Sex was never meant to be “safe” or “negotiated” – or fatal.
- “Jeffrey” (Steven Weber)

Jeffrey has obviously never heard of the sex wars, teenage pregnancies, breech births, flirting, jilted lovers, extra-marital affairs, syphilis, rape, abortion, arranged marriages, prostitution, harems, divorce, depression, make-up, plastic surgery, anorexia, workplace romances, dating, the pill, impotence, gay bashing, capital punishment for sodomy or adultery, blackmail, the Trojan wars, Romeo and Juliet, the closet, the hanky code and so on, and so on, and so on.

Sex is a volatile and complex thing that’s attended by innumerable rituals, codes and negotiated rules. Sex often has fatal and unwanted consequences, and things that make the experience “safer” such as various forms of contraception or clandestine lovers doing it in secret hideaways predated the AIDS crisis by thousands of years. It’s hard to imagine how any kind of sex could occur without some form of negotiation or the presence of some kind of risk.

Even virgin teenagers, with their wild romantic and sexual fantasies, unwanted public erections or confusing, cramping menstrual experiences, understand the elemental, primal power of sex before they’ve even experienced it. Somewhere along the road to adulthood, however, many gay men seem to lose this knowledge. For only in the solipsistic, reality-starved, vacuum-sealed echo chamber of gay ghetto culture, the setting for the pathetic Jeffrey, could the idea that sex is naturally uncomplicated and should come with no consequences be expressed so guilessly.

Jeffrey is, easily, the worst gay-themed film ever made. Given the generally low quality of gay-themed, films, this is quite a condemnation, but Jeffrey easily qualifies. It is staggeringly bad.

At the start of this film, Jeffrey (Steven Weber) tells us that even though he “loves sex” he can’t cope with the confusions and pressures of a gay sex life in the age of HIV/AIDS, so he’s decided to become celibate. Temptation abounds, however, especially at the partially clad, sweaty world of the gym, where Jeffrey meets flirtatious Steve (Michael T Weiss). Jeffrey plucks up the courage to go on a date with Steve, but Steve’s HIV-positive. What's Jeffrey going to do?

Who cares?

I’m not sure why anybody would want to make or watch a light, ditzy comedy about AIDS, especially in 1995, when the epidemic was at its peak. More people in America - most of them gay men - died of AIDS in 1995 than in any other year.

Death and dying are ever present in Jeffrey, but the film treats them as important but strange guests, to be revered and respected but best left alone. “Hate AIDS, Jeffrey, not life”, is a representative line of dialogue. But how can Jeffrey, or his audience, come to hate AIDS when it seems like quite a benign thing that can be easily salved with discos, dish and dating? The film doesn’t have to be morbid, and a light-hearted exploration of how the superficialities of gay life have been warped by HIV/AIDS is a compelling idea, but just making everything silly and funny sucks out every drop of potential drama, humour and interest.

And though the film tries to perch itself on an altruistic high horse, its attempt at broad comedy means it is snared in the sour trap of exploitation. Everyone that appears on screen is made fun of in one way or another, and stereotype abounds. The moment a character steps into a blue-lit alley where cyclone fencing and garbage bins are found, ethinc gang thugs emerge from the shadows and beat him up and steal his wallet. A Catholic priest (Nathan Lane) waits in his confession booth like a spider to jump any half good-looking guy that enters the church. Every gay character older than fourty has a tongue dripping with acid and an encyclopaedic gift for fashion and home decorating. Instead of generating a comfortably knowing buzz of warm comedy, with familiar archetypes ribbed and teased for their funny sides, Jeffrey just spews bile and contradiction left, right and centre.

In the film’s one truly hilarious scene Steve comes home to an answering machine message from a freaked out Jeffrey who’s giving him the brush-off. Steve’s reaction is to immediately put on some Hi-NRG house music and start shuffling around his apartment, his body grooving and grinding the anguish away, his face grimaced with conflict until he starts twirling furiously, arms outstretched in a Wonder Woman style spin which the camera catches with an overhead shot, in case he takes off like a helicopter, I guess.

Zany romantic comedies don’t tend to include terminal illness at the centre of their plots. Would You’ve Got Mail have worked if Meg Ryan had leukaemia? I’m trying to imagine American Pie with “this one time, at band camp, I found out I had multiple sclerosis!” HIV/AIDS doesn’t neatly squash into the frame, and if it is to be underplayed, then something far more significant than unemployed actors trying to get laid in New York has to be present. Jeffrey aims for nonsense, and is far more successful than it realises.