EDGE Boston

It wasn’t until I finally saw Knocked Up that I realized I’d been pursuing Jake Gyllenhaal in all the wrong ways. At first I figured I’d beef up, a la Spartacus, certain the effort would turn Jake into an eternal slave to my man-candy charms. When the only closet that opened up was my own, as I needed room for all the Creatine and, well, candy I’d purchased, I took a tip from Jack Nicholson’s film career and tried the older-man angle. After all, Nicholson’s been getting screen sirens of Gyllenhaal’s maturity since the two Jakes were the same age.

Then I remembered that, while Nicholson may be a pig in movies like As Good As It Gets, he’s an oinker with cash. When the kind folks at EDGE refused to give me a raise of 30 million dollars a column (homophobes!), I almost gave up on Jake. There was a brief period where I tried the Pillow Talk approach, wooing Jake with Manhattan and martinis. But that backfired too. Kids today are no longer Doris Day dumb. Jake was onto my fake Rock almost as quickly as I was onto his real one.

Gere and Roberts, Connery and Zeta-Jones, Douglas and Zeta-Jones, not only are these fictional men great-looking, they can shower fortunes on their significant youngers. I was just about to do something rash, like go after someone attainable, when I took in Judd Apatow’s charming new comedy about love on planet earth. Silly me: Jake doesn’t want a handsome, rich older man any more than he wants a boyish type like Keira Knightley. Like every other smart, young, successful, and, of course, outlandishly gorgeous girl in Hollywood, Jake wants an overweight, homely, lazy, penniless, stoned-out bum. Did I learn nothing from Sideways?

I quit my job at EDGE (the extreme intellectual nature of these columns can only be detrimental to my love life), and my days are now spent playing video games in one hand and downing brewskies and bong hits in the other. Chicks like Gyllenhaal really dig that. Just to make sure I have the right physique for Jake, I’m studying the film canons of Woody Allen, Bill Murray (Jessica Lange and Sharon Stone in the same movie? It doesn’t get better than that!), and this year’s newest leading sex cannon, Jack Black. Who wouldn’t want to spend their holiday with that hubba-hubba hunk of flesh. Elvis Presley was so ahead of his time.

The best part about my new film-inspired love life is that I no longer have to worry about AIDS. Like the L.A.-based career woman, Alison Scott, in Knocked Up, the worst that can happen if Jake and I have unprotected sex is that he’ll end up with a bun in his oven. I can think of worse scenarios. HIV isn’t even a grey area in Katherine Heigl’s sexual anatomy. Were two male movie characters unfortunate enough to have drunken intercourse with condom-less strangers, neither one would be worried about their date’s potential as a life partner. They’d be far too concerned about their partner’s lifetime of other partners.

The good sex news has been brewing for ages, but we longtime gay men just chose to ignore it. Back in 1987, Michael Douglas mounted Glenn Close in her Fatal Attraction kitchen - no sign of condoms among those pots and pans and a carving knife. In those more ignorant times, people viewed the film as a metaphor of AIDS scare. Alas, no. All it really symbolized was that the swinging days of one-night-stands and Playboy Bunnies had finally boiled over.

Since then, Kyle MacLachlan’s ripped into Elizabeth Berkley like a Great White Shark in Showgirl’s 1995 latex-free swimming-pool scene, Iben Hjejle’s climbed aboard John Cusack’s rubber-proof automatic gear shift in 2000’s High Fidelity, and Matthew McConaughey’s gotten more bang for his pleasure buck with Kate’s condom-free Hudson in 2003’s How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. (If it were one of those overly serious "gay flicks," day one would be "Tell him you won’t wear protection.")

Even straight porn is happily more care-free than homo porn. Ever since a few hundred thousand guys were wiped off the face of the earth, those dumb dudes in gay-porn videos got all anal-retentive on us and started wearing condoms. And believe me, it’s not the prettiest part of their pictures. On the local straight porn channel in New York, Ten, you’ll see just about every sex act imaginable, except that pesky one where the guy pulls out a Trojan before mounting the horse. Oh sure, the hetero porn industry’s had a couple of recent AIDS-related "accidents" (surprisingly, the timing of the HIV test and the few dozen film shoots before the results come back doesn’t always sync!), but that’s all in a day’s work of anonymous sex with dozens of partners. Besides, some of those guys are so adorably chubby, latex on their chubbies when they nail the babes would only ruin the realistic oeuvre the directors are going for.

Now that I’m a couch potato, I’m learning that the fat guy’s been winning all along. TV shows like According to Jim, The King of Queens, and Still Standing all feature overweight, deadbeat guys who sit around the house (literally), as their sexy, slim, and ambitious wives do most of the work and still cling to them like clogs to arteries. King’s Leah Remini did gain some weight after a real-life pregnancy, and why those producers didn’t replace her with, say, Jessica Alba, is beyond me. I did tune in to this one show called Roseanne, which had the most ridiculous premise I’ve ever seen. An overweight man is actually married to an overweight woman. Fat chance! The producers must have realized what a farfetched plotline that was, because for the last season they changed the premise to something much more believable - the couple win the Lottery.

Meanwhile, I’m working my remote muscles to catch up on all these smart movies I’ve sadly overlooked. Wedding Crashers has bum Owen Wilson getting babe Rachel McAdams, The Break-Up has dim-witted Vince Vaughn getting complaints from bright-eyed Jennifer Aniston. She’s mad that he watches sports and drinks all day while she works hard for the money. After watching that shrew in on-screen action, I think we all know who broke up with whom in real life. I even had a chance to view Apatow’s earlier, much more naïve work, The 40 Year Old Virgin. In that piece of ludicrous filmmaking, the guy, Steve Carell, is actually kind of cute (and let’s get real, even unsexed he’d have a much hotter - and younger - babe than Catherine Keener), and precious time is wasted on a scene about the "importance" of condoms before intercourse.

The way I see it, it all comes out when Jake does the wash. We’re a couple now, and it’s been glorious for me. While I’m sure the little brokeback missus would love to contribute his thoughts, he’s working double time on a new film, and I won’t let him back in the house until he brings me home some bacon. Since the dawn of time, men have been in charge, no matter what kind of ape they were. Then women told them they wanted to be equal. Later on, females had the audacity to ask their husbands to do unreasonable things, like make dinner and cover their butt cracks. More recently, women have shown an attraction to metrosexuals and - gasp! - homosexuals. The caveman is simply reclaiming his territory. This fall the Geico commercial guy’s getting his own TV show. I wonder what Raquel Welch-like cavegirl-in-a-binkini-loincloth they’ll dig up for him.

It’s not just that the nerds are getting their revenge; onscreen, we’re going all the way back to the beginning. As it turns out, The Honeymooners never over.