In Sordid Lives, small-town Texans are portrayed as overweight, taking life too seriously, and with major hang-ups about sex. The plot revolves around a funeral scheduled for Peggy Ingraham (played in a casket by Gloria LeRoy), who got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night at a sleazy motel and fatally tripped over the artificial legs of G.W. Nethercutt (played by Beau Bridges), a male sex partner other than her husband. Preparations are underway for the service and the reception afterward, to be catered by Peggy’s sister, Aunt Sissy Hickey (played by Beth Grant), who resumes a chainsmoking habit acquired somewhere through five former husbands when the tension level of the soap opera reaches an asymptote. LaVonda Du Pree (played by Ann Walker), one of Peggy’s daughters, tells her sister Latrelle Williamson (played by Bonnie Bedelia) to stop denying that her son Ty is gay, and their cat talk is what drives Aunt Sissy to light up after three days of cold turkey cigarette abstinence. Ty (played by Kirk Geiger), is an actor living in Los Angeles. At first unsure whether to attend his grandmother’s funeral, he has two sessions with his current psychiatrist the day before the funeral. He has been having therapy for the past three years, even changing psychiatrists, because of relationship and identity problems because he is gay. LaVonda’s brother, Wardell Owens (played by Newell Alexander), runs a bar, but some two decades earlier beat up his son Earl (played by Leslie Jordan) because of gay tendencies and then committed him to a mental institution, where he is a transvestite lip-sync Tammy Wynette lookalike. Dr. Eve Bolinger (played by Rosemary Alexander) hopes to cure him of being gay so that she can appear on the Opray Winfrey show, but her maladroit efforts result only in frustration and alcoholism. Noleta Nethercutt (played by Delta Burke), having been cuckolded by the dead woman, teams up with LaVonda to play Bertha & Louise at Wardell’s bar. At gunpoint, they order G.W., Wardell Owens, and his brother Odell Owens (played by Earl H. Bullock) to strip to boxers or briefs; then they force them to don women’s clothes and makeup, and obtain apologies from the men for their various sex-related indiscretions. Wardell, genuinely contrite, then goes to the mental institution to take his drag queen son home. Ty finally decides to face the music in what he perceives to be straight-laced small-town Texas, so he flies to attend the funeral. Upon his arrival at the church, Ty insists on telling his mother that he is gay, whereupon they become reconciled. The only character in the film who does not “get physical” is Bitsy Mae Harling (played by Olivia Newton-John), the soloist at Wardell’s bar, who sings the title song and other selections throughout the film, including “Just As I Am” at the funeral. Crudely hilarious lines throughout the film kept West Hollywood patrons laughing over and over again despite extraordinarily trashy Texans, all in contrast with the sophisticated pretty people of Los Angeles portrayed in the film. Sordid Lives, originally a stage play written semiautobiographically and directed by Del Shores, is a film that will appeal to bitchy gays who have been rejected by austere and intolerant families, whom they would secretly like to believe are really living in a Payton Place. MH