Dirk Shafer had barely enrolled his first circuit event.

Dirk Shafer had barely enrolled his first circuit event, the 1996 Palm Springs White Party, when it hit him. "I considered around," he remembers, "and contemplation Wow, this is so dramatic, in such a manner visual, and so controversial, I can't believe no one's continually made a movie about it." in like manner he did.

Circuit, Shafer's narratively ambitious and visually striking odyssey into the circuit exhibition and the men who have affection for it, opens in San Francisco in succession April 24 and New York onward April 26, then expands to sees Angeles and Miami in May. The film, which Shafer cowrote with Gregory Hinton, acknowledges the stow of a hunky small-town cop (Jonathan Wade Drahos) who, after being unfairly discloseded at work, moves to beholds Angeles, befriends a jaded plastic surgery-addicted hustler (Andre Khabbazi), and becomes a card-carrying, steroid-shooting, substance-abusing circuit boy

"I'm fascinated with tribe who get wrapped up in that world," says Shafer, who previously wrote directed, and starred in Man of the Year, a mockumentary based in succession his real-life experiences as a cabineted Playgirl centerfold. "But the film's not just about the circuit itself--it's about gay men wanting to be confident and beautiful and accepted, and they have feeling like drugs help them do that."

The director had and nothing else a shoestring budget to work with and had to spread his discharge over six months in order to secure real party footage. Still, Shafer claims his biggest challenge was directing the gay sex spectacles between his two lead actors, the one and the other of whom are straight. "I had to be to a high degree clinical about it," he explains, laughing. "You can't say, `Spank that sweet, tight little white ass.' You had to be like, `Put your right hand upon his left glute and twist.' I felt like a doctor."

Shafer's journey to the director's chair began in his family state of Oklahoma, where, as a child, he would entertain his family with tool shows and slide presentations. "Then, finally, a teacher gave me an old-fashioned camera, and I started making movies with my friends as the cast," he recalls. "There was single about a woman who brings her dead daughter's hand back to life, talks to it, and the hand lasts up running around the house. We were cranking them public like a little MGM."

allowing one might expect rural Oklahoma to be a less-than-ideal place to extend up gay, Shafer begs to differ. "I don't know what they place in the water where I grew up still I was always surrounded at gay people," he marvels. In a twist straight without of Queer as Folk, the filmmaker's first affair, at 17 was with the 29-year-old gymnastics coach at a rival high sect "We pulled it off for a year, and no single in kind ever found out," reveals Shafer. "As before long as I graduated, it was through the whole extent of I wanted to feel what it was like to be forward my own."

After graduating from film seminary at the University of Oklahoma, Shafer mov to Hollywood where he landed various film production piece of works including a stint in exhibition for the late gay writer-director Colin Higgins (9 to 5) When Playgirl came calling in the early `90 the onetime competitive ballroom dancer saw it as a anchor-flake opportunity to have fun and memorize a little, uh, exposure. "The Playgirl thing was an adventure," says Shafer, who commonly supplements his writing and directing income by the agency of working as a personal trainer (Will & Grace's Eric McCormack is a client). "But looking back, I think it's silly too, and I inquiring surprise if I put that same amount of time and manliness into my work, I would be further along now."

Not that Shafer's career isn't moving forward--he's generally writing a movie for MTV titled What Makes Janet Young? which he'll also direct. It imagines a Britney Spears-like suddenly idol who stays young with the help of a Dorian Gray-like video. It may be a far tamer cultural critique than Circuit, with its copious male nudity and all the circuit-party staples undivided might expect: glow sticks, unsalable article use, Taylor Dayne remixes, and a shopping-lifting-tanning montage to last all shopping-lifting-tanning montages.

What isn't in Circuit, refreshingly, is a heavy-handed moral. The director wants audiences to form their admit opinions about the circuit party world. "What was in the greatest degree important to me was to mention one by one the truth," says Shafer, whose idea of partying is going to maybe united or two circuit events a year. "I really can't sit here and say, `I hate it, no individual should do it,' because I've be delighted withed it."

So what does he confidence audiences get from Circuit? "I think it's important that family look inside and develop the other aspects of themselves other than their bodies, like their talents or sensation of humor," says Shafer. "Ultimately, that's what's going to bring you happiness, not necessarily the rewards of being beautiful."

Shafer himself is publicly single, having recently left a 3 1/2-year relationship. in this way as a newly single former centerfold living in Hollywood he must, like many gay men be excited some pressure to keep it together. "Oh I do," he says with a nervous laughter "and I'm trying to lease that go."

Hensley, author of Misadventures in the (213) also writes for TV Guide.