Greg Osborne | Intersect / 2024

the calm of the gay bar, the peace of drugs

by Douglas Messerli

 

Greg Osborne (screenwriter and director) Intersect / 2024 [30.30 minutes]

 

US director Greg Osborne’s Intersect has got to be one of the worst LGBTQ movies I have ever watched—and since I’ve now watched some 3,000 such films, that is saying a lot.

     This film begins with an absolutely inane introduction spoken in a voice-over about the need for “calm” in a world of constant motion, distraction, and hate. In a highly repetitive speech in which the narrator keeps asking the viewer whether or not he can hear him, the word calm is repeated enough times to almost make the viewer want to turn off the movie at that moment.

     And the “calm” the narrator calls for, evidently, is found in the world of gay sex and drugs, the first segment involving a young man about to get married to a female who, after an argument with her seeks solace in a gay bar, having long been “curious” about gay sex. There he finds anything but calm as a pole performer lures him upstairs for drugs. Somehow, after a long vomiting scene, the handsome user quite explicably is now hooked, on the drugs evidently since we have no evidence that he ever did involve himself with gay sex.

     In the second segment, an experienced gay man attempts to lure a young, highly tattooed pre-med student away from his books, and finally gets him to meet up in a desert gay spa. Once more, the chase seems to be the major subject since we never see them engaged in the “calm” or even the wild chaos of sex.

     And in the third segment we see an entire young police force busily shaking down and stripping hustlers for their own sexual purposes—no sex portrayed—as well as for drugs and kick-backs such as the lovely home to which one young officer retreats after he is fired from the force. Don’t worry about him. The sergeant in charge is also fired and comes looking for him, admitting that he has always had his eye on him, the two evidently falling into a permanent affair.

     Most of these short serial dramas are portrayed by a narrative voice, since the actors, not even listed in IMDb, cannot provide us with the slightest hint that they know how to act. As one Letterboxd commentator put it, “this is a porn film without the porn.”

     I have no clue why Osborne wanted to make this film, what he was trying to say, or who might have put up the money to support such a clueless offering; I can only suppose that the director was also on drugs. Certainly sex was not on this creator’s mind. It’s almost as if this film wants to be gay without being involved in gay sex.

 

Los Angeles, March 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).