A hot trend is to render gay sex as symbolic of one's downfall. In Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky's new PSA, "Desperate," a boyish, scabby-faced meth head is reduced to giving oral stimulation in a fleabag hotel room to a balding perv (the length one will go to for Tina money!). This is becoming a motif for Aronofsky, who in Requiem for a Dream immortalized Jennifer Connelly's drug-induced physical and moral decay in the classic "ass to ass" double dildo scene with another woman, surrounded by cheering men in fez hats. An often full-frontally nude (impressive we might add!) Michael Fassbinder is a sex addict in the upcoming Shame. And what signifies his rock bottom? Yup, he gets a blowjob.
This is a cyclical phenomenon. A classic example of this was in 1969's Midnight Cowboy when Jon Voigt's naive hustler gets a BJ in a seedy cinema from a high school nerd (who does the fellatio equivalent of dine-and-ditch afterward). The moral of this could be: If you're gonna sell yourself, make sure the John can pay his bills. Everyone points out drug-addled straight porn actor John Holmes's nadir as when he segued into making gay films. Um, but what about his involvement in the Wonderland murders? Cocaine leads Robert Downey Jr.'s Julian to sell his upper class Los Angeles ass to men in Less Than Zero, and Leonardo DiCaprio gives up hoops for heroin and man-on-man sex in the Basketball Diaries. Don't even get us started on Law and Order: SVU trends--OK, a standout includes Mark-Paul Gosselaar's (Zack in Saved by the Bell!) turn as a straight man who wanders into bottoming in bareback gangbang porn.
Rampant gay sex can also be symbolic of the immoral turpitude of homosexuals themselves. Look at the horror-painted leather underworld Al Pacino explores in Cruising, or the creepy prostitution sex in Mysterious Skin.
To even out the scales, there needs to be a film where a gay man's moral compass becomes skewed and he has to service an unattractive woman.
