So This Is Christmas

An aspiring writer wanders through a city looking for inspiration. Over the course of a day, he has nine distinct encounters.

Justin, a 17-year old entering his final year of high school, gets a job as a life guard at a fitness center. Surrounded by hard bodies of both sexes and instructed by his boss to keep an eye on the steam room to report any men having sex, Justin begins to divine the direction his erotic feelings point. In separate incidents, Vicky and Russell, two older co-workers, hit on him. He tries out responses to both, and then must figure out what to do with his new self-knowledge.

Each of the three short films in this collection presents a young gay man at the threshold of adulthood. In "Pool Days," Justin is a 17-year old Bethesda lad, hired as the evening life guard at a fitness center. In the course of the summer, he realizes and embraces that he's gay. In "A Friend of Dorothy," Winston arrives from upstate for his freshman year at NYU. He has to figure out, with some help from Anne, a hometown friend, how to build a social life as a young gay man in the city. In "The Disco Years," Tom looks back on 1978, the year in high school that he came out of the closet after one joyful and several painful encounters

Melanie Beck is the only surviving victim of a killer-rapist who wears a Freddy Krueger-esque mask and claw. Despite having seen the killer's face, Beck has blocked it from her memory. Becoming suicidal, she tries to kill herself on the beach but is saved by Axel, another rapist sleazeball who keeps her locked in his hotel room. All this builds to a mind blowing conclusion.