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The More You Think About One Night Only, The Harder It Is to Believe Gay People Would Be OK
Дата публикации: 11-08-2026 21:36:32


Written down on paper, the world of One Night Only is a harrowing one. A conservative government and an opportunistic tech industry have colluded to implant mandatory biochips in people’s wrists that surveil their sexual activity, with carceral consequences for anyone who does the deed outside of marriage — except for a single night of the year when all bets are off. It’s the sort of premise that could make for a great 1984-style thriller with a forbidden love story — but instead Easy A director Will Gluck presents it as a sort of mildly zany social backdrop for an otherwise breezy, aughties-style romantic comedy.If you ignore the political implications, this movie is actually quite fun, as Them contributor Mathew Rodriguez and I found out together on its opening weekend. Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro play two unlucky singles who keep bumping into each other throughout an After Hours-style series of misadventures on the one night a year when they can legally have sex. The leads have genuine chemistry, the situational comedy is amusing, and there’s even some laugh-out-loud-funny parodies of pharmaceutical company pop song rewrites (think: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!”). But ignoring the political implications is, well, impossible. Indeed, the suspension of disbelief requires a level of effort on par with not having sex 364 days a year.As a queer and transgender person who loves movies, I had a great time watching One Night Only. I also could not stop thinking about the fate of my people in this universe. The film tries to hand-wave away all matters LGBTQ+ via a side character — gay best friend Arya, played by Quintessa Swindell — who says something to the effect of, “We’ve been skirting around straight people’s laws since before the Bible.” But if that were the case, why wouldn’t horny heterosexuals use the same workarounds? And why do so many group shots of bars and events include same-sex couples pawing at each other with total desperation? Are those just the gays who are really into respectability politics?As many observers have pointed out by now, the key sticking point is even grimmer. Realistically speaking, there’s no universe in which conservatives implant sex-regulating biochips into people’s bodies that doesn’t also include bans on queer intimacy. I know this is supposed to be a “fun” fantasy premise, but in the real world — where right-wing legislators are dreaming about overturning same-sex marriage and trying to make genital exams mandatory for school sports — it strains credulity that queer people are just … somehow not being specifically being targeted by Monica Barbaro’s fictional president. If the so-called “Mandate” were real, there’d be at least 20 states where you’d go to jail for holding hands with someone of the same gender.Look, imposing actual logic onto a movie like this is a fool’s errand. And at some point, you’re ruining your own enjoyment to scrutinize it too closely. But on the other hand, if you’re going to go out of your way to engage in some high-concept social commentary in a rom-com, the internal logic kind of does need to feel somewhat feasible, if a little heightened. And that’s where One Night Only lands in a weird place: The movie takes pains to feel quite grounded, with real-world filming locations all across New York and little touches — like “Repeal” signs in store windows — that make it seem like we’re supposed to actually recognize this as a possible scenario not all that far removed from our current timeline. And while it’s sadly not all that wild to accept a government trying to impose puritanical mores onto a pliant population, it is difficult to believe that they wouldn’t exact special harm on LGBTQ+ people. Like, I’ve been alive for a few decades now. I know how this goes.And I suspect the people who made this film know that’s the case, too! The fictional talking head who explains the government’s position on a cable news show is named Josh Holloway — a somewhat pointed nod to famously anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaker Josh Hawley. If the senior senator from Missouri ever got his hands on biochipping technology, I doubt he’d let the gays live and let live. No, we’d probably be zapped for thinking queer thoughts and forced into temporary comas for taking cross-sex hormones. God forbid our chipped wrists go limp! Scary thoughts like those make the whole project of One Night Only quite dire — and yet it somehow manages to be one of the better theatrical comedies I’ve seen in a minute. And maybe that makes it an oddly fitting movie for Trump 2.0: One Night Only doesn’t let me fully escape our current nightmare, but it is fun to laugh at the words “plaque psoriasis” sung to the tune of ”Brave” by Sara Bareilles.Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s newsletters.

