You'll have to forgive me.  As a religious practitioner of RBST* — someone who sleeps an average of 20 hours a day — it takes me a while to squeeze in a movie, what with gardening and work and Merchant Marines all to do in the couple of hours I have to accomplish my evil deeds. 

So far the film fare has been varied.  It all started way back in April with Gay Sex In The Seventies, with more staches than you could shake a, um, rhymes with "stick" at...


The meat of the movie is the interviews with key players of the period — artists, writers and activists — reflecting fondly on the sex-filled days of their youth, and part of what's interesting is the Then-and-Now comparisons.  Photos from the times show mostly ordinary men as various and sundry as in our own time.  Memories of them as the most beautiful people in the world hold out hope that my old lovers, too, will someday all be young gods. No one asks "were the times innocent, or was it just us?"  I guess I should ask myself: are the times cynical, or is it just me? 

While the credits roll, representatives of the next generation — the one that grew up in the shadow of the one that invented sex — reflect on their perceptions of that golden age of debauch.  "The seventies represent to me: polyester,disco," says one.  "Big lapels," another chimes in.  "I know that facial hair was much more 'in' back then," offers a third.  Finally a kid with a mohawk says: "They were just free about everything, and now everybody's so uptight!" (What he doesn't realize is that, as is so often the case, the former and latter parties are one and the same.)

I was a kid in the seventies.  I'm actually not tempted to wonder what I might have gotten up to had I been born ten years before I was, which would have put me right about on the bottom of the pig pile at the Crisco Disco in 1976. As it happened, I managed to get my share of gay sex anyway.  And lived to tell the tale.  And you can't beat that.

On my last trip to the STD clinic, a couple of years ago now when that last wave of killer clap was making the rounds, my gritty middle-aged female nurse was telling me: "you know, if there were no STDs to worry about, everybody would be fucking everybody."  As anyone who's tried knows, and many a young man has, the logistics of that get complicated.  But you get the feeling from Gay Sex in the Seventies that that's what the seventies were really like, at least in New York City and San Francisco. 

AIDS, of course, casts its shadow back in time, over the golden age of gay sex, and adds to nostalgia for a brief time when sex seemed poised to be just another form of social intercourse, but way, way more fun than a coffee at Starbucks.  Sure, the blowjob was the handshake of the nineties, but it's a far cry from the ultimate greeting back in the day.  Yeah, we've got our friends with benefits, but even strangers had them back then.

Ultimately, it's the expulsion from the gay Eden, the garden of earthly delights, that gives the story of Sex in the Seventies its mythic grandeur.  AIDS is what lends an air of heroism to what was, after all, ordinary hedonism in the end.  But as one of the interviewees in the movie observes, these things come in waves.  Sex isn't going away. And sexual ethics are only a part of the spread of STDs. 

Commerce, urbanization, and warfare (all three inextricably linked) have always been bringers of disease.  Jared Diamond, in his Guns, Germs and Steel, describes Europe's introduction to syphilis, which some say Columbus brought back from the New World (touché, Columbus!): "when syphilis was first definitely recorded in Europe in 1495, its pustules often covered the body from the head to the knees, caused flesh to fall from people's faces, and led to death within a few months."  Sound familiar?

Once the "war" — as those who experienced the first wave of AIDS call it — began, the heroism was real, and the soldiers fought the good fight with such fierce intensity they transformed a lifestyle into a movement.  And while we owe things like marriage equality to that movement, politicizing the lifestyle has its downsides.  I don't think it's a big secret that sex is more fun than social activism.  But it's to our credit that we've managed to keep the sex in social activism, somehow.

By far the most poignant thing about the movie were the reveries and resignation of survivors, with their shoe boxes full of snapshots and memories.  One of them sums up what he misses most about the seventies: how easy it was to make friends back then.  But personal memory is a funny thing.  The interviewees, fixated on a golden moment in time, sometimes seem to see it suspended in amber.  They seem to think that if the times hadn't changed they wouldn't have either. 

This is a little like the ongoing quandary I face with bad service.  I wonder if the service is objectively any worse nowadays than it ever was, or if my patience has just run out.  Or maybe I'm getting worse service for a reason.  I suspect the older you get the worse people tend to treat you unless you're obviously someone they have to toady up to. 

I'm trying not to fall into that same trap with sex.  It's not easy.  It's natural to generalize from our own experience, but when I hear people my age or older holding forth on how much better sex was in the days of their youth than it is now, you want to remind them that there are still young people out there, and they're still having sex, and probably quite a lot of it, just not with us (or at least not with you). 

Well, obviously, it's their loss. 

After Gay Sex In The Seventies I took my movie critic landlord Jay Carr's advice and rented La Moustache, a movie that's actually more about shaving one off...


...which hunky Vincent Lindon's Marc does basically to the opening credits.  The mustache here is what we in film theory circles call "an absent presence".  Never mind, the movie is a superbly paced existential thriller based on an audacious premise, with moments of sheer brilliance sprinkled throughout.  The ones that I found transcendent were possibly the most banal of the movie — when Marc, who has fled to Hong Kong, is riding the ferry back and forth, in a kind of purgatory. 

"What does it all mean?" asks Andrew Sarris in his review in the New York Observer.  "We are never quite sure. All we learn from this relentless saga of mental and physical solitude are the many varieties of suffering one can endure when one feels alone in the universe." 

That's some mustache is all I can say. Or... is it?

From there I hit Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's films, which weren't very satisfying, stachewise, if you want to know the truth...


After I'd finished Eleven, Twelve, and Thirteen, I got totally distracted by the unexpected discovery of the lovely and talented Jalil Lespert, in Le Petit Lieutenant...


I also rented Ressources Humaines, and a couple of others, but in none of them does Jalil have a mustache.  If he were to have one, it would very likely look something like this:


I think it would have been a nice little touch for his role in Le Petit Lieutenant, actually.  I mean, come on.  Cops and mustaches: two great things that go great together!

The truth is Jalil Lespert would look good no matter what kind of stache you stuck on him, as the following exercise clearly demonstrates:


Just sayin'.
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*Radical Beauty Sleep Therapy