Strangelove

Jorge Xolalpa’s Strangelove streaming series presents interludes depicting the experiences and challenges of a group of gay men in Los Angeles. The men are LatinX Millennials trying to navigate a chaotic kaleidoscope of careers, friendships, and relationships. 

Cristian (Alexis Vazquez), David (Raury Rolander), Rami (Brandon Baez), and Manuel (Edgar Segura) share their capricious quandaries in life as friends, lovers, and confidants.  These characters are moving through largely uncharted waters, creating lives in non-traditional modes as young gay men. Across six episodes, Xolalpa invites the viewer to experience their intimate lives firsthand, both in and out of the bedroom. The boundaries between love and friendship are different than with straight couples and not always clear in every case, and this causes endless pain and frustration. 

While they are all dynamic and outspoken, Cristian is the most powerful and the only one identified as a top in the group. David has his own situation to deal with navigating life with his transgender parent, who transitioned to being a woman before his mother died. They have achieved a strained equilibrium, but there are still issues. David also has a sexual encounter with an ostensibly straight-married male client for whom he’s doing interior design work. It’s not a situation where just anything goes, but many unexpected lines are crossed. 

“…invites the viewer to experience their lives firsthand, in and out of the bedroom…”

The production quality reveals the limited budget for the series, with lighting, sound, and camera work at a lower tier than usual for TV series, but the performances are top notch, and more than offset those facets.  Pacing is good, and with each episode running around 24 minutes, there’s not a huge time commitment in keeping up with the show. 

The parallel show Strangelove brings to mind is the Russel T Davies series from 1999 called Queer as Folk, set in Pittsburgh. The world has changed dramatically in the quarter century since then, and L.A. is radically different from Pittsburgh, then and now, with a whole generation of cultural evolution spanning that time. Layer in the LatinX element of the group, and this show brings a fresh look at what it is to be gay in L.A. trying to make a successful and happy life. 

A heads-up for viewers, Strangelove is an intensely adult-themed show.  Read that as: it features a great deal of explicit on-screen sex mixed in with the soap-opera style drama. The series is in turns tense and humorous, there is joy and happiness in these friendships, around the melodrama. The multiplicity of characters moving around each other’s lives provides plenty of spectacle, and situations deepen and become more complex with each episode.