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Cinema & The Circuit

On the big screen, gay party boys are barely there

Written by Steve Weinstein

As anyone lucky enough to experience it knows, a big Circuit party contains enough plots for a whole network of soap operas. Romance, intrigue, sex, substance use and abuse, hot men, sex, hot women, fierce music, dance-music divas, mind-altering psychotropic drugs, great-looking crowd ... did I mention sex? And it all takes place over several hours of a long weekend. So why, with the exception of one minor documentary and an indie, has the Circuit never been depicted on film?

“Part of the reason there haven’t been more films is the distance that the idea of a Circuit party has from mainstream culture,” notes Matthew Breen, the executive editor of the Advocate. “A lot of gay men want to keep it as a secret.” In addition, there’s what Breen describes as “the difficulty depicting that environment; imagine describing it to someone who’s never experienced it—the high sexual temperature, mood-alerting drugs, a communal feel. It’s hard to describe such an alternate experience on film.” Only consider the spate of really bad films in the ‘60s that attempted to reproduce hallucinogenic states of mind, such as The Trip, starring Peter Fonda.

The Circuit represents only a small slice of gay life—and one from which many gay men, in Michelangelo Signorile’s phrase, spend their life outside. “Anything that implies that this is the essence of the gay community, is something that all gay men share as an interest” would be controversial, Breen points out.

As a party producer (the impresario behind the Saint at Large’s Black Party), and as a film producer (he helped bring seminal New Queer Cinema director Gregg Araki to a larger public), Stephen Pevner brings a dual perspective to the subject. “The people on the Circuit aren’t very self-critical,” he says. “They don’t want to see it in a negative light. Who wants to sit in a theater and watch a movie about people just having a good time?”

With those caveats in mind, here is a critical history of the Circuit on film—such as it is.

Proto-Circuit Movies

Before the Circuit, there was disco. If you’ve suffered through Can’t Stop the Music or Xanadu (both 1980), you know that disco may have produced some dynamite music, but it was responsible for really horrible films (to match those clothes). The only disco-era film that stands the test of time is Saturday Night Fever (1977, whose dance scenes were filmed in a Brooklyn, N.Y., club that later became the area’s major gay disco). Into this mosh pit of bad films with good scores also goes the disco-era drama 54, a 1998 drama about the most famous disco of them all, Studio 54, in which Ryan Phillippe, at his most androgynously beautiful, plays a straight boy drawn into drugs, polymorphous sex and swoopy dance hooks.

If the disco-era films were suffused with a gay consciousness, none of them featured out-gay characters. In fact, before this decade, there was no depiction in a mainstream film of gay men dancing together except for a brief scene in 1970’s The Boys in the Band, in which the “boys” do a line dance “like the one we used to do on Fire Island”—where such dancing was necessitated by laws forbidding men dancing together.

In Cruising, the controversial 1980 film, Al Pacino, as a New York City policeman who goes undercover to find a serial killer of gay men, finds himself on a tiny dance floor in Greenwich Village. Cruising was excoriated at the time for the way it portrayed gay men as obsessed with hardcore S&M, but lately it’s had a second look and has begun to be appreciated as the only Hollywood artifact of the heady days between Stonewall and the advent of the AIDS crisis.

Non-Gay Parties

Since the advent of talkies, Hollywood has been giving us depictions of straight couples dancing, from those Fred-and-Ginger RKO confections and MGM musicals to American International surfer quickies and Strictly Ballroom. More recently, there have been attempts to capture the rave or big-room straight club scene, with various success.

It’s All Gone Pete Tong, a 2004 Canadian mocumentary about a DJ who goes deaf, paints a mildly satiric portrait of nightlife in Ibiza. The island gets a darker spin in the 2002 dark British thriller Morvern Caller, in which a poor Scottish girl comes into money and goes raving in sunny Spain. Raves come out a little better in films like all three Matrix films; Groove (2000), a look at the San Francisco rave scene; and 24-Hour Party People (2002), a British film that is most notable for its exploration of Manchester’s underground raves. 

