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11 Mar 2007 04:00 pm

How Gay Is "300"?

Totally gay, according to this still-tingling viewer:

I caught 300 last night and thought I'd pass on my thoughts.

It is a deeply silly and deeply beautiful film. It's most silly when it's trying to be a movie, and it's most beautiful when it's trying to be a graphic novel.  Fortunately, it mostly just tries to be a graphic novel. But, ah, the men Andrew. All those beautiful, beautiful men dancing around in briefs and capes.  It almost brought me to tears. It is perhaps the gayest movie that I've ever seen that wasn't porn.

Those who try to deconstruct the movie into a statement on the current war, or who say that it is racist or (most glaringly wrong) anti-gay are utterly missing the point. Everyone (perhaps excluding the Queen) in the film is gay. You have the butch gym queens of Sparta (I mean can any chisled man run around in speedos and a cape and call himself straight?), and the pierced, shaved, and bejeweled bar queens of Persia. It's gay-on-gay violence, pure and simple. If I were to cast this film in any way (and it really is far too silly for this sort of analysis), I'd say it was portraying the libertarian, buffed and bearded Sullivanistas taking on the effete, decadent elites of the HRC. The movie is clearly on the side of the Sullivanista/Spartans, and so am I.

Here's to speedos, capes, and libertarian principles!

Sure, but no speedos!

(Photo: Moviegoers in Sparta, some 200 kilometres south of Athens, enter a screening of '300', the new Hollywood epic chronicling the Battle of Thermopylae of 480 BCE, 07 March 2007. The Peloponnese town played host to an honourary premiere of the movie. By Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty.)

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