Do You Like Gladiator Movies?

The movie GLADIATOR was released in 2000. My friends and I went to a trendy restaurant afterwards. The gay maitre de greeted us and and asked where we had been.

"We saw GLADIATOR."

Joe made a face and hissed, "I saw it. I didn't like it."

"Why not" asked my ex-lover Ms. Carolina. She loved Russell Crowe.

"Because there were no queers."

"You mean like Tony Curtis and Laurence Olivier in SPARTACUS?"

"Exactly."

"Jude Law was a little swishy in the movie."

"Not enough to notice."

"You mean like Steve Reeves."

"Exactly." Joe nearly swooned with delight. "He was who the strange men meant when as a boy they asked me if I liked gladiator movies."

"Someone actually asked you that?"

"More than once and the answer was always yes."

Joe attended to a group of bankers at the entrance and Ms. Carolina whispered, "Now I understand what Peter Graves meant in AIRPLANE."

"No one ever asked me that?"

"I guess you weren't as lucky as Joe."

Not many gladiator movies had been made after 2000.

Certainly nothing like BEN HUR.

The other evening at home I was bored and watched QUO VADIS or where are you going in Latin.

The movie featured Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Peter Ustinov and a cast of thousands.

The producer Sam Zimbalist chose art director Edward C. Carfagno to recreate Rome and all its glory and this film swished like silk curtains in the wind.

Peter Ustinov camped out Nero as a mad violet poet with ringlets.

The writer, actor, diplomat, and family man ( he had four kids ) allowed none of his scenes in QUO VADI to pass with flaming high and bright.

His wife resembled a hissing drag queen.

They both dressed like they were going to the Gay Pride March.

Ustinov was a genius, because Rome was actually very puritan.

Nero's friends fell under his thrall in the movie

Noble Romans were straight, but possessed a taste for brutality according the western historians.

Christians were infecting the empire.

Peter looked like the Old Testament God with a limp wrist.

The Romans knew where to put troublemakers.

The Colosseum.

Man versus beast.

Thumbs down.

Do I like gladiator movies?

Yes.

I prefer to spare life.

It is not a sign of weakness.

Roma January 1985

Rome January 1985

Tanino Liberatore and I traveled in his Fiat from Paris over the Alps into Italy. Tanino was the famed cartoonist of RanXerox a powerful android robot the love slave of the underage Lubna. We had collaborated on a graphic comic and were bound to the Eternal City to pick up money from the publishers. We rolled into Rome at night. The city slept under siege from the Red Brigades. He sought out whose on the Via Veneto. They were scared of nothing, having Albanian pimps. He went off into the bushes, while a sat guard in the car. After we went to a bar to score coke then crashed at his friends' apartment watching EVIL DEAD high on blow. scared me straight.

The next day I wandered through Rome; the Vatican buying a stiletto, lunch at Mario's by the coliseum then through the Senate ruins. Sunset up the Spanish Steps to the Hotel Farber for drinks, then back to party with Tanino.

After we drove to Pescara on the Adriatic to see his parents. We went to a freezing theater to watch porno and afterwards sat on the shore of a foggy Adriatic. Bone cold.

He was a monster. RanXerox that is. We were merely wicked when we were young and when we weren't so young too