Gay jeffrey

It would probably all turn sour in the end. Michael T. Weiss is beautiful (and hunky) and one hell of an actor. However, he's put to the test when he meets Steve (Michael T. Weiss), an attractive man he later learns is HIV-positive, forcing him to confront his fear of falling in love with someone in the face of inevitable death. It is both painful and joyful at turns watching the character navigate through a turning point in his life.

Could, but that's the crapshoot of life.

Anyway he's decided to be celibate and fill his life with other things. While some of these fourth wall breaks work better than others, the result is fun and even joyous in ways you’d never expect from a ’90s comedy about AIDS. It’s then that the film skewers the classic ideal of masculinity that society enforces onto the queer community as much as the rest of the world — a rejection of emotion and romanticism.

But even by 1995, everyone knew just what a tragedy this was. It’s not exactly a film about AIDS or gay men, but gay men are the protagonists and AIDS the most extreme case of what fearful doom could become a potential relationship. So, worth seeing but no great movie. Are there flaws in the movie. The characters we meet are intriguing, and though the 2-dimensional stereotypes are made for laughs, we get the feeling that we are laughing at the strange mix of truth and falsehood many of the stereotypes possess; we are laughing not at people who are "flaming" but at characters who are exuberant, joyous people, trying to squeeze every bit of joy and delight that they can out of every moment.

I won't spoil the journey through this story with any specifics, let's just say that Jeffrey doesn't quite get it.

As for the acting, it's purposely broad with Patrick Steward playing against type, both in his role of Picard and in his many Shakespearean ones. So he decides to give up sex completely. Other than that, this is an OK movie.

What most of these narratives share in common is a somber spin on what’s been a horrific nightmare for countless queer people fighting to survive (throughout the ’80s and ’90s especially).

A decade and a half later, his influence on queer comedy is still worth examining, as he is responsible for writing two films that, albeit dated, are valuable cinematic relics from the ‘90s that touched on a cultural zeitgeist that was slowly acknowledging the existence of out-and-proud homosexuals: 1995’s Jeffrey and 1997’s In & Out.

Also the scenes with Olympia Dukakis, Sigourney Weaver and Nathan Lane are great! And others I knew were diagnosed and went in weeks. Had Rudnick covered the same ground as more serious contemporaries like Rent or Angels In America, then perhaps Jeffrey wouldn’t resonate as much as it still does now. 

It’s one thing to make us cry about this painful chapter, but another to make us laugh about it.

Jeffrey's friends advise him to reconsider his celibacy, and give it a go. How else would Jeffrey have seen the error of his ways? But it’s hard being gay and hard, even when the specter of death looms large. 

What follows is a bold, surprisingly irreverent comedy about AIDS that breaks the fourth wall at any given opportunity, like when Jeffrey practically barks at Weiss’s Steve as the rest of the frame freezes so only we get to witness his horniness in full. 

Then there’s the moment when Steve (rather brazenly) asks what would happen if they kissed right there in the gym in front of everyone.

When we were filming the movie, it was on a very low budget, all around the city, no permits, sort of gonzo filmmaking.