The Last Gay Word: When Did Gay Movies Stop Sucking?

Gay movies suck, right? Poor production quality, horrible acting, oftentimes appallingly bad scripts. That's been the conventional wisdom for years now. So, of course, it must be true.

And yes, I've sat through plenty of bad gay films: O Fantasma, Totally F**ked Up, The Delta, Splendor, The Doom Generation, Jeffrey, The Living End, 200 American, Happy, Texas, Grand Ecole, most of the Boy's Life series of short films.

I can't count the number of times I've left the theater or turned off the DVD feeling burned, or just wondering how an idea that seemed so good got so off-track. This year alone, it happened with Poster Boy, Coffee Date, Boy Culture, Adam & Steve, The Mostly Unfabulous Life of Ethan Green, and The Dying Gaul (ohhh boy! what a stinker).

But are gay movies really all that worse than their straight counterparts? And even if they were, could it be that things have finally changed for the better?

“Eighty-five percent of all movies suck,” says Alonso Duralde, author of 101 Must-See Movies for Gay Men. “In the last few years, there were more gay movies, so more of them sucked. Back when Bill Sherwood made Parting Glances [in 1986], it was so much harder to get a gay movie made. It took years get everything in place—time that was spent working on the script.”

It doesn't help that most gay movies are independent movies, which, contrary to popular belief, may actually have a higher “suck” ratio than studio-made or studio financed films. Say what you will about Hollywood, but studios make the movies that they think will make them a buck. Sure, that means enduring a summer of bloated, joyless spectacles like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Superman Returns. And when the studios have turned their eyes to gay themes, it's usually resulted in movies like In & Out, Philadelphia, and The Bird Cage—stories obviously designed to reach a mass heterosexual audience.

But at least the scenes are never washed out. At least there aren't any awkward pauses when an actor forgot or adlibbed a line, but the filmmakers were too poor to reshoot.

Independent films, meanwhile, ultimately get made because of the passion of the filmmakers. Sometimes that passion can translate into gems like Latter Days, Trick, Beautiful Thing, The Wedding Banquet, Gods & Monsters, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, or entertaining trifles like Big Eden, Mambo Italiano, and Get Real.

But sometimes it's more along the lines of Bruce La Bruce's Hustler White, possibly the single worst gay movie ever made.

In other words, independent movies are the self-published novels of the film world—which, if you've read a lot of self-published novels, explains a lot about the low quality of some gay films. If the studios pay too much attention to their audience, maybe some independent filmmakers don't pay enough attention. Maybe a test screening doesn't do much good when it involves your mother, your best friend in the whole wide world, and the counselor who helped nurse you through treatment following your fourth suicide attempt.

But something has changed, even in the world of independent gay movies.