AllMovie

For the entire decade of the '70s, perhaps because there was no spectre such as AIDS, explorations which blurred and crossed the lines of gender were a feature of big-city living in the U.S. Big, beefy men with beards, eye shadow, lipstick, pancake makeup, and chiffon ballet dresses were an everyday phenomenon. Luminous Procedures seems to be an extension of that exploration, and it features The Cockettes, one of the gender-bending street-theater groups of the period. Two un-athletic young men are taken on a tour of a pleasure palace of the bizarre, in scenes somewhat reminiscent of Fellini's Satyricon. Sexual and gender encounters of all kinds take place to the accompaniment of something resembling circus music. There is even (at the end) an unequivocally heterosexual encounter. Some hardcore sexual scenes are shown, but the film appears to be designed to evoke a dreamlike state rather than mere erotic arousal.