Last year it seemed the notorious sex-phobic Australian censors were relaxing a bit after they permitted the documentary Donkey Love to screen uncut, despite the fact it featured footage of men having real sex with animals.
However they’ve now shown their true squeamishness by banning Travis Mathews’ movie I Want Your Love, which was due to screen at LGBT film festivals in Aus this year. The movie, based on Mathews’ acclaimed short, is about a young gay artist who negotiates the difficulties of having sex with his best friend, before he leaves Los Angeles to move back to Ohio.
As with the original short, the film features real sex, which is what’s prompted the Australian Classification Board to ban it. It’s certainly not the first time they’ve got upset about the sight of an erection, previously outlawing the likes of Larry Clark’s Ken Park, Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie (the Melbourne Underground Film Festival defied that ban and got a $750 fine), the French movie Baise-Moi and the controversial A Serbian Film.
Some have accused the censor of anti-gay bias, as the board has approved movies with real straight sex – as long as it’s not in connected to violence – but has outlawed quite a few movies with consensual, non-violent gay sex. Indeed just last year one of Mathews’ shorts, In Their Room: Berlin, was refused permission to screen at the Mardi Gras Film Festival.
As Mathews put it on I Want Your Love’s Facebook page, ‘But bigger than the film, this is about censorship, free speech and maybe a good dose of homophobia.’ There’s also a petition been started on Change.org to get the decision overturned.
If you’re wondering about the donkey sex, that was deemed okay as it depicted a folk tradition in parts of Colombia, where young men have sex with the animals in order to prepare themselves for the real thing. However we’d love to know if the Australian Classification Board would have passed it if the men had been having sex with male donkeys.
I Want Your Love should be released on DVD in the US and UK later this year.
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