Out on DVD: Swinging straights, sexy soaps and Rock Hudson

Straight people pursuing sexual liberation — who do they think they are? Gays? Find out in the documentary American Swing, one of several new DVDs of note this week.

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The media loves to talk about how the gays are such sexual libertines, and that's why we all have AIDS and make Jesus cry. But heterosexuals get up to just as much, if not more, naughty business than their homo brethren. Just ask any manager of a sex toys boutique. Or watch the acclaimed documentary American Swing, about Plato's Retreat, the infamous 1970s New York City sex club where The Ice Storm–era breeders went to let it all hang out.

Or you could always curl up with Knots Landing: The Complete Second Season, which features all manner of man-on-lady shenanigans. (If you've already made your way through the new Dynasty box that came out last week, this will help you through the withdrawal.)

Also out on DVD this week is the second season (or "series," as the Brits like to say) on the pansexually-daring teen soap Skins, which makes even the Degrassi horndogs look like little angels. And yes, that's Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel you see on the cover.

Sex is pretty much all they talk about in Pillow Talk, although it's kept very subtextual, given that the film was made in 1959. The new 50th Anniversary Edition out this week allows us to marvel at the multiple levels going on in this classic farce — gay actor Rock Hudson plays a heterosexual playboy who pretends to be gay to get virginal ice-queen Doris Day to seduce him. And let's not even talk about Tony Randall. In any event, for sheer entertainment value or for the Queer Studies term papers it could inspire, Pillow Talk is a must.

Competition was tough for our Title of the Week; I was almost leaning towards Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter, but this public-domain cheapie seems to come out on DVD every month or so. The clear winner was The Pope's Toilet, an acclaimed comedy from Brazil about an impoverished man who decides he's going to cash in on the impending visit of Pope John Paul II (it's set in 1988) by setting up a pay toilet in front of his house and charging the throngs of the faithful to use the facilities. It's probably not the first time that people have thought of the pontiff and of poo simultaneously.