Billy Eichner and “Fire Island” star Joel Kim Booster are on the cover of EW’s Pride Issue!

On the set of Entertainment Weekly’s 2022 Pride cover shoot, cover star, Billy Eichner, reflects on being surrounded by a queer photographer, crew, and journalist. “It makes for a more comfortable environment, you know? You don’t have to code-switch,” His fellow cover star, Joel Kim Booster, agrees: “It’s great working with so many queer people, because someone finally gets our references, I can talk about Cherry Jones and people understand who that is.”

This latest of our annual Pride covers is also a coming out party of sorts (pun intended) as Patrick Gomez steps into his new role as Editor in Chief/General Manager of Entertainment Weekly, a brand he says has been a part of his identity for decades. “Also part of my identity for decades is my pride as a gay man… though, like far too many, I struggled with accepting that part of myself for far too long,” explains Gomez in his first editor’s letter. “As we began brainstorming possible Pride cover stars — my first cover as EIC — it was clear it should be a celebration of pure, unabashed queer love.”

Booster, 34, stars in the Pride and Prejudice-inspired romantic-comedy Fire Island, hitting Hulu on June 3; and Eichner, 43, will headline the first gay rom-com ever released by a major studio when Universal’s Bros hits theaters Sept. 30. “Comedy is still largely a male heterosexual space, and both of us are used to navigating that for the majority of our careers, so this was a huge change of pace for me,” Booster says of Fire Island, which he also wrote. “It’s a change of pace for me too,” adds Eichner, who wrote his film with director Nicholas Stoller, who also formed the idea to create the movie. “The idea for Bros wouldn’t start with me, because I didn’t think it was realistic,” says Eichner. “Judd Apatow and Nick Stoller make big studio comedies, and they kept telling me, ‘We’re going to do this with Universal.’ And I said, ‘No. We’re not. You guys don’t get it. I’ve been gay for over 20 years in this business, and Universal’s not doing this movie.’ And then they did, and that was amazing because I had been convinced over the years that that just wasn’t possible.” When creating Fire Island, Booster’s main fear was that he’d be pushed to generalize the gay community. “Straight white guys do not get asked how their movies represent the entire straight white male experience. They just don’t. And it’s an expectation…. We take it seriously, but it also feels deeply challenging and a little unfair, honestly,” says Booster. “I’ll know that we’ve really made progress in this realm when we can release our movies and they aren’t brought up in the same sentence as one another.”

On the flip side, the feedback since releasing the trailers of these films have been heartwarming. “Honestly, it’s the gay Asian people that come up to me saying, ‘I’ve never felt seen in this way before on screen.’ The movie is very specifically about me and Bowen [Yang], but I think that it does translate to a lot of people who have similar experiences — and so if it’s touching that with those people, I think I’ve done my job, and I’m really proud of that,” explains Booster. Eichner adds: “I’ve been very pleasantly surprised, and relieved, by how much people are laughing at the movie. There are all the historic things about it — and I’ve also been surprised by how moved people are by the movie — but really I just wanted it to be funny.”

For more on EW’s Pride cover story please go to EW.com: https://ew.com/movies/billy-eichner-joel-kim-booster-bros-fire-island-pride-2022-cover/