Real Sex in the City

Travis Mathews

I Want Your Love, the unflinching, sexually explicit film directed by Travis Mathews (Interior. Leather Bar, In Their Room) is now available on DVD.  The romantic interweaving of friends and lovers in San Francisco features more graphic sex than most films would ever dare. We sat down with Mathews to talk about making the film and the reception it's gotten.

The Advocate: I Want Your Love is a very bold statement. Where did the title originate?
Travis Mathews: I had already started writing the script for I Want Your Love, but I didn’t have a name for it. I’m very inspired by music and at the time I was listening to a Chromatics record and I fell in the love with their song “I Want Your Love.” I thought it made sense with the story I was telling. It was all about these characters searching for intimacy, love, closeness, and connection.

I Want Your Love feels like an extension of your documentary series In Their Room, which profiles men at their most intimate moments, sexually and emotionally. How did that series come about?
In Their Room involved a few things coming together at the same time. Butt magazine put out a call for short films for a show they were curating. I was interested in showing men in ways that we are not accustomed to seeing — very raw, very vulnerable, very candid — which I think shows a real strength as opposed to a cosmetic strength that we see in most hypermasculine portrayals of men in film that are not quite as honest. 

Was it difficult to find gay men who were willing to participate in the project?
The first person I shot for In Their Room was a guy named Dino. We met on Craigslist. I went over to his house and I still didn’t have a clear idea of what I was doing so I leaned on all my documentary skills. I just started interviewing him. Then I went home and looked at the footage and knew there was something interesting going on there. I decided to put out a call to all my friends in San Francisco, and within two weeks I had finished the first In Their Room — San Francisco. This sounds a little bit cheesy, but it was one of the only times in my life that felt purely magical. I took my hands off the wheel and it just made sense.

Would I Want Your Love exist had you not made In Their Room?
No. While doing [In Their Room] I became excited about the narratives I heard from these guys about contemporary gay life that I wasn’t seeing in film. It got me excited about taking a stab at writing I Want Your Love.