Straight Acting in gay New York

There's a scene in the movie Boiler Room where a group of stockbrokers are eating a celebratory dinner at a restaurant in Manhattan. They get into a drunken tiff with a table of gay men next to them. That's when one of the stockbrokers makes a suggestion:Stockbroker: "Hey, you know what they should do with you guys? They should take all of you guys and throw all of you on a fuckin' island somewhere."Gay man: "Oh, yeah. Hey, guess what."Stockbroker: "What?"Gay man: "You're on it."New York is gay. Gayer than a picnic. Gayer than an Easter parade. So it was only natural that the premiere of my first documentary film, Straight Acting, should be at New Fest, the New York Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Film Festival. After all, it was NYC in all its gay glory that had helped kick my butt out of the closet and into queer life.The first time that I came to the city six years ago, I had been a supreme closet case, a moody Mormon conservative with my suppressed sexuality written all over my strained face. You know, like Joe Pitt in Angels in America. And like Joe I couldn't help but be seduced by the freedom of the city. On my virgin journey on the subway, timidly taking my seat on the L train, I ended up, like John Rocker had warned, across from two shaved-headed, tattooed, and pierced hard-core punks. As I stared like the tourist I was, the one leaned over and stuck his tongue in his boyfriend's mouth. Damn, it was hot.Later, standing in front of Titian's Venus and Adonis in the Met, and crying like a lost child, I realized that there was no question I was a queer. Who else cries over the pretty paintings at the Metropolitan Museum?So I went home and eventually got around to telling my family that I was gay, and then...nothing. I ended up in this kind of limbo, afraid to give up my old life and reach out for a new one. That's when the city rescued me again, this time with its tragedy.As I watched so many New Yorkers die on my television that morning in September, I started to get the shakes. All these folks, normal people like me, had gone to work and then disappeared without a trace. The mortality of it hit me with the bitch-slap I so richly needed. I didn't want to disappear without a trace. So within a month, I had moved to Hollywood, started a new job, and gone to my first L.A. gay bar. Life was too short to live other people's lives.There was one other fallout for me from that day. Not long after, I read an article in The Advocate about Mark Bingham, the gay man from San Francisco who had gone down heroically with his fellow passengers on Flight 93, which crashed in a Pennsylvania field rather than into the U.S. Capitol or the White House. Mark was a rugby player, and he played on a gay rugby team in San Francisco. The idea of a rugby team made up primarily of the kind of queer guys who would play a hard contact sport intrigued me. I'd realized right away how little I liked hanging out in the bars with gay men I had nothing in common with--other than sex. I needed a way to meet other queers who were my kind of guys.So I joined the L.A. Rebellion, a gay-friendly rugby team, and met a bunch of men, many of whom were going through an experience similar to mine. Often dissatisfied with life in the gay ghetto, or tired of the stereotypes forced onto them, they were looking for a place where they could be openly gay while still doing the things that they liked to do as guys, like running around a muddy field trying to tackle a large man with a ball. When I later met the documentary producer Amy Sommer, a straight woman with the kind of open-mindedness you've got to look hard for these days, I talked to her about all these gay guys who were carving this new space for themselves.Thus the film was born.It wasn't just my rugger friends and I who were experiencing this newfound freedom to be the kinds of men we wanted to be. In other "tough guy" activities gay men were defying the homophobia of the sports world and claiming their space on the pitch. I ended up in Oklahoma and Las Vegas filming rodeo riders, in Texas and London filming rugby tournaments, and, inevitably, back in New York, this time for the Chelsea Challenge, a hockey tournament organized by the New York City Gay Hockey Association.I found a bunch of guys, some of them with "New Yawk" accents, who were also out athletes, putting themselves on the line to play the sport they loved. I named the film Straight Acting to commemorate my own transition from "acting straight" while in the closet to being openly, honestly gay while playing what is erroneously considered a "straight guys' sport."