ASK ANY BUDDY

Rating: 🍆🍆🍆🍆

Trailer

This historical document of gay life before it got sanitized for straights with movies like Love, Simon (ugh) and Call Me by Your Name (kill me) throbs with both a love of cinema and the culture it captures.  Elizabeth Purchell spent months masterfully splicing together footage from dozens of gay porn films from the ‘60s to ‘80s that showcase real cruising locations: bars, theaters, clubs, bathouses, corners, and piers lost to time.  What a shame tough-on-crime mayors purged most major American metropolises of these anything goes spaces ‘cause a few moneyed pearl clutchers complained too loud. 

Don’t let Ask Any Buddy’s XXX moniker intimidate you, either. Don’t be a prude!  As a straightish dude, I see my own dick every single day.  So a couple more erect, fellated, and thrusting ones projected on screen for the sake of art didn’t phase me one bit. Skip this movie, and you’ll miss amazing sights like a dancer with Gene Simmons face paint and Bo Derek braids, a Marilyn Monroe impersonator getting a blowjob, a Tom of Finland looking “biker” hitting on a news reporter during a city hall sit-in, and a wide spectrum of interior gay fantasies made flesh through the magic of cinema. 

“The first gay horror movie was a porno.” Purchell said during a technically illegal Texas screening. “The first gay rom com was a porno.” 

Sodomy laws are still on the book in this stupid state. You can legally carry a gun in a place of worship, but the Texas penal code still defines “homosexual conduct” as a Class C misdemeanor offense punishable with up to a $500 fine, if a person “engages in deviate sexual intercourse with another individual of the same sex.”  Screening a gay porn collage in a theater? Forget about it! 

In a climate still so backward and repressive, it feels almost uplifting to watch LGBTQ folks of all stripes living their best lives, beating down homophobes, and making it in inclusive spaces.  As Purchell mentioned, these pornographic films allowed gay voices to tell their own stories within their own means. It would take decades after Times Square shuttered its last hardcore theater or Harvey Milk ran for office before Hollyweird would even consider letting an openly gay person sit in the director’s chair.  

Are things better or worse now than the lives and times depicted in Ask Any Buddy? The nonstop party depicted within pulses vibrant and contagious, and the final sequence of the film feels almost like an end of an era.  Will a director come along who won’t pan to a window during a pivotal gay sex scene or depict queer characters so bland and bougie and they might as well be in a straight rom com? Only time will tell.  But if Ask Any Buddy is any indication, we still have a long way to go.