THE FULL SCREENPLAY

About two hours into a very long car ride to see Tegan and Sara in Portland, Maine, and one hour into the High School Musical 3 soundtrack, I turn to my friend Sam and say, “You know, when you think about it, Troy’s struggle in the first movie is really emblematic of what I feel like a lot of lesbians go through, like that thing, what’s it called-”

“The thing where Troy’s good at everything the way type A lesbians are when their parents pay a lot of attention to them and they want to distract from their sexualities. I read the article about that. It’s current. It’s potent.”

“And like,” I say, having vivid flashbacks to being nine and seeing a three-quarters profile of Zac Efron in the white jersey and thinking he was an attractive short-haired woman and feeling Weird about it, “and like. How the whole thing with him and Gabriella is about how the world sees them in a way that’s different than who they are-”

“Because of compulsory heterosexuality, yeah. Because they’re lesbians. Is Chad bi in this scenario still?”

“Chad is obviously still bi. But I feel like the first movie becomes a Chasing Amy situation for him.”

“That’s so unfortunate.”

“It all works out. Also, When There Was Me and You becomes a lot more emotionally harrowing if it’s Gabriella mourning the loss of her first real lesbian relationship-”

“Are you talking about your lesbian High School Musical thing again?” (Not me or Sam, but my other friend Sophie who I thought was asleep in the backseat.)

4 months and a lot of transcribing later, here we are.

(POSTSCRIPT: There is no publicly sourced High School Musical script available on the internet so please appreciate that this transcription was done almost entirely by me, Hannah, over the course of a week.)