Sit Down. Stand up. Ring the Bells.

I don't know how to start this review, so I'll say this: BOY CULTURE is a typical romance movie in most senses... except that it involves man on man. Currently playing only in Hollywood and New York, this is one of those unrated gay films that really makes you scratch your head about what makes it SO terrible that the rating was released. There's no male nudity, no female nudity, and only a few shots of men getting their kicks.

Anyway, this is a movie about "X," an escort who has 12 clients, whom he calls disciples, making him Jesus, as if his ass were on a crusade to give these men a good fucking (from the shots we see of these clients, I guess he does.). And it's definitely not sex. There's no sex in this movie, it seems. It's all fucking. They refer to it as so, and it's promiscuous enough to warrant the term "fucking" as opposed to "sex." "X" has two roomates, Joey, and Andrew, the former being a young 18-year-old slut who has tons of tricks and does drugs and all those times of things; and the latter, Andrew, is the central character of the story aside from "X." They've all been roomates for a year, and there's been sexual tension between "X" and Andrew and Joey for that whole year. From the posters, it could be assumed that there's some sort of crazy man on man on man ménage à trois, of which there is none. Joey is the baby, and Andrew and "X" are the dads to his promiscuity.

All of this is narrated by "X," who tells of all of this very cynically, almost tiredly, as if not really caring. Passively telling of the mutual masturbation (just kidding), and all the parallel stories including one trick named Gregory who tells of his love of 50 years with a man named Reynaldo who just recently passed away. Funny how the story of Reynaldo and Gregory parallels so well wtih the story of "X" and Andrew. "X" even was in love and fucked his cousin, "call him John," when he was 12. Nothing ultra-nasty there either, by the way. Etcetera. It's all very convoluted and trite. The dialogue is stinted and it all seems like a typical love story.

Except it's two men and a bunch of other men who pass in and out of the open door\asshole. And that's where I think the MPAA had a problem with this movie: it's homosexual and women are never portrayed as being pleasured. If nothing else, this is the greatest showing of the MPAA's homophobia. This is a prototypical R-rated romance melodrama. It's not SHORTBUS, it's not DEEP THROAT. Nothing. It's just BOY CULTURE, a movie about men in love. And what's so wrong with that? Oh, right, the woman is not involved.

I grimaced less at the male kissing and the male touching and feeling than I did at the thought that all of this in the movie would be permissable if it were a man and a woman or a woman and a woman or, I don't know, released by a major studio. It is everything that Kirby Dick recognized about the homophobia in the industry incarnate. Living proof that this movie could be widely distributed, and probably liked by a good many people. But it is shunned because it has a soundtrack consisting of mostly house music, and a good ton of man-on-man kissing and lusting.