We all know how the mob works. We learned all the rules from the movies. We know that there is a “Don” who runs his own “family,” and they typically resort to some shady, underground activities to accumulate their money and power. Typically, this is done by means of gambling, narcotics, bank robbing, and political puppeteering. Of course, should you make the mistake of taking sides against the family, you might find yourself amongst some unsuspecting fishes with whom to sleep.

Sure, the movies told us all about the mob. So what, might you ask, is all this noise about an alleged “Gay Mob” infiltrating the social consciousness? Producer/Writer Chris Durant, with his film project The Gay Mob, hope to shed light on all the fagolas lurking in the shadows of our streets and frequenting our bars. Last Sunday, Durant offered patrons of Minneapolis’ Bedlam Theater a sneak peek on their work in progress during a public script reading/fundraiser for their project.

The Gay Mob – subtitled “Mafia Wars, Drama Queens and Fairy Godmothers, Oh My!” – tells the story of two gay friends from the Twin Cities who choose to shelter a homeless teen, whose penchant for technological pranksterism leads him to develop a fake website named thegaymob.com. It would seem that not every is quite in on the joke, and – you guessed it – the real Gay Mob intervenes, wreaking chaos on this homeless homo and his unsuspecting guardians.

Yet that’s only one facet of the story Durant’s Durant hopes to tell. Tangentially connected to the script’s narrative include a married man coming to terms with his true sexuality, a maternal drag performer finding closure in a family life teeming with loss and sadness, and a shrill, conservative ideologue hell-bent on passing speedy legislation that would save the sanctity of marriage from certain doom.

Sounds pretty ambitious in scope, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more; The Gay Mob tackles these weighty issues with an unexpectedly cheerful touch, hoping to inject some joy into some serious topics. Durant tells the Column that his intention all along was to handle his material with a sense of urgency, but supported by a tone of consistent lightheartedness. “This project is very personal to me,” says Durant. “I have been working on [The Gay Mob] for a long time…my goal was to portray our lives in a way that was both educational and entertaining.” At the same time, Durant wanted to be careful never to hit his audience over the head with a message.

Indeed, the tone Durant (along with director Anthony Stanton) crafts seldom forays into the didactic. Durant finds great confidence in his cast and crew, many of whom work with him on “The Show So Gay” webisodes. During the script reading, you feel compelled to applaud the ambitions of all parties involved and you feel like you have found a community project worth supporting.

What intrigues me particularly about The Gay Mob film project is that Durant and company plan for their film to root itself stylistically in those old mob movie tropes, introducing to the genre a much-needed queer sensibility. It seems like the logical next step; the very best mob movies stand as definitive representations of Americana. With the queer community inching its way more so into the domain of mainstream America, an iconoclastic “queerification” of the genre feels past due.

I hope it is taken as a compliment if I lament that the script’s storytelling elements fit together a bit too impeccably. I say “compliment,” because I know the material I have seen has the potential for something undoubtedly transcendent. To give an example, each principal character gains personal insight from their travails in the denouement, which the characters quite literally recite to us under the guise of an Outfront “Just Fair” rally. While it is nice to see a community institution like Outfront playing a role in the story, a more elegant handling of the story’s moral would have been to nix this scene entirely. I urge the artists behind this project to afford their audience the ability to interpret the story’s meaning, rather than to bring their own point across via the unnecessary contrivance of narration.

Additionally, some of Durant’s archetypal characters don’t really transcend the generic Peter Lorre and Sean Hayes-style gay screen stereotypes to which we have grown accustomed (and somewhat weary). One particularly effeminate gay character punctuates his dialogue with familiar diva one-liners with such calculated fervor, any intended sense of irony or self-awareness becomes lost in the stereotype, and devolves dangerously close to cringe-worthy territory.

Reservations aside, I take pleasure in visualizing The Gay Mob as a familiar mob movie exercise, structurally broken down in a way that allows for queer genre experimentation à la Haynes or Almodòvar. Given my aforementioned concerns, I am not quite certain that the movie’s creative team will actually move forward with this mindset.

But hey, I can always hope.

For more information on “The Show so Gay” project, or to financially support The Gay Mob, visit their website at http://www.theshowsogay.com/.