Red Hot Adult Action

I feel a little odd right now. I'm still excited from seeing a great movie on the big screen tonight, but I've also got a feeling of dread and melancholy because the creeping black death that is my job is hovering once again as I think about having to go to bed soon so I can get my seven or eight hours of sleep before trudging back to the ambition-killing energy-suck that is the Texas Legislative Council. That was a long and not very good sentence. I'm sorry. But I did see a great movie, Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together at the Alamo Drafthouse Village. God, what a great movie. I won't go on and on about it because I've been going on and on about movies for the past several days, but, fuck, it's a good movie. And it reminded me of something that was an early bonding point for me and my lady friend. "Happy Together" was the first movie in the Austin Film Society's new film series, "Gay and Lesbian Images in Global Cinema." There is a core audience of film society members, including my girlfriend and me, who see pretty much every series the Film Society programs, but there are also a lot of people who have some kind of special interest in the subject who usually turn up just for that series. For example, the Iranian film series was well-attended by Iranian immigrants to Texas, the kung-fu series was full of geeky fanboys, and any series having to do with classic Hollywood movies from the golden age of film are usually chock-full with old folks. However, the audience tonight was pretty much just the film society regulars. And mostly straight couples, to boot. It kind of surprised me. It's not like I could tell by looking who was homosexual and who wasn't, but it was a far different crowd than another my girlfriend, Kristy, and I encountered at a gay film festival back in Lincoln, Nebraska when we were first dating. I was in my last year of college, and I had been seeing Kristy for maybe a month. I was taking a class called "Women in Pop Culture" and one of our assignments was to attend a film at the Gay and Lesbian Film Festival at the art film theater on the university campus and write a paper about its representation of women. With my classes, work schedule of two jobs, and a new relationship I was all excited about, I didn't have much time to see any of these films except for one on Saturday night called, and I'm not kidding about this, "Hard." In my extraordinary brilliance, I happened to pick the only film in the festival that had no female characters, I'm talking zero women in the entire film, which made my paper for a class called "Women in Pop Culture" ridiculously irrelevant. Fortunately, I had a great professor who let me write it anyway. I asked Kristy if she wanted to go with me to see "Hard," and she said yes. This was maybe our fourth date. We still didn't know each other that well. We get into the theater, and it's a packed, sold-out crowd. In addition, everyone in the theater is a flamingly gay man except for Kristy and me. The stereotypes were out in full effect. It looked like the inside of the gay bar in those horrible "Police Academy" movies when the stick-in-the-mud police chief is tricked into going inside and is fondled and forced to tango with a crew of mustachioed, leather-clad rent boys. I'd like to say I'd never felt so out of place, but it wasn't really that uncomfortable. It was a very welcoming environment. No one gave us dirty looks, but it was really weird to be the only straight man in a rather large room. Kristy was the only woman in the room, so it was probably even weirder for her. So we're sitting in the theater, the lights go down, and a short film is shown before "Hard." This film might have destroyed lesser relationships, but, I'm happy to say, actually strengthened ours. It was our first collective embarrassing moment. This short film, entitled "Devotions," featured a lot of new age hippy bullshit mantras, flute playing, and Ginsberg-esque poetry. It also featured 25 minutes of old, fat, heavily bearded, naked men shaving each other's pubic hair, giving each other blowjobs, and sucking each other's toes, not to mention lots of hot oil massaged into frighteningly erect, old-man cock. I'm sure there's an audience for this, but the rest of the theater also seemed very taken aback. I don't care how gay you are, no one wants to see a Wilford Brimley lookalike given a handjob by someone resembling a department-store Santa Claus.