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 Gay gross-out comedies such as Another Gay Movie and its sequel are not everyone’s slice of quiche. Iain Clacher spoke to leading exponent of the genre, Todd Stephens.
When Another Gay Movie started screening in 2006, gay audiences were either appalled or delighted by the gay take on the “gross-out” comedy genre.
Like a gay American Pie, here was a group of gay teens competing to lose their “a-cherries” and discovering a world of cucumbers, net hook-ups and even “Belgian chocolate”.
“People either seem to love it or be really offended by it,” writer-director Todd Stephens told Queensland Pride.
“I set out to make films that allow us to laugh at ourselves, and not everybody is ready to laugh at themselves. I understand that, but I think it’s time to move beyond coming out and angsty movies about struggling with ourselves.”
Stephens said he was inspired to write AGM after a previous feature, Gypsy 83, struggled to get distribution because it “wasn’t gay enough”.
“I got a little angry and I thought ‘ok, if they want something gay, my next movie is going to be the gayest movie ever made’.”
Stephens says AMG and its new sequel, Another Gay Sequel, were strongly influenced by the gross-out surrealism of John Waters (Pink Flamingoes, Hairspray) and the commercial teen comedies of John Hughes (The Breakfast Club) as well as “a million different pop culture movie and TV references from Dawn of the Dead to The Brady Bunch”.
The first thing audiences will notice of Sequel is that three of the four leads are no longer played by the same actors, a fact that’s cleverly referenced early on.
“Two of the guys from the original dropped out right before we made the movie because their agents staged an intervention and ganged up on them,” Stephens says.
“Some of these actors are gay in real life but are not out. It’s sad and disturbing, but I understand how it’s difficult to be an actor, and the fear of being typecast is very real.”
There were no such fears for Jonah Blechman, who reprises his role as Nico, the campest of the quartet.
Says Blechman: “I played a queer character in my first film, This Boy’s Life, and at the time there weren’t a lot of out queer characters. My agents all told me not to do something that was queer. I feel it stopped a lot of work for me, but over the years it seemed holding that level of fear about queer characters was not letting me do work I’m probably here to do.”
Though one critic claimed Sequel ends with a “renunciation of casual sex”, director Stephens sees the film’s message differently.
“It’s a celebration of sex. I don’t see gay sex as something to be ashamed of, but there’s still a lot of gay people who don’t want the world to know what we do. I’ve been in a relationship for many years and it’s a question we all face: how do we incorporate casual sex in our lives? The film was about the characters finding out what’s right for them.”
Though Stephens’ plans on veering back to the dramatic for his next couple of projects, he says he already has the story planned for Another Gay Movie Strikes Back: Gays in Space.
“I’d love to do it someday. It’s like a gay Lost in Space meets Barbarella. It’s about a group of gay astronauts on a mission to find intelligent gay life in the universe.
“We’ll see. We’ll see.”
Another Gay Sequel is released on DVD on December 9.
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Another gay gross-out
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