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Yay Bedfellows!

I'm bored.
I'm uninterested.
I'm uninspired, and why should I be?
What difference does any of it make?

Nobody cares anyway.

And we did the interview. Yay!

To emphasize the frustrating inconvenience of his work and school schedule, Will Wikle said, “Aye Papi!”

My first interaction with Wikle was almost two years ago, interviewing him over the phone for a gay travel story; back then, Wikle was the host of LOGO’s televised gay travel series, “Round Trip Ticket.” Coincidentally, about two months later, we met face-to-face and made the crazy camaraderie in the city of brotherly love, when both of us were in town (Wikle as a celebrity guest judge and me as media) to attend The 2007 Mr. Gay Philadelphia competition. It was during the pageant, while I was exploiting my press pass to loiter backstage and ogle the loin-cloth clad contestants, when Wikle greeted me with a kiss—or at least that’s what I think he did, if memory serves, and, actually, it might not. It’s a little spotty because I was very drunk at the time. So my recollection of Wikle’s friendly kiss on the cheek may just as well have been a spiteful punch to the face, which wouldn’t have been that uncalled for had Wikle thought my hanging all over his hunky, TV news anchor husband, clinging to his couture in an intoxicated effort to anchor my drunken ass upright, was actually a shameless attempt to molest his man. Then again, maybe I was molesting his man. Nevertheless, Mr. Gay Philadelphia 2007 was crowned, thus our wild weekend in Pennsylvania passed. Wikle went home to New York, I returned to Chicago and we didn’t keep in touch, fun times in Philli notwithstanding.

However, after screening an advanced promotional copy of the Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild, and watching Wikle play out in one of the movie’s lead roles, I was compelled to reach out and touch him again. I had never seen him act before—I didn’t even know he could act—but, as the popular posse’s pretentious prince, Wikle portrayed AGS’s primary protagonist so perfectly that I just had to email him and tell him so.

Wikle wrote back to thank me. We reminisced. We caught up and pleasantries were exchanged, during which I suggested doing an official interview with him for feature on ChicagoPride.com in collaboration with AGS’s upcoming DVD release. Wikle loved the idea. He was all for it. So I initiated the interview over email but over a week went by and, come a few days before the movie’s street date, I still hadn’t heard back from him.

After emailing him again, checking to see if he was still interested in and/or available for the interview, Wikle replied, apologizing for not, as of yet, following up. His heavy school and 13-hour/day work load had recently left him extremely preoccupied, and he had to study for exams. Promising to get back to me after taking a test later that night, “I’ve been such a crack-head this week,” Wikle wrote. “Aye Papi!”

The ever-feigning nice guy that I am, I told Wikle not to rush, that school and providing health care to the masses [Wikle’s a nurse] was way more important than a fluffy film feature; he could get to the interview whenever he can, if he can and, if he can’t, no big deal—but I didn’t actually mean any of that shit. I want my [expletive] interview, Bitch!

Yet Wikle seemingly took me seriously, because I haven’t heard from him since, and Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild was released on DVD December 9, 2008.

Groundbreaking—nowadays it’s an overused term, marginally meant and meagerly metaphorical but never actually accurate. When it comes to the contemporary exhibitions of entertainment, it’s all been done before. Pretty much every story has already been told. Every image exposed, every portrait portrayed and every taboo tapped, every idea has been exploited to its utmost. Every plot, however provocative, however intense, emotive or enlightening, simply presumes pretense via a new veneer over an old façade. Rarely does anything ever really break ground because there’s no ground left to break. Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band is groundbreaking.

Following a group of gay male friends awkwardly inclined to entertain one unexpected party guest, Crowley’s innovative play made its New York debut in 1968, a time when no story like it had ever been honestly, or as poignantly, told before. When the film adaptation was released two years later, no movie like it had ever been made before. Yet The Boys in the Band not only broke ground, it forged its own firm foundation in film history because no movie quite like it was ever made again. Even by today’s standards, it’s still so powerfully relevant, albeit, by today’s standards, just as unnerving.

The dynamics don’t feel dated. Portraying a gay sociological and psychological construct developed by shame, guilt, insecurity and ostracism, the resolve is 40-years-old and frighteningly familiar. Preceding four decades of emotional evolution, expression and advocacy, The Boys in the Band inevitably reveals how far we’ve come as an LGBT community but also how long we’ve faltered as individuals. Inside ourselves, so little has changed. Watching this movie for the first time in 2008 was like going home to a haunted house.

Groundbreaking. Provocative. Intense. Emotive and enlightening, the first edition of The Boys in the Band on DVD was released November 11, 2008.