This is all so I can talk about (somewhat reluctantly) what I saw last night. Andy was out drinking with some of his friends from work, so I was home alone, waiting for him to come home. I was really horny and that didn’t help things. I chatted online for awhile but got really bored with that. I’d smoked a little pot to relax (which I try to do sparingly in order to make it last) and had a glass of red wine. I sat down in the front of the TV to see what was on. One channel was showing ‘Trick.’ That gay movie that also has Tori Spelling in it. The basic plot is that 2 cute young guys meet each other one evening in NYC but can’t seem to find anywhere to be alone. The whole movie is them trying to find a place to have sex. But the roommate won’t leave the apartment, his best friend won’t leave him alone, another friend offers his apartment but then it becomes unavailable, etc. etc.

Well one of the guys is a ‘shy’ aspiring broadway musical composer and the other guy is a go-go dancer. Both of them have impossibly toned, slim bodies, perfect faces, and lots of stereotypical friends that they encounter through the course of the evening. There’s the middle-aged cabaret queen, the female best friend who’s a fag hag, an ex-boyfriend who’s a drugged-out party boy, a drag queen named miss coco peru, the dumb straight roommate who just wants to get it on with his girlfriend, etc. That’s the whole movie.

I tried not to watch it, but every time I flipped the channel I eventually flipped it back. I ended up watching pretty much all but the first twenty minutes. It was grotesque but addicting, and I think the fact that I was stoned had something to do with it. I hated it, it made me squirm, but I couldn’t stop watching. And I think the main thing that bugged me about the movie is that these characters, I know they actually do exist somewhere, I mean there are people like that out there, but they aren’t part of my world. That’s not my world. These people would not be my friends, wouldn’t have any part of my life, wouldn’t even give me the time of day if I walked up and said hello. Bitter? I’m shut out from that ‘average’ gay lifestyle that includes clubbing every friday and saturday night until dawn, or taking lots of party drugs, or going to piano bars or circuit parties, or hanging out with cabaret queens or drag queens. That gay world exists but it’s not a part of me. It’s not the reason I came out, was not even the catalyst for coming out. Yet here’s this movie that says, look at all this, this is what being gay is about.

I don’t go clubbing on the weekends because at the coffeehouse I usually worked weekends, I had to be in bed early. I had no concept of weekends (and probably still don’t). It’s easy to spend lots of money at a bar. I prefer to spend my money on movies, or books, or buying cd’s, or even dining out or travelling. I never had vast quantities of cash I was willing to earmark for ‘nights out with the boys.’ That party life must begin when you’re 21, or younger. I’m 27 now, and chances are I won’t be altering my life in that direction.

Both guys in the movie, even the ‘shy, geeky, socially-awkward’ one, have amazing bodies, torsos that seem chiseled from flesh-marble, completely smooth. Even the guy who insists ‘I never go to bars’ is the ideal of what a gay guy who goes to bars looks like. both guys wear just the right clothes, fashionably tight, know all the hip places to go to, appear to be ‘struggling’ to make it in NYC—but the film lets us know that these guys still have nothing to worry about. they’re too beautiful and attractive to fail. The film presents a fictional, stylized world but still tries to pass it off as ‘this is what it’s like to be young and gay in NYC.’ It’s the same thing that bothers me about ‘Queer As Folk,’ the American version of the British tv show with all the gay characters.

It’s not real. It’s just one cliche transposing another. Trading the straight world’s stereotype of the gay lifestyle for the gay version of that stereotype. It’s not like ‘Love and Death on Long Island,’ with John Hurt and Jason Priestly, which is not about LIFESTYLE but instead about the specific characters in the story. This is my favorite ‘gay’ film. Few others that I’ve seen have its honesty and vividness.

“Trick” presents a fake world that I nonetheless feel rotten about being left out of. That’s the irony.