Joel Kim Booster knows that what he’s going through right now may never happen again. The 34-year-old comedian is currently in the eye of a pop culture tornado. Just weeks after the buzzy release of Fire Island, the acclaimed film which he wrote and starred in, his first major Netflix stand-up special, Psychosexual, was released on Tuesday. And on Friday Apple TV+ will premiere Loot, a new show starring Booster and Maya Rudolph. June has undoubtedly been the biggest month of his career.
And throughout this month, which happens to be Pride, people keep telling him how much they love Fire Island and its delightful, somewhat improbable adaptation-of-sorts of Pride and Prejudice. Booster reconfigured the Jane Austen classic into a party romp-romcom about a pair of gay Asian-American men (played by Booster and his real-life friend, the Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang) and their larger queer chosen family as they vacation on the titular islet that has historically been a haven for a certain wealthier, whiter subset of gay men. But there are also a few people here and there who in these same public spaces tell him that they decidedly did not like the movie. “It’s a combination of a sort of gay familiarity with each other, and also alcohol,” Booster says.
