The Mask of Zorro (1998)

The original cape-furling, boots-stamping, sword-playing gay blade of West Hollywood is celebrated in The Mask of Zorro (1998). Although the film’s location is not precisely at the queenly intersection of boulevards Santa Monica and San Vicente—The Mask of Zorro is broadly set in a Southern California transitioning from Spanish tyranny to capitalist independence—the action bristles with sly camp and stylized self-parody, such as to delight any patron or performer at Dixie Dear’s Drag Dude Floorshow. The old master Zorro escapes from two decades of unlawful confinement to train his scamp of a successor. The dynamic duo sets about taking vengeance upon the European oppressor who twenty years ago killed senor Zorro senior’s wife and abducted his daughter to raise as a pawn of Mardrid. Steel clashes upon steel and sparks spiral into out-of-control romance as the old master’s lost daughter finds herself pinned by the point of the young upstart’s rapier.