Once, while enjoying a night of scintillating “conversation” at The Cock, I noticed a guy and an armful of his straight girlfriends who had positioned themselves around the go-go boy platform. Rather than just stuffing some money down his underpants and moving on like the rest of us, they camped out. And just when you thought they couldn’t make it more difficult for anyone else to objectify him, they pulled out the cameras and were snapping pictures with him as if he were a tourist attraction. I was reminded of this activity while I watched Bam Bam & Celeste, Margaret Cho’s straight-to-DVD gay guy/straight girl roadtrip movie. Cho plays Celeste, an insecure and self-loathing fag hag, who spends all her time chatting on the Internet and hanging out with Bam Bam (played by Cho’s longtime comedy cohort, Bruce Daniels), her BFF since high school who’s fabulously gay and very supportive, but at times a little self-absorbed. Tired of putting up with their racist, homophobic surroundings, they decide to break the shackles of small-town angst and head off to New York City to follow their dreams of opening up a hair salon.

Bam Bam & Celeste has the makings of something campy and fun, but sadly, it lacks both the creative invention of a lot of the more recent gay comedies (Not Another Gay Movie, Adam & Steve) and the emotional drive of a good chick flick romance. Celeste should be the movie’s emotional center, but instead she comes off as a pathetic buzzkill for Bam Bam’s sexual antics. Didn’t six years of “Will and Grace” teach us anything? Women who exclusively attach themselves to gay men are cute and fun for like, eight minutes, after that it’s just exhausting. It’s not a total letdown: Cho managed to pull together a great cast and maintain high production values for a scrappy indie flick. It’s just that, like that night with the go-go boy, I couldn’t help but feel it could’ve been better without the female interference.