The Sausage Sighting at the Film Festival

The Plains, Spring 2015

When I lived in the gay neighborhoods of Los Angeles, New York, and Fort Lauderdale, there were annual Gay and Lesbian Film Festivals to attend.

In the Straight World, not so much.  You can go to mainstream film festivals to see an occasional gay-themed piece (mostly about gay teens being bullied at school) amid the many selections about lonely, isolated heterosexuals and melancholy children:

A woman tries to keep the rattling suitcase of her dead husband closed.

A young boy walks through a deserted city to a house where a little girl is ballet-dancing.

A man chases a balloon through a subway station.

A young girl collects fallen leaves.

There is occasional beefcake.  Graham Patrick Martin, who played a gay hustler on Major Crimes, plays a guy who hires an "authentic girlfriend," and instead of sex, gets a nagging harridan.  But at least he takes his shirt off.

Buffed Polish actor and dancer Rafal Iwaniuk, who has posted a "like" of a gay sauna in Warsaw on Facebook (unless it's another Rafal Iwaniuk) plays a tough who sits next to a guy on a train and makes him feel threatened.

The festival of short films here on the Plains last year was sponsored by the University, and held in three venues downtown.  Most of the shorts I saw were held in a t-shaped theater with folding chairs and couches.

My date (Jimmy the Boy Toy) and I sat on a couch on the left side of the "t," where we could see the screen and the projection booth, a narrow room separated from us by a curtain.

The projectionist stood and walked into the "t" to adjust the sound and so on.  Otherwise he slouched on a couch just in back of the curtain.  He didn't realize that I could see his legs and crotch perfectly, especially when the screen lit up with a bright scene.

He was a college student, tall, a little chunky, with thick hair and a bright, androgynous face, wearing a festival sweater, and very tight jeans that displayed a substantial basket.

He usually didn't watch the movies.  He texted on his cell phone with one hand.  The other was lying on his inner thigh, parallel to his crotch.

Right next to his bulge.

I nudged Jimmy.  We both put our heads on our elbows and pretended to fall asleep so we could see better.

This short was about a young man locked in a room with several versions of himself banging on the door, trying to get in.  Not very interesting.

The projectionist was now paging through something on his cell phone.  I couldn't see what.

He was starting to tent!

The short ended.  He got up to cue the next one: about a woman trying to assemble the fragments of her ruined life in a deserted basement.

Texting again, then back to paging through something.  Porn?  His hand moved to his crotch.  Now he was cupping.

I looked closely.  He was starting to fondle.  The tent came up.

The short ended.  He stood, tenting, and went to cue the next one.  A woman who is distracted by vivid daydreams, and goes to a clinic in an attempt to become "normal," but ends up dancing with unicorn people.

This was a long film, nearly twenty minutes.  The projectionist lounged on the couch and paged through his cell phone again.  The tent returned.  He began to fondle it.

Would he pull it out?

Yes!  Well, at least he unzipped.  Now the tent was in his white briefs, a clear view of a fully aroused Bratwurst+!

He fondled it for a few moments, then slid it back into his pants and went back to texting.

Unfortunately, at the 2016 festival, there was a different projectionist in the t-shaped theater, and no tenting happened.

I did get a glimpse of one of the participants at the urinal.

Impressive, but not really worth sitting through six hours of films about lonely, isolated heterosexuals and melancholy children.

See also: My Platonic Friends and Their Boy Toy; Topped by the Vietnamese Twink