The Patriarchs

A desperate love story fueled by wine and whiskey, The Patriarchs bashes gay capitalism in an orgy of queer liberation and failure.

Daddy love, you never came out of a cunt.

From these first spoken words, The Patriarchs promises an apocalyptic journey through the failures of queer liberation, gay assimilation, and the despair inherent in utopian politics.  The movie weaves two narratives: A symposium of vile, drunk white gay men ranting about erotics and a love story of two strangers: a middle-aged alcoholic and a homeless graffiti punk.  The symposium tackles the questions of a gay culture ravaged by disease facing the horrors of an earth collapsing beneath the weight of industry. Violent sex, alcoholism and creative failure consume the day the lovers share.

Drowning in race, class, and gender wars, gasping for revolution and liberation, seething with lust, violence and addiction, The Patriarchs is a bizarre, underground elegy for the generation of artists and lovers who fought and died for the sexual revolution only to be swallowed by the greed of gay assimilation.

The Patriarchs refuses simple answers. After gorging upon this cornucopia of sexual and political perversion, viewers will be abandoned in a state of ideological indigestion, guts burning from the doomsday schizophrenia of this sadistic homage to Plato’s Symposium.