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Written down on paper, the world of One Night Only is a harrowing one. A conservative government and an opportunistic tech industry have colluded to implant mandatory biochips in people’s wrists that surveil their sexual activity, with carceral consequences for anyone who does the deed outside of marriage — except for a single night of the year when all bets are off. It’s the sort of premise that could make for a great 1984-style thriller with a forbidden love story — but instead Easy A director Will Gluck presents it as a sort of mildly zany social backdrop for an otherwise breezy, aughties-style romantic comedy.

If you ignore the political implications, this movie is actually quite fun, as Them contributor Mathew Rodriguez and I found out together on its opening weekend. Callum Turner and Monica Barbaro play two unlucky singles who keep bumping into each other throughout an After Hours-style series of misadventures on the one night a year when they can legally have sex. The leads have genuine chemistry, the situational comedy is amusing, and there’s even some laugh-out-loud-funny parodies of pharmaceutical company pop song rewrites (think: “Oh, oh, oh, Ozempic!”). But ignoring the political implications is, well, impossible. Indeed, the suspension of disbelief requires a level of effort on par with not having sex 364 days a year.

As a queer and transgender person who loves movies, I had a great time watching One Night Only. I also could not stop thinking about the fate of my people in this universe. The film tries to hand-wave away all matters LGBTQ+ via a side character — gay best friend Arya, played by Quintessa Swindell — who says something to the effect of, “We’ve been skirting around straight people’s laws since before the Bible.” But if that were the case, why wouldn’t horny heterosexuals use the same workarounds? And why do so many group shots of bars and events include same-sex couples pawing at each other with total desperation? Are those just the gays who are really into respectability politics?

As many observers have pointed out by now, the key sticking point is even grimmer. Realistically speaking, there’s no universe in which conservatives implant sex-regulating biochips into people’s bodies that doesn’t also include bans on queer intimacy. I know this is supposed to be a “fun” fantasy premise, but in the real world — where right-wing legislators are dreaming about overturning same-sex marriage and trying to make genital exams mandatory for school sports — it strains credulity that queer people are just … somehow not being specifically being targeted by Monica Barbaro’s fictional president. If the so-called “Mandate” were real, there’d be at least 20 states where you’d go to jail for holding hands with someone of the same gender.

Look, imposing actual logic onto a movie like this is a fool’s errand. And at some point, you’re ruining your own enjoyment to scrutinize it too closely. But on the other hand, if you’re going to go out of your way to engage in some high-concept social commentary in a rom-com, the internal logic kind of does need to feel somewhat feasible, if a little heightened. And that’s where One Night Only lands in a weird place: The movie takes pains to feel quite grounded, with real-world filming locations all across New York and little touches — like “Repeal” signs in store windows — that make it seem like we’re supposed to actually recognize this as a possible scenario not all that far removed from our current timeline. And while it’s sadly not all that wild to accept a government trying to impose puritanical mores onto a pliant population, it is difficult to believe that they wouldn’t exact special harm on LGBTQ+ people. Like, I’ve been alive for a few decades now. I know how this goes.

And I suspect the people who made this film know that’s the case, too! The fictional talking head who explains the government’s position on a cable news show is named Josh Holloway — a somewhat pointed nod to famously anti-LGBTQ+ lawmaker Josh Hawley. If the senior senator from Missouri ever got his hands on biochipping technology, I doubt he’d let the gays live and let live. No, we’d probably be zapped for thinking queer thoughts and forced into temporary comas for taking cross-sex hormones. God forbid our chipped wrists go limp! Scary thoughts like those make the whole project of One Night Only quite dire — and yet it somehow manages to be one of the better theatrical comedies I’ve seen in a minute. And maybe that makes it an oddly fitting movie for Trump 2.0: One Night Only doesn’t let me fully escape our current nightmare, but it is fun to laugh at the words “plaque psoriasis” sung to the tune of ”Brave” by Sara Bareilles.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s newsletters.

Samantha Allen

Samantha Allen. Samantha Allen is the managing editor of Them. She is the author of Patricia Wants to Cuddle, the... Read more

Managing Editor

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