Historically speaking, queer filmgoers have been bad cinema's best friends.

Thanks to the magic of camp appropriation, gays seized the foulest dregs of Hollywood, then sweetened and strained them through an entirely novel way of looking at film. Who would remember Maria Montez today were it not for Jack Smith's delirious celebration of her subcompetent allure? But since the mainstreaming of camp a specifically gay way of looking at film, or anything at all, has gone the way of the passenger pigeon. Gays today, like boring people everywhere, prefer movies about characters kind of like themselves (except younger and hotter).

Still, there's an abundance of great gay literature, and great gay visual art, and great gay theater—so what accounts for the fact that, given a random gay romantic comedy and its random straight equivalent, the gay movie will inevitably be lazier, duller, and generally more excruciating than its straight counterpart?

The answer is that gays, long starved for protagonists created in their own image, have unquestioningly gobbled up every last gay-themed movie. As Will of Will & Grace chirpily put it, "Let me tell you a little secret that we try to keep within the community: Gay movies suck. But until the laws change, we're still obligated to go see 'em." (Will has a lot of nerve to talk about sucky gay anything.) Whether it's about prissy preteens or wasting AIDS patients, wise old queens or shrill fag hags, obnoxious circuit boys or attractive trannies (or all possible combinations of the above, stuffed into one toneless cacophony), a gay movie will move tickets at the art-house box office. Not because it's good, but because it's good for "the community." And while gay-themed films have not sold tickets at a clip that would satisfy big studios—except for Brokeback Mountain—sales have been robust enough to maintain a entire pack of specialty distributors trafficking in hairless male chests (and, to a lesser extent, nuzzling pink-hawked girls).

You've no doubt seen the logos—the notoriously unchoosy Strand Releasing (a sampling of the more self-explanatory titles in their library: Testosterone, Lesbians of Buenos Aires, Beefcake), TLA Releasing (Adam & Steve, 9 Dead Gay Guys, Circuit), plus Wolfe Video, Frameline, and more. They barely have to market their damn movies—give it a gay-sounding title or slap a fresh young thing on the poster, and their work is done. Which means the filmmakers barely have to try.

Imagine, if you can bear it, the pitch for a movie like the unforgivably lame Latter Days: "So, it's about a gay Mormon, and he wears this adorable little tie—" Sold! The movie eked out a few encouraging reviews, thanks mostly to its being banned in Salt Lake City, but really, it's horrible. Horrible. No one should see it.

Or take Q. Allan Brocka's Eating Out, a lifeless romantic comedy about a straight boy pretending to be gay to attract a coed fag hag still hung up on her hot homosexual ex. Why must gay comedies always feature an annoying, screechy-voiced girl who gets equal screen time with the gay hero? The only hypothesis I've been able to come up with—apart from the unpleasant notion that gay screenwriters suffer from virulent misogyny—is that next to a screaming harpy, a gay protagonist is gonna look hot. Who cares if Gabriel in Trick has zero personality? You're just thrilled that Tori Spelling—as (wait for it) an idiotic young lady still fixated on her high-school homo sweetheart—has finally shut her lip-synching mouth.

And when queer filmmakers take on a tried-and-true formula, like Todd Stephen's Another Gay Movie, a twist on the virginity-shedding graduation summer of Porky's or American Pie, things go horribly wrong. Like hamster wrong. The words "butt cherry" and "man-snatch" wrong.

Lesbian movies, meanwhile, are susceptible to grave sins of their own. Coming-of-age movies like the catastrophically stupid Better Than Chocolate manage to hit every cliché in the (Rita Mae Brown) book—hidden vibrators, body-paint art, rainbow-festooned bookstores—while careening unevenly between featherweight comedy and dire melodrama.

Mediocre gay movies should embarrass the LGBT community, and the existence of anti-gay laws do not compel the consumption of this endless stream of crap. The only solution to this ugly state of affairs is a moratorium. Gays and lesbians, stop buying tickets to bad queer movies. Queer filmmakers, take some time off for introspection. Are you really doing a service to the community? Or are you shriveling gay pride with every incompetent frame?