Gregg Araki on sex, film and queer resistance: ‘All the terrible shit in the world is because of sexual repression’

As his 12th feature film, I Want Your Sex, hits theaters, the cult gay film-maker is as fired up as ever

Is straight sex the most perverse sex of all? Gregg Araki’s new film makes a convincing case. Titled I Want Your Sex, the movie is a deliriously fun and often hilarious study of desire, power and art that features bondage, full-frontal and a vagina made out of pink chewed-up bubble gum. “For me, it is a very queer story,” the director says, speaking the week of the film’s release in a video call from his Los Angeles home. “It’s a take on kink and alternate sexuality that goes right across the straight-queer spectrum.”

While it is not the first heterosexual movie by Gregg Araki – that honor goes to his 1995 acid trip of a road movie The Doom Generation – it features the new queer cinema pioneer’s starriest cast in years, perhaps in a sign that Hollywood at large has caught up to the cult director’s anarchic vision. Forty years into his career, we still want Araki’s sex: the film is set to reach the director’s biggest audience to date, opening to 700 US screens this week, a stunning figure for an independent film and a wider opening than recent films by indie veterans like Nicolas Winding Refn and Jim Jarmusch.