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 Just to let you know, by writing this piece I'm pretty much ruining whatever chance I may have had to sneak in a press screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which won't open until December of 2003 (the latest installment of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, opened worldwide last week). Not that I had much of a chance to begin with, but if I did, I can kiss it goodbye by giving you this simple link. Yeah, I'm sure Peter Jackson will love that one. Shit, I'm not even trying to promote the film, and it sure the hell tweaks me. The images of these characters that I hold so sacred being salaciously exploited and re-interpreted to satisfy some depraved and morally inappropriate viewpoint… sure, it sounds great on paper, but does it work in practice? I asked Ben, a gay co-worker, what he thought of it, because god knows as a straight guy I'm completely out of my depth on this one. Ben found the site "hysterical." "Lord of the Rings is filled with sensuous, erotic (note I did not say homoerotic) images," Ben wrote. "So, to look at the images and relationships through a strictly homo perspective is funny, and I thought the artwork was quite clever. I mean, I'd pay cash to see some of those characters getting it on in real life… sigh… if only it were possible." And just to prove his Lordliness, he quoted Gandalf the wizard from the first film. "Now, 'ride hard and don't look back'... or was that 'ride me hard?" Ay ay ay.  This Photoshop-enabled twist on Tolkien's tale, courtesy of the Theban Band, is the latest twist on the art form known as slash. What is slash? Well, if I was to capitalize the "s," he would be the former guitarist for Guns 'N' Roses, the nice Jewish boy who wears a top hat and is a slightly warmed-over clone of Joe Perry of Aerosmith, who was a slightly warmed over clone of the impossible and nonexistent bastard child of Keith Richards and Jimmy Page. Without the capital "s," though, slash is the practice whereby an artist or a writer uses popular and established fictional characters and puts them in sexual situations that their original creators would either never have imagined or never have published.Of course, with the popularity of the first film, I have to admit that it certainly was inevitable that LOTR would be slashed. I remember after the first installment, The Fellowship of the Ring, was released I took a fag-hag friend of mine to see it at a local megaplex. She admired the undeniable skill and craft of the film, and seemed to like gruff old Gimli the best (he's kind of a mini-bear if you think about it). So after three hours of grand folklore and wizardry, it finally comes down to the scene where Frodo leaves the fellowship and Sam follows after him. I could just sense that my friend was brewing up a hand-wavey "Hello?!" acknowledgement of perceived homoeroticism, but she managed to keep it under wraps…for a few more minutes at least. When the film ended with Frodo turning to Sam and, smiling, telling him, "I'm glad you're here with me, Sam," my friend had had all she could take and couldn't take no more. She started chuckling, then let loose with an "Oh my! Isn't that touching? Someone toss them a Trojan." "Goddam it!" I hissed (it was a matinee and the end of the film, so I was unlikely to receive a dreaded "Shh!"). "How did I know you were gonna go there? Jesus, is nothing sacred?" "What the fuck are you talking about?" she cackled back. "What do you know about sacred?" Grr. She was right. I pride myself on considering just about nothing sacred. I don't think there's almost anything that can't be turned around for a laugh. Professional comics and the writers of South Park were even able to squeeze humor out of the Sept. 11 tragedy by making Osama bin Laden the butt of many jokes (with the SP staff even taking it a step further with a brilliant riff on the old anti-Hitler Warner Bros. cartoons), and at the time I joined them. So why the hell not Lord of the Rings? Sure I read and loved it… like fuckin' 20 years ago. In fact, I had forgotten so much of it that I had to go back and read it again after seeing FOTR. And I certainly wasn't a total nerd about it. For instance, I didn't wear a Gandalf hat or stand in line at midnight to be the first to see it (though I did for The Two Towers, god help me… not the Gandalf hat, the midnight showing). Maybe because, despite my reaction, it does seem like an obvious choice. There is, of course, the aforementioned (if platonic in intent) intimacy between friends Sam and Frodo. Then you've got the fact that, in a three-hour film, there was only about 15 minutes' worth of screen time where women are featured. I mean, as a heterosexual man, I would love to see a three-hour film where men only pop in and out as ancillary characters, as long as the women weren't Sandra Bullock, Cher, and Olympia Dukakis. As a film about a manly quest, also, Lord of the Rings is a pretty easy target. Like Star Trek (whose Kirk/Spock relationship is easily the most gay slashed of any pop culture pairing), it involves a bunch of men (and the occasional auxiliary woman) on a daring adventure, facing peril at every turn, with no one to turn to but each other for warmth, companionship, and comfort.
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