"Lie Down With Dogs" probably only exists because it was a product of the mid-90s, and as such has become a bit of a time capsule of an era that is now long gone, for good or ill. In the early 90s entertainment with gay themes began to capture the interests of straight viewers; "Philadelphia," "Priscilla Queen Of The Desert," "The Crying Game" and the PBS mini- series "Tales From The City" were all successful and proved to Hollywood that there was money to be made in "gay cinema." The sole motivating factor in Hollywood is making a buck; suddenly gay meant cash, and there was a flood of gay-themed movies. Most of them were pretty terrible, some of them ("Broken Hearts Club," "Jeffrey," "Billy's Hollywood Screen Kiss," "To Wong Foo") had bigger budgets and tried hard, and sometimes succeeded. The main thing Hollywood created was content: for the first time in history, there was an abundance of gay-themed films that took the subject matter more or less for granted-- these were not stories about perverts, degenerates and losers, the homosexuals of these films were heroes.
Nowadays it's hard to imagine how a film like "Lie Down With Dogs" would get any attention at all. Gay-themed films are the "B-movies" of the day, micro-budgeted without much distribution, but there are scads of them. Most of them are, like "LDWD," fluffy, forgettable and mostly fun, low on budget, acting or story but entertaining enough--like a trashy summer read. "LDWD" in particular shows a time when gay men looked a certain way, acted a certain way and thought certain ways...just listening to the soundtrack is like hearing a time capsule of what the 90s *sounded* like.
I picked this movie up for a dollar out of curiosity recently and found that what the movie is "about" was of little importance--that it isn't about a conflicted gay man trying to come out in a straight world or writhing in shame is the significant thing. That it's a mindless comedy about a young man on the prowl for love makes it no different than thousands of rom-coms made for straight people, which is also significant. There are now dozens of such movies to choose from but that wasn't always the case, and in a weird way makes "LDWD," which is NOT a particularly good film, a bit of a landmark. Also too the fact that the "author" of the film seems to have passed away lends the film a bit of significance, or at least poignancy; all the bubble-headed, insatiable, selfish characters in the film would now be a good deal older as would be the target audience for this film, gay men in 1995. The 90s are gone, the world has changed and "Tommy" and his buddies would have passed the torch to a younger generation of egocentric P-Town tourists by now. It makes the film seem almost sad somehow, in that light. I would be surprised if anyone even remembers this movie at all in another 10 years (or even today), and that's not the end of the world, but as a time capsule of a different era I think it's rather thought-provoking.
