perfectly hexagonal face certainly don’t hurt matters. Dur Colin Carman, PhD, assistant professor of English at Colorado Mesa Univ., contributed to The Bloomsbury Handbook of Queer Romanticism .

January–February 2026

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