Michael and his partner Brent are off dodging icebergs on an Alaskan cruise (lucky stiffs!), while Brian has had a very busy week over on the blog. That leaves me to write this week's column. And on Friday the Thirteenth no less! Sure, it's supposed to be very bad luck, but I'm just going to throw a pinch of salt over my left shoulder and get on with it...

SOMEONE ELSE'S SEX AND THE CITY

As a rule, us gay guys have always been fond of Sex and the City. After all, the show was produced and written by two gay men (Darren Starr and Michael Patrick King), and the conflicts and crises the SATC women faced over six seasons were often eerily familiar to the sexually active urban gay man. Fear of Commitment? Check. Fear of aging? Check. Funky Spunk? Er… check. In fact, the show’s underlying gay sensibility was such that you could easily assume Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda and especially Samantha were all just thinly disguised gay men.

Me, I loved the HBO series. I found it funny and, except for maybe Carrie’s shoe obsession, infinitely relatable. I also appreciated its central message: That friendships are paramount — family isn't just about blood relations. So this week when I finally had a chance to catch the film, I was really looking forward to it. After five years apart, here was a chance to re-connect with what to me felt like old friends.

Of course, I completely discounted all the negative reviews I’d read. I chalked these up to straight male critics not really “getting” the material. Sex and the City is for the women and us gays, after all!

Well, after sitting through the film I think I’m going to have to reassess. Sex and the City: The Movie isn’t for us gays. In fact — and I can’t believe I’m saying this — it’s a total chick flick.

My first clue that SATC: The Movie wasn’t for me came with a sight gag in the first ten minutes. The ladies are all reunited on a Manhattan street. Their attention is drawn to a very handsome businessman who passes them on the sidewalk. A few steps later he greets another handsome man and they kiss.

I was watching this in a theater in a very small town in Virginia, and the almost all female audience (I'd wager mostly school teachers, office receptionists, junior leaguers, and soccer moms) got a huge hoot out of the sight gag. In fact, it brought down the house. But me, I thought it was sort of tired. Haven’t we seen this joke a hundred times before? It was funny in the eighties, but now not so much.

And worse than the audience’s response was the reaction of the ladies on the screen. Charlotte, Samantha, Carrie and Miranda’s tittering amongst themselves at the sight of two handsome men kissing wasn’t mean-spirited or anything – it just seemed hopelessly provincial. These are supposed to be urbane, sophisticated Manhattanites. I mean, these ladies have seen it all and done it all. Are they really going to blink an eye at two men kissing on the street?

Now I don’t mean to imply that the movie (or even the small town audience I was watching it with) were in any way anti-gay. That's not it at all. It's just that sitting there I began to feel as if the film was squarely targeted for the middle-American women seated all around me. Unlike the TV series, which always felt inclusive to me, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was simply a bystander to someone else’s entertainment. It bummed me out.

That feeling only became more acute later in the movie when they trotted out Stanford (Willie Garson) and Anthony (Mario Cantone) and then…

**** SPOILER ALERT ****

...actually paired them up as a couple in a twenty-second throwaway scene. Frankly, I about choked on my popcorn.

Mario Cantone (left) & Willie Garson

Next Page-- What have they done with the real Stanford and Anthony? Also, Ollian TKO's Nuke!