Not long ago, after I updated an old friend on my activities of recent years he wrote back to tell me that my reports of pseudonymous work were interesting because he, too, has been doing creative work under an assumed soubriquet.
[10/19/14: tracked down missing videos; failed to restore missing image. -ed]
But there is, Dear Reader, there is. And if it and its authors are not now widely notorious, well, they should be.
T.S. and Paul have made two gay underground films: Skull & Bones (Ariztical Entertainment, 2009), "A Tale of Homocidal Mania" and The Gays (2011).
(They also have square employment, good gigs at bureaux with assiduous corporate relations departments disinclined, perforce, to association with humor, irony, notoriety, undergroundiness, and, quite possibly, gay men with chips on their shoulders and axes to grind, or whose work may be characterized by any of the foregoing descriptors.)
I have not seen Skull & Bones. Having read the synopsis, I was, for a time, pretty sure that I did not want to see what I understood to be a feature-length series of class-driven rape fantasies (notwithstanding my own congruent antipathy to certain features of the (anti)heroes(?) selected victims). In discussion of the film, Paul has used the phrase "gay-on-straight humiliation slasher," somewhat wryly, to attempt to assign genre, and I have seen "darkly comic gay slasher" used.
Now I am not so sure that I don't want to see it. I now suspect my satire processors had been out of alignment when I read that synopsis; they have been recalibrated.
You see, I recently had the opportunity to attend the final cut screening of The Gays at the Anthology Film Archives in The City.
Reader, it was fantastic: hilariously enjoyable! Go see it (or command its delivery to you)!
The filmmakers agreed that I could use the word "Gaysploitation" to describe it, but the word is used in the fairly technical sense of featuring and exaggerating for purposes of ridicule stereotypes to which the 'sploited class of persons is popularly subject, while the film, itself, defies description. The trailer, including the wonderful theme song, is available at the website, where the blurb reads as follows:
Wouldn't it be great if your parents taught you how to hold your own in a fag-eat-fag world? Rod Gay and Bob Gay-Paris are the streetwise gay mentors you never had. Come revel in the raunchy wisdom they pass along to their two gay sons -- Alex and Tommy -- advice that will empower the boys to bend the world over, lube it up, and snap one off!After the screening, I had the opportunity to tell T.S. and Paul how much I enjoyed it, and they talked a little bit about a couple projects that they have in mind. On one, in particular, T.S. remarked that, as auteur (my word, not his), his satirical commentary would be markedly "angry." I asked whether he would characterize his satirical commentary as "angry" in the film we had just seen screened, and he said, "Of course; didn't you find it angry?" I replied that I thought that it had been hilarious, and felt a little abashed for not having absorbed a sense of the author's anger (and also for not a) having seen Skull & Bones for background, at least, and b) being able to fluently discourse on the subject, just then, on the fly . . . which would have been cooler).
So, now I think that I should see it again, with the 'sploitation rubric, and a notion of the potential personal anger of any member of the 'sploited class, in mind, and also see Skull & Bones.
Whew. All that writing about satire reminded me of a number from Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles, so, without any further seque or introduction, here's "Sodomy":