Taxi Zum Klo

We smoked some weed, the local news on mute in front of us. He just wants something on, he says. You know, he says. He doesn't really ask this, just says it. I nod my head even though I actually don't know. I don't know why anyone would have a TV on just because.

He soon put on music. The silent TV stayed on. We got naked and fell into his bed making out where I couldn't see the images on the TV, just its shifting lights, glowing brighter than dimmer, than brighter.

At some point, while he was giving me head, I started rubbing my foot against his ass, knowing this guy has a foot fetish. He sat back more and more, his face making that "fuck yeah" face that is one of the most beautiful things to see, to see someone lost in pleasure, to know that someone is feeling it. He kept leaning back more and more, rubbing his ass against my foot. He reached for the lube and soon was riding my big toe.

Afterwards, I rode the subway home, thinking of how good a burrito would be. I bought one. I ate one.

I watched Taxi Zum Klo and then Getting Go, the first amazingly good, the second one really not good at all.

Taxi Zum Klo is one of the more honest gay movies I have seen. There is no melodrama - no struggles of a man coming to terms with his identity, with coming out, or with exile from his family or community. There is none of that boring egotism of gay men trying to make their own overblown insecurities a narrative worthy of a feature film. There is also none of the moralism that seems to also be in too many gay films - that there is something sinister or depressing about cruising. Instead you have a movie that depicts something vaguely resembling a reality that feels familiar to me - a man who manages to balance a professional life with a life in which he parties hard and seeks out sex everywhere. That this movie came out in 1981 is pretty amazing to me. It's really funny and really honest. The film opens with Frank Ripploh wiping his ass after taking a shit. That right there announces everything - that this movie you are about to see is going to give it to you real, warts and all.

Then fast-forward some nearly thirty years and you get the shockingly conservative Getting Go. The filmmaker's attitude toward sex is so Victorian and prudish. Compared to the movie I had paired it with, it felt dishonest, all the more so because its framing device is that it's an actual documentary being filmed, though really just a conventional love story. The filmmaker/narrator follows around a go-go boy he is infatuated with under the pretense of making a documentary about him. When he interviews the dancer about go-go dancing, he does so with questions that make it seem as if there is something depressing and degrading about it. It was actually a maddening film to watch. Some really saccharine clips of romance, of him and the go-go boy together at last, and all paired with a patronizing attitude towards not only go-go dancers and sex workers, but toward the idea of sex and sexuality itself. It had potential, but it was just really bad. But it's got a lot of company. Put a pretty naked boy in your movie, dumb as it is, and apparently you now have a distributable gay movie. The number of bad gay movies I have seen is way too many, which was why Taxi Zum Klo was such a joy to watch.