Oliver Stone did seem to be on some really weird gay trip. From a historical point, it was a total misunderstanding of Greco-Roman military homosexuality, which was more like prison sex than the gay night life of Fire Island. Soldiers marched off from home for years at a time into uninhabited remote areas, and the more powerful soldiers would punk the weaker ones, or men would trade sexual favors for favored treatment, in other words, a prison scene where the dominant partner in the homosexual liason used the submissives as a substitute for women until they could get back home to mamma. Instead Stone gives us this whole Provincetown-in-Persia boy-toy thing with Al the Fag too wrapped up in the Gay Lifestyle to service the women, and with Al tormented by what seemed like hours of excuriatingly boring homosexual angst. What a turkey.