I mention this movie (the photo is from the CD) only because the writer and director was Dirk Shafer, who made a name for himself by becoming the first Playgirl nude model to come out as gay.
He made this movie in 2001 and it was released in the usual handful of small independent theatres like the Quad in New York City. It grossed $200,000 or thereabouts.
I remember being very affected by this movie, for a number of reasons.
The first is that I thought it was almost unbelievably bleak and true. Another movie that came out around the same time was called Hard On and it was praised and talked about the struggles of a young man with a conservative family trying to find his way in the Australian gay scene. But if you look closely at that movie, every single sexual episode is disgusting or borders on rape. There is nothing actually kind in the gay world of that movie. But his family life softens the blow, so to speak. And I think people were fooled by the bleakness of that film into thinking that it depicted a struggle.
This was brutally honest, I thought. It showed in almost a casual way, how the joy of doing drugs and having as much sex as you want, as well as being beautiful and reveling in the hedononism of gay male body worship and sexuality can snare a person. These were the sorts of things that I thought would be addressed, maybe obliquely, in the Christophjer Nolan version of The Odyssey. In that journey, in the ancient epic poem I mean, Odysseus is constantly distracted by sex and drugs and temptation on his way home to Ithaca to be reunited with Penelope. The episode with the Cyclops takes a year I think, and I believe it takes another year to deal with the sorceress Circe. His time with Calypso goes on for almost 7 years and for most of those 7 years he simply doesn’t remember what he was supposed to be doing, so drugged up he is by the Lotus flowers.
Well he doesn’t really want to get there, does he? He’s having too much fun. But that wasn’t in the Nolan version, which is absolutely fine with me.
Anyway, Circuit was just about as true as I’ve ever seen. The fact that it’s bleak does not stain the gay community unless you have a singular worry about perception — like we can’t say anything “bad” about the gay community because it betrays the struggle. That, to me, is a useless concern about what straight people think. That’s like being an atheist and worried that Christian Fundamentalists aren’t going to like you.
The other reason it impacted me is I had almost exactly the same desire: to be swept up in male beauty, drugs, drinking, dancing and sex. I wanted the hedonistic life and was never able to have it, probably because I didn’t have the look and could only partake from the side so to speak. I could never really plunge in. Plus I have this sort of trigger I guess that prevents me from being too stupid or pulls me back from total indulgence. That’s ultimately why I quit drinking. It was getting too close for comfort to being a problem. (Some would say that that IS a problem.)
And then I was thinking about this movie the other day because I came across the soundtrack in my list of albums [the soundtrack was justifiably criticized for being a brilliant compilation of dance music but they didn’t fade from one to the other, the way dance music is supposed to be. They just played one song. It ended. And then they started the next. A dance compilation needs to be one long track from song to song. But maybe they didn’t have the money or the talent to do that.] So I looked up the movie, thinking that I’d like to see it again, and learned that Dirk Shafer, the writer and director, had died in 2015 about 11 years ago. He was 51. He died in his car and the cause was methamphetamine and cocaine toxicity. I think this means it might not have been an overdose, but he had been doing it for so long that he had a heart attack from it — probably from the coke. After writing and directing this movie he became a pilates instructor. He wrote nothing else. He had a boyfriend, I think. I was terribly saddened to hear this. It kind of makes me think that maybe he was always addicted to crystal meth — even back when he made this movie. Since one of the characters dies from snorting some drugs laced with cyanide or something like that, he almost wrote his own end.
Only one of the producers seems to have continued in the movie field, and I couldn’t find anything else about the actors or most of the people involved in the production. Maybe they changed their names. Or maybe this was a one off adventure for most of them. But I will always like this movie and I’m glad he contributed it. Nothing changed of course and the few reviews on IMDB are all about how depressing it is. I have no idea what the circuit scene is all about now, but I imagine it’s pretty much the same: lots of drugs and sex and extraordinarily beautiful men. But now with Prep!