Expanded to feature length from an award-winning 2010 short film of the same name (Frameline35), I Want Your Love tells the story of Jesse, a scruffy, thirty-ish performance artist living in San Francisco. After a decade surviving hand-to-mouth in the gay mecca, he is forced to move back to bland but affordable Ohio, a bittersweet decision made via much unfinished soul-searching. Faced with fears of an uncertain future and career, Jesse shows ambivalence about the going-away party being thrown by his BFF/roommate, who has his own issues to sort out with a passive-aggressive boyfriend who’s moving into the apartment. A visit from Jesse’s “comfort food” ex only adds to the overall angst quotient.

Writer-director Travis Mathews (creator of the gay video web series In Their Room) is a refreshingly new talent. If you took the raw, unsimulated sex of Shortbus and the naked, unflinching honesty of Weekend, then tailored it to the Butt generation, you’d have something akin to the charmingly low-key yet in-your-face I Want Your Love. To call this hairy indie animal “sexually explicit” is to sell the film short. Yes, a lot is on camera, but there’s an emotional maturity to the story and naturalistic performances that subverts and transcends your run-of-the-mill adult film flick. The sex scenes are explicit, erotic, sloppy, funny, awkward, spontaneous and relatable — just like real life.