Monday 12^th April 2010

A crate of apples in the foyer at London’s  National Film Theatre: help yourself if you fancy a healthy snack. Wander into the Ladies by mistake, according to Robert Nevil, and you might not realise your mistake (DON’T be rude about lesbians, it’s not funny and it’s not nice).

Why on earth are Poor Little Rich Gays within a million miles….?

I’ve always had it in for the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival (believe it or not, an annual event). For me, it means one thing: Robert Nevil diarized and unavailable for weeks.

And the horror of it, from all I’ve heard. One year I could swear there was a six-hour epic about Gay Life in the Gobi Desert. They planned a disco night, but nobody came.

This year, RN was accompanied variously by Eddie Sedgewick, Joshua Baring, and Helmut Mutti (straight, but complaining of the unattractiveness of the boys on the screen). They saw one film about a ‘boi’ (a lesbian with a goatee apparently) looking for her orgasm, which she had mislaid. Nobody had the sense to tell her to go back to where she last saw it. Another was about grim Orthodox Jewish butchers having it off in Jerusalem and a third concerned the refurbishment of old dildoes.

Robert Nevil and Joshua Baring have described Raging Sun, Raging Sky to me in some detail. It is Mexican and has everything: lovely thoughts, some of them even written on the screen for ease of understanding: ‘Sacrifice is love, love is sacrifice. Nature must have her demands’. Lovely action too: a young slapper has sex with a hot young boy who leaves and wanders round Mexico looking for boys to have sex with. Meanwhile a hunk is wandering round Mexico looking for boys to have sex with. He comes upon an ugly having sex in a lav. He thought he wanted to get involved but got scared. The ugly then wanders round Mexico looking for boys to have sex with. Now we know the hot young boy and the hunk are meant for each other. They wander through Mexico in the rain. The ugly tries to interrupt them. Finally the ugly gets raped in a nasty part of Mexico while the other two had sex.

No wonder the Mexican Tourist Board have put their stamp on this glory.

Joshua Baring got the giggles and was told off by some prim Art House Cinema gays. The last part of the film was mad. ‘Everyone seemed to be doing a lot of flying and running and dying and resurrecting,’ Joshua remarks. ‘It was AWFUL.’

The clothes at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival were awful too but Poor Little Rich Gays do not merely sneer. The obscure, you know, the minor, the forgotten – it’s what we like. Sharon Osbourne! Katie Price! Jane Austen! Fuck off!

What about The Man Who Loved Yngve? Stavanger, 1989. Norway, so un-Poor Little Rich Gay. Oily fish and beer but charming, intimate, confused 17-year-old boys, one of them reminding Robert Nevil of the Austrian scion of a condiments empire he had a pash for at that age.

Poor Little Rich Gays have always known where the money is.