A 'Gay' Week!

It's been a 'gay' week, this week just gone. Or should I say gayer?

It started with me seeing Holding The Man, the film adaptation of Timothy Conigrave's award winning memoir of the same name. I'd only just discovered that the film had been made less than a week previously. While I wasn't disappointed with the film, the performances and portrayals were beautifully and starkly presented, I did feel that I didn't have the emotional response that I was expecting to have. I remember, vaguely, being more touched by the book, but then that was 20 years ago, not long after it was published, so maybe time had tainted my recall. I decided to re-read the book, to see what, if any, difference I found this time around. I'd actually bought the book (Holding The Man, as well as Christo Tsiolkas Loaded) a few months previously so that I had them in my collection (the copies I'd read belonged to my ex, shortly after they had been published).

As I read (Monday night through to Thursday night, and then Loaded Thursday night through to Saturday morning), I decided to re-watch a few of the gay movies I have (no, NOT porn!). As is my wont, when I start something with a pattern to it, I need to see the sequence all the way through (I won't just buy a book in a series, I need to buy the whole series!)

The movies that I have, and watched, are as follows, in viewing order: The Birdcage; Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; The Rocky Horror Picture Show (okay, not so much gay, but definitely adventurous!); Jeffrey; Beginners; East Side Story; The Men Next Door; We Were Here; The Visitor; Sexual Tension: Volatile; Bad Boy Street; From Beginning To End; Ciao; Eating Out: The Open Weekend; Eating out Drama Camp; Eating Out; Eating Out 2: Sloppy Seconds; Eating Out: All You Can Eat; I Do; Violet Tendencies; The Broken Hearts Club; Weekend; Dog Tags; The Falls; Absent; August; The Kids Are Alright; Milk; Mulligans; A Single Man; Philadelphia; and, Were The World Mine. About two thirds of the way through I started remembering others I had and needed to watch. I think that the list would 'officially' ended at around Absent otherwise.

A few years back, I also bought a book called Out Plays which has 10 classic GLBTI plays. I started reading that this morning. The first play: The Boys In The Band. (First performed in 1968, and some things haven't changed!) I've decided that my Gay Week will officially end tomorrow morning when I go to see Holding The Man again, and see if/how it affects me any differently.

I'm not sure what I hoped to achieve by this immersion into gay film, literature and plays. Was it just a theme that I followed through? A subconscious need to try and (re?)connect with the gay community? Or a need to try and fill the perceived hole in my heart, for some romance, or just an alternative to the many rom-coms in my dvd collection? Or maybe a little bit of each.