"Boy" Meets World - Q. Allan Brocka Talks "Boy Culture"

It's a cavernous-for Manhattan-living room; furniture designed by architects and good art on the walls. The apartment envy only ratchets up after realizing that resident scribe Matthew Rettenmund could have had boy hookers draped over the leather and chrome gear and written the hourly rates off on his income tax return while he was working on his novel Boy Culture, which chronicles the misadventures of a insouciant rentboy who answers to the letter X. "I've gotta get some hookers," Rettenmund jokes about his recent trip to Los Angeles for Boy Culture's Outfest debut, "I've got to take the plunge."

Tonight, his pad is given over to a party for Boy Culture's co-writer and director Q. Allan Brocka, commemorating the film's Tribeca Film Festival premiere, but Rettenmund admits he considered hiring call boys for the event. "I wanted to have hustlers walking around handing out the food naked," he boasts, but when it comes right down to it, Rettenmund is fairly shy. "I have a very vivid imagination," is how he explains his research into the sex trade.

Meanwhile, Brocka saunters over in jeans, balancing a heaping plate of shrimp. "Breakfast," he says, matter-of-factly motioning toward his plate, explaining he's still a couple of time zones away. Brocka's peek into the sex trade also turns out to be Vivid, but in his case, that's the adult video label and a documentary he lensed about the Vivid girls. "They're adult actresses," Brocka explains, "And going into that project, I still had these thoughts in my head, even though I knew so many sex workers in my life. I thought they'd be these women struggling through life, trying to pay their way through college. Yet every single one of them was totally business. It was about becoming the most famous porn star in the world. All of them! Seven out of eight were in long-term relationships, or even had children. It just totally blew my mind, and I'm not saying that's true of everyone you see on a street corner or starring in a porno movie, but they're not all victims. I think we need to get out of that mentality; that's why I'm all for legalizing it."

So did this odd couple actually meet? "I met Allan briefly for a dinner after the film had been shot," Rettenmund explains, "He seemed like a nice guy. And obviously, he didn't phone it in because he immediately changed the race of one of the characters." It's a point he's just now reconciling. Rettenmund tried his hand at an early draft of the screenplay, but as he'd been working on this piece since he crafted it to gain admission to a particularly rigorous writing class at his alma mater, The University of Chicago, where the book was originally set, he threw in the towel. Even after coming across some casting notices for the film searching for a black actor, Rettenmund still didn't put two and two together. When the penny finally dropped, he was afraid the producers he optioned his book to might have missed the point of it as "a critique of white, gay male culture." Rettenmund adds, "When I finally saw it, I realized they not only picked up on the finer points, but they enhanced them. I tend to panic at first. In this case, I panicked and the final outcome was just terrific and a real tribute to the book."

Brocka explains his motivation for the color change as part of a larger process of self-examination. "While I was reading the book," he says, "I was thinking about where I was going career-wise, what I wanted to do with my life and what kind of films I wanted to make. I had just written Eating Out and it looked like it was going to happen. That was an all-white script. I had written six other screenplays where the leads were people of color and the only one that got made was the one where all the leads were white. As a person of color myself, I just couldn't do another one. It was purely just my own hang-up. If I was being paid a million dollars making some big budget film, then I'd have an excuse. I could go make any indie film I wanted, but to work so hard to make a film that doesn't represent myself, I just can't bring the energy."

It's just one of the many parallels the director sees between his own industry and sex work. "In the end, it all comes down to money," he explains, "Actors feel less bankable if they can't book roles and there's this constant fear: am I not booking these roles because I'm gay?" Working steadily as an out director is also one of the many reasons why he's so happy to be returning to Outfest for his eighth year. "Outfest is the whole reason I have any kind of work at all," he enthuses, "I wouldn't have a career if it weren't for them." And while Brocka may be as inexperienced as Rettenmund when it comes to rentboys, he does seem slightly more eager. "I think everyone has a sexual side," the director explains, "I totally see myself hiring a hustler someday. If I had the disposable income, I would have done it by now, just out of sheer curiosity."