Matt Chupack | I Think I'm Gay? / 2019

a comedy of errors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Matt Chupack (screenwriter and director) I Think I'm Gay? / 2019 [18 minutes]

 

Poor Zach (Miles Tagtmeyer). He has just been told by his girl fiend Amy (Rebecca Goldstein) that because he can’t get an erection that she thinks he gay. The only evidence of the fact is that Zach gets immediately confused and contacts his gay friend Kyle (Matt Jennings) for advice.

     Kyle takes him out to a get brunch with his friends, Sandy (Victoria Mele) and Drew (Aaron Jung). Drew, a flamboyant Asian gay man who first question is whether or not Zach likes “dick.”

His answer characterizes this rather puerile little comedy which stereotypes its own characters.

     Zach: “I’ve never tried it. But I can tell when a guy is good-looking or ugly.”

     Drew puts it simply: “If you want to if you are gay you’ve got to get bummed by a guy.”

     He then proceeds to pour out information to the totally innocent Zach about the various “tribes” of gay individuals—"bears, otters, twinks, daddies, sugar daddies, cubs, silver foxes, pups, wolves, bulls, gym bunnies, circuit queens”—enough to confuse even an old pro like me.

     Baffled and feeling utterly out of place, Zach cannot even begin to assimilate all this information, let alone know whether he belongs to this world. The solution is to “take him to church,” which only further flummoxes him until they explain that they mean to take him to a gay bar where he can maybe meet somebody he might like. Where they found one today not swamped by young straights, I have no idea. But maybe that’s the point. Sexuality if so indefinite these days.

    Like the old TV series, “Queer eye for the straight guy,” they go straight (well, they actually zig-zag) to his closet and startled at what is there immediately begin producing new clothes (obviously borrowed from one another) in order to dress him up. Nothing looks quite right until they dress him in a black T-shirt and black jeans, re-arrange his cute red hair and premiere him at the bar, where nearly everyone falls in love with him.

     Immediately, Drew encounters a group of fellow twinks to whom he introduces Zach, one of them, Justin (Adam Razavi) immediately taking advantage of the situation by asking him to buy 10 tequila shots for the two of them and Justin’s friends. Kyle looks on rather forlornly to see from a distance what appears to be Zach’s quick adaptation to the situation.

     Suddenly Justin is bad-mouthing an older man who he feels is a creep just for coming to a gay bar; and before Zach can even comprehend what it means, he’s asking Zach to come to the bathroom with him.

     The very next moment they’re kissing and before he can even think, Justin has pulled down his pants and is actively providing a blow-job.

      But Zach still is soft. Something’s missing. A knock on the bathroom door sends Zach scurrying out, not at all happy with what has just been revealed. The manager, observing what is going on, chases Zach out of the bar.

      Perhaps Sandy, the lesbian, has been right all long. Sexuality is about intimacy and passion, not a quick blow-job or even a forceful fuck with a woman.

      At the end of the evening, both Sandy and Drew have found others to be with. Only Kyle sits alone with his drinks. Observing the fracas, he follows Zach to the back parking lot where the disconsolate would-be gay boy now sits.

       Zach admits that he now realizes that he is just fucked up, but Kyle suggests that it may have just been a scary, random bathroom incident. “You know all this being gay stuff; it’s not as easy as I thought it would be.”

       Kyle’s response is perhaps the most serious line of this comedy: “Whoever said it was easy to be gay?”

       But Zach has learned a few things: “I know that bathrooms are not sexy. Twinks scare the shit out of me. And I have some really amazing friends who stick by me in all my craziness.”

       Well, at least he has one loyal friend in Kyle who now kisses him. In the middle of trying to express that he thinks he “might”….we’re ready to hear him answer that he is perhaps aroused when a voice cries out “Zach.”

      It is his ex-girlfriend standing like a dark rupture of the past with all her cronies behind her giggling, a reminder perhaps that seeking out the gay has been worth it.

 

Los Angeles, June 23 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2026).