Although Franco identifies as straight, he's told many gay-themed stories as an actor, fiction writer and filmmaker. He's said he's drawn to this material out of personal fascination and a sense of social justice. As far as he's concerned, there isn't enough sex in popular culture—or enough flavors of the frank and real and artistically expressive kind of screen sex, as opposed to the sunlight-through-venetian-blinds-and-closeups-of-intertwined-hands kind of sex. And the overwhelming majority of screen sex is between men and women.
Franco busts out the word "normative" in one of the interview segments, and it doesn't feel forced, because that's ultimately what "Interior. Leather Bar" is about: the difficulty of trying to tell gay stories in a heteronormative world. Franco wants to know why screen sex can't just be a storytelling tool. Why is it possible to have many varieties of violence in a film and still have kids be able to see it, while even mildly explicit sex will earn an automatic "R" rating? As actor Jack Nicholson observed in the 1970s, cut a woman's breast off with a sword and movie is rated "PG"; touch it and it's an "R." He was exaggerating, but not by much.
Franqui quiere saber por qué el sexo no puede ser tan solo una herramienta para narrar historias. ¿Por qué puede haber tantas clases de violencia en una película y que aún así los niños puedan verla, mientras que una escena de sexo medianamente explícita signifique una clasificación para mayores de diecisiete años? Como el actor Jack Nicholson observó durante los años setenta, "corta el pecho de una mujer con una espada y la película es para mayores de ocho años; tócala y es para mayores de diecisiete". Exageraba, pero no por mucho.
