Customer Rating:  
Summary: When being gay was a better option than dead in Vietnam
Comment: I don't know how the release of this film coincided with the Stonewall riots of the same year, but either way I approached it with trepidation. Directed by Bruce Kessler, a veteran of such TV comedies as The Monkees and I Dream of Jeannie, my curiosity was on the level of how offensive could this treatment be to a modern gay person. The setup is that two straight men pretend to be gay to avoid the Vietnam draft, and this pretence extends to them living together as a couple in a pre-decorated "cottage" in the ghetto of San Francisco. My reservations were not about how gay the two would pretend to be, but rather what kind of authentic gay men they would be surrounded by. Soon we meet Michael Greer as their landlord who is a walking stereotype - he cooks, he likes opera, he quotes Maria Montez movies, he is effeminate, inconsiderate, vain, over-emotional, mysogynistic, and has poor taste, to boot. The fact that Greer emerged from this enterprise as a "star" to appear in Fortune and Men's Eyes and later doing his Bette Davis in The Rose years later, is probably testament to the kinds of roles gay men were stuck with at the time. Kessler belabours jokes about the campy decoration of the cottage eg a pink bedroom, statues of naked men (which Greer has done), having the two deceivers repeatedly receiving guests who demand a tour. There are also noticable pauses after each line, presumably for the laugh and to compensate for TV's ubiquitious laugh-track. However, not surprisingly, the laughs are few, unless you can listen to "fag" repeatedly, and the words "normal" and "sick" are also used unsubtlely. What did give me a laugh was the performance of Sebastian Cole as Greer's "husband" because he adopts a ridiculous vampire voice that has to be a put-on. We get a set-piece at a gay bar with the men reacting to a punch-up as if gay men never punch, and a party at Greer's place there is the suggestion of the spectrum of types amongst gays. There is a plot possibilty of one of the two deceivers being latently gay but this is soon dropped, and washed away with the excuse that any man who is promiscuous has problems. Kevin Coughlin probably works better as the "straight" man of the two, since he takes the whole thing seriously and doesn't play it for comedy like his buddy, Larry Casey. But then since Casey is the more physically attractive of the two (he spends most of the film with a bare chest), it is easier to accept their behavioural choices. One gets the sense that Casey would have a gay experience just to "get off". Kessler provides one amusing edit from a blown kiss to someone wiping their mouth with a napkin, but ends the film with a stupid cheap gag.
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