Circuit Drama

A very few recent films have dramatized the gay party scene, most notably Party Monster (2003). It fictionalizes real-life club kid Michael Alig, who made New York’s Limelight notorious before his incarceration for the murder of an alleged drug dealer; it also gave Seth Green and Macaulay Culkin their first grown-up roles.

For better or worse, that leaves Dirk Shafer’s Circuit (2001) as the only full-fledged fictionalized portrait. John, a small-town police officer, moves in with his cousin in L.A. and finds himself in the middle of the West Hollywood scene. He befriends a hustler and an old female acquaintance while he starts taking steroids and every other drug. The film climaxes at the White Party in Palm Springs.

Shafer was constrained by a low budget, but he managed to get some interesting footage of the White Party, and it helps that his two leads (both straight) are good looking enough to pass for Circuit stars. The critics were deeply divided about this film, and so was the ostensible crowd the film dramatized. Many men find this a hateful depiction that emphasizes the worst aspects of the Circuit; while others believe that it legitimately dramatizes the darker side of the party scene.

Aside from Circuit, there have been a few experimental films that have tried to capture the magic of the gay dance floor. Schwarzwald is a short film that depicts the 2006 Black Party theme in fictional form. It stars the female-to-male porn performer Buck Angel as a medieval prince abandoned by his evil mother and watched over by a sorcerer. The movie ends with footage from the party itself, including sex performances, flaggers and the dance floor.

Director Richard Kimmel shot it in one day outside New York City. Pevner meant it as a keepsake for partygoers, but also something that would “legitimize the Black Party for people who had never seen the inside.” It has been on the gay festival circuit, as well as being shown in clubs, which fits with Pevner’s stated goal as “the movie you can dance to” (Saint veteran DJ Michael Fierman scored the film).

Documentaries

The one genre where the Circuit has fared best is in the nonfiction realm. The lone full-length documentary about the Circuit experience itself, 2002’s When Boys Fly follows a group of friends as they prepare for, and experience, the Miami White Party. The most controversial aspect of the film is the depiction of drug use, especially GHB: One cast member did, in fact, suffer severe medical problems and went into rehab. Most observers believe the film is an unfair portrayal.

In Maestro (2004), Roxy: The Last Dance (2008) and Where Ocean Meets Sky (2004), the scene is portrayed far more positively. All three depict aspects of New York’s gay club culture. As its name implies, Roxy celebrates the famous roller rink that hosted a longstanding gay Saturday dance party where Victor Calderone, among others, was resident, and that was the site of many notable occasions, such as appearances by Cher and Madonna. While Where Ocean Meets Sky isn’t strictly about music, this history of Fire Island Pines contains much information about the Sandpiper, where Tom Moulton invented the EP, and its successor the Pavilion.

Maestro is a loving look back at the Paradise Garage, a mega-club that thrived in the early 1980s, and especially the resident DJ, Larry Levan. Although Levan is shown warts-and-all (he died in 1992 after years of drug use), it also celebrates his musical legacy, with notable acolytes such as Frankie Knuckles, Junior Vasquez and Manny Lehman paying tribute to his genius. The film ends with an expansive montage of superstar DJs from around the world. It’s a beautiful sequence that summons up how Levan’s signature beat mixing helped give birth to a whole musical style; but it also celebrates the very best aspects of that ecstatic communion we call the Circuit.

Reader Comments

Steve, you missed a couple movies that I felt really captured the spirit of the dance floor. The first is obvious: “Go” (Douglas Liman, 1999). You just forgot this one, right?  Then there’s “Babel.” The scene with Rinko Kikuchi, the deaf girl, alone on the dance floor after all her friends have met boys is kind of heartbreaking. And we’ve all been there. Anna Paquin dancing to Cymande in “25th Hour” (Spike Lee) captures the joy of it all.

Wish I could find some of the documentaries you mention on Netflix.

By Michael C on 08-25-2009

Well written article and a good read.

By DnSF on 10-03-2010

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