Today's Moment Of Pure Ridiculous Joy: "I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance"

Fun fact: There is a 2001 three-act opera exploring, parodying, mocking and even sympathizingly understanding the cultural underpinnings and social normalizations of The Jerry Springer Show. It is called (if you can even believe this name wasn’t already taken) Jerry Springer: The Opera.

Its breakout song—at least for gay men at massive circuit parties in the early 2000s—was “I Just Wanna Fuckin' Dance,” in which a stripper who is done being belittled and called a whore takes ownership of the actions and choices her circumstances have offered her and proclaims “I’m tired of all this trying / I wanna do some living / ‘Cos I’ve done enough dying / I just wanna dance / I just wanna fucking dance!”

Yes, there is swearing. It’s about JERRY SPRINGER.

But back to us gays and our massive circuit parties (which are massively massive dance parties with laser light shows, rampant shirtlessness, speakers the size of industrial refrigerators and deafening remixes of awesome dance songs, with the exception of Madonna’s appalling rendition of “Don’t Cry For Me, Argentina,” which is in every conceivable way the polar opposite of awesome and you are to NEVER MENTION AGAIN). Anyway, we gays OF COURSE made many deafening remixes of “I Just Wanna Dance,” which is an awesome dance song. Plus it’s about wanting to dance. TOTAL TWOFER.

Speaking of twofers, here’s a super-awesome remix (though we're now long past the 15th anniversary) paired with dance clips from every awesome genre of awesome movie musical from Sweet Charity to Xanadu. IT. IS. SO. AWESOME. Watch it. Love it. Sing along with it. If it doesn’t make you wanna be gay, it will at the very least make you wanna dance. I mean wanna FUCKIN' dance!

Movies: The Boys in the Band

I tried. Again. But the plot has way too many illogical stupidities. And I quit within the first hour.

I get how it was groundbreaking 50 years ago when it put gay men front and center in a narrative that didn’t play us as one-dimensional faggot stereotypes. And I appreciate that it let the gay characters be messy and imperfect and complicated and unlikable for reasons any other character in any other narrative could be unlikable.

But the conceit driving the entire plot was illogical then and it’s illogical now—and we’re no longer in a zeitgeist where gays are so desperate for representation that we’re slavishly thankful for sloppy pop culture just because it mentions us.

Maybe in another 50 years a director or screenwriter will find a plausible way to keep nine arguably unhappy people from en-masse leaving a hostile, toxic, physically violent birthday party before the end of the first act. Until then, I’ll just appreciate the fact that this revival appeared on Broadway and now in this movie starring all out gay actors, many of whom are relatively famous. And for that, I am indeed slavishly thankful.