Relax ... it's just sex!

Since the mid-1980s, P J Castellaneta has written and directed one short and two features portraying gay scenes in the USA. Together Alone focused on a talkative couple and won several gay film festival awards. Relax ... It's Just Sex! (1997) was talkative too, and tried very hard to be serio-comic. It probably didn't win awards because gay film goers like to take themselves seriously when it comes to handing out awards. Apart from which, the movie is not good as a movie, let alone a gay movie.

Gay movies rarely feature both male and female homosexuals, as singletons and couples, alongside heterosexual friends. At first, Relax looked as if it might be a prejudice-challenging version of TV's Friends. In Castellaneta's movie, ten buddies dine in each other's apartments and take an unhealthy amount of interest in each other's private lives.

You can guess that one of them has just been diagnosed HIV-positive, another has met the latest love of his life, the lesbian couple will get confused, and that a pregnancy-hungry fag hag (Jennifer Tilly) is holding them all together. The only other known faces were Paul Winfield, playing a black agony of an auntie, and Kristin Scott Thomas' younger sister as a lady-like Englishwoman swapping a black for her male Latino cousin. Yes, it's another rainbow-worshiping movie.

The major plot detail sounded original (drunken gay man rapes one of his hetero muggers) and looked almost comically hard to believe. Some artfully OTT jokes and cute insults were tossed into the characters' verbal ping-pong games. There's a lot of data about HIV/AIDS. Nothing else is memorable in a positive way.