Inside on the Lives of Gay Men (HBO)
A continent may divide them, but HBO's "Girls" will have to shove over and cede some of the Frank New Voice limelight to "Looking," the network's charming and deceptively significant new half-hour series that premieres Sunday about a trio of gay men living in San Francisco.
What at first seems like your standard (if R-rated) banter-heavy, young-urbanites-seek-love/meaning tale, this time told from a gay perspective, quickly proves to have a truer heart and loftier ambitions.
Yes, creator Michael Lannan is clearly determined to depict and discuss male homosexuality with the same semi-erotic-realism that has become commonplace among heterosexual sex scenes — We’re here, we're queer, we're copulating on screen, get used to it.
Having established this (again and again and once more for good measure), the story becomes both more universal — who among us is not looking for love/meaning? — more pointed, and way more interesting.
In the decades following the Stonewall riots and then the AIDS crisis, gay men became symbolic of society's seesawing definitions of diversity and tolerance (see please the recent "Duck Dynasty" kerfuffle). This story too has been viewed through a mostly heterosexual prism — how are we as a nation, i.e., all the straight folk, feeling about “those" gays today?
Even shows like "Queer as Folk" and "The L-Word" often seemed to have "A Straight Person's Guide to Understanding Gay People" subtext.
Here, not so much. As with "Girls," the purpose is not the view as the vantage point. The world has changed, is changing, just as fast and radically for gay men as it is for everyone else and isn't it time a show dealt with that?
Why yes, yes it is.
"Glee's" Jonathan Groff pulls lead as Patrick, a 29-year-old Midwest transplant struggling to take his work as a video-game designer and his love life to the next level. Antic, unfiltered, anxious and adorable, Patrick can't quite align his vision of life with its realities. We meet him as he engages in a requisitely awkward first time in-park encounter (that evokes, almost litigiously, a similar park scene from "Angels in America") until it is interrupted by a cellphone call. Which he answers.
http://www.latimes.com
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