Straddling the line between old school showbiz cheesiness and contemporary short attention span whateverness, Ben is the New Old Gay. He loves Patti LuPone.

It’s not news that gay movies are usually crap. I still see them, or watch them on TV or Netflix or whatever, but my expectations are invariably low. As a matter of fact, I think over the years, my standards have been substantially lowered by the constant influx of dreck.

Why do I keep going back?

I guess there’s something satisfying about seeing aspects of my own life reflected in – I was going to say art, but that hardly describes flicks such as Another Gay Movie (which I enjoyed, but come on!); even entertainment feels like a stretch for the genre that includes Eating Out, let alone (painful memory shudder) Eating Out 2.

Nonetheless, living as a second-class citizen in this heterosexist society, and having grown up invisible in an even more homophobic climate, I crave gay movies and I don’t stop trying to find the good ones.

The situation is so dire that oftentimes, all a gay movie has to do to lead the pack is merely not be idiotic. Regardless of the skin quotient, gay movies are frequently like porn in their embarrassing dialogue. But there have been a few over the years that were truly good, and they have affected me deeply and given me hope to straggle on through all the incorrigible performances of incomprehensibly cheesy material.

I remember being 20 years old and seeing the preview for Stonewall.

I didn’t care whether it was an accurate depiction of the birth of the gay rights movement and I didn’t even realize that it was a quasi-musical with drag queens lip-syncing to great songs by 1960s girl groups to comment on the narrative. I just gleaned that it was the story of a young gay guy moving to New York City and finding love and good times. There’s a youthful abandon and joy and romance that I love in movies and I knew, from the preview, I would find it in Stonewall. It’s like how I used to watch Meatballs before I went to summer camp, or Sixteen Candles before school started, the movies would get me revved up for what I was about to experience – I yearned for movies that would get me excited to start my life as a gay man.

Straddling the line between old school showbiz cheesiness and contemporary short attention span whateverness, Ben is the New Old Gay. He loves Patti LuPone.

This weekend, the day came at last when my roommate moved out and I got to take over the entire railroad apartment for myself, after sharing it with one person or another, for 10 years.

Unfortunately, I won’t be the only living thing in the place for the next couple of weeks, because, to update you on my post of few weeks ago (Bed Bugs and Scabies and Crabs, Oh My!), it has turned out that I actually have a bed bug infestation.

When I first began itching several months ago (!), my doctor had erroneously prescribed a scabies treatment, which I have dutifully applied several times now, following the directions to do all the dry cleaning and laundry and vacuum and spray.

The spray is what made this go on so long. It also kills bed bugs, just not all of them and not where they live, so each time I re-treated my purported scabies, I fended off the bed bugs for a couple of weeks, and it was only recently, after all this time that I finally saw one.

Slowly waking up one morning, I happened to glance over and see the little insect crawling on my hand. Revolted, my knee-jerk reaction was to jerk my hand away, shake it off, but then I realized I had to catch it, to obtain proof, for my landlord, for an exterminator, although somehow I knew exactly what it was.

As I scrambled to grab in a tissue, it burst open with my blood (Happy Halloween, you guys!!!) as a combination gesture of “Yes, I’m a bed bug, this is what we do,” and “Fuck you! Where’s your evidence now, biatch?”