The wise and funny words of writer-director Don Roos: “It’s exhausting being gay!”

My plan was to share with you large portions of Don Roos’ wonderfully hilarious opening night speech from opening night of Outfest 2009 at the Orpheum Theatre. I had a seat up close and had taped it.

Here’s the problem: the frequent audience laughter – including my own -has drowned out parts of the speech!

So I am missing some of the funniest lines.

Had I known that the writer-director  behind The Opposite of Sex, Boys on the Side and Happy Endings was so damned funny, I would have been madly scribbling down notes. It really was stand-up comedy at its best delivered as an acceptance speech.

Outfest organizers quickly realized what a smash Roos was and have scheduled a Q&A with him next weekend to be conducted by the gifted out director Paris Barclay. Check the Outfest site for details.

Until then, here are some of the parts of the speech/comedy routine that I was able to salvage:

On getting together with partner Dan Bucatinsky with whom he has two children: “I love him, I literally stalked him into submission 17 years ago. … I spend my life creating these weird families that are half-brothers and lesbians, step-brothers, pseudo children. In my real life I have a really conventional family, full of plastic and pacifiers and car seats which completely fills up all the time that sex and pleasure used to.”

Roos remembers growing up “as the only homosexual in America but finally came out to his parents when he was 25: “They were both so shocked it shocked me. I said, ‘Mom, my hobbies are vacuuming and dieting!'”

On Outfest: “It was one of my first experiences of finding people like me, telling my story, our stories. It inspired me. I can’t even tell you how many wonderful movies. One documentary called Changing Our Mind which I saw back in 1991 truly changed my  idea of what it was like to be gay, what it was like to be a human being who loves someone.”

“I’m always happy for my films to be called gay, I’m happy to be called a gay writer and happy to be called a gay filmmaker – very happy.  But it’s weird, as wonderful as it is to finally have a community, to know that there are other filmmakers out there, it comes at a little bit of a price and the price is it’s just not enough to be gay. It’s scary that that’s true. It’s exhausting being gay.”

He said that it used to be enough to be a gay filmmaker “but now that there are so many of us, you have to be a good filmmaker too – as good as you can possibly be in order to be heard.”

Roos had some parting advice to the audience:  a) come out and b) “Go stalk that boy or girl and force them to love you!”

Well, it certainly worked for him!