Craig Chester’s “Adam & Steve” tries to spin an odd cultural phenomenon – anonymous sex among gay men – into a romantic comedy. But the lack of genuine romance in the film is surpassed only by the absence of comedy. It goes through the motions of the romantic comedy genre, but you won’t laugh, you won’t cry, and you’ll probably regret the time you lost watching the film.

The closest that “Adam & Steve” comes to telling a joke that works is during a couple of gay-cowboy scenes. Instead of the mountaintops of “Brokeback Mountain,” however, these take place at a gay rodeo dance club.

Mr. Chester, the writer-director, has said he wanted to make a different type of gay-themed film. Where many gay-focused films, most notably “Brokeback,” are tinged with a mood of tragedy and longing and emphasize the victimization of gays by an intolerant society, Mr. Chester clearly wanted to escape this genre with something lighter and airier. Something with a happy ending. If only he could have done so with a better film.

The film opens in 1987. Two 20-something goth kids, Adam (Mr. Chester) and Rhonda (Parker Posey in a fat suit), find that what they thought was goth night at Danceteria is in fact a disco inferno. At the suggestion of one of the members of a go-go dance troupe, they experiment with cocaine. Adam takes the go-go boy back to his apartment, but the evening ends in gross-out disaster due to the effects of the laxative used to cut the coke.

Seventeen years later Adam is lonely, single, and in recovery from his coke addiction. His aging dog is his closest companion. Rhonda has lost weight, which ironically hurts her fat chick stand-up routine. A pair of chance encounters brings Adam together with Steve (Malcolm Gets), a tall, waspy professional who favors anonymous sex in his gym’s shower. They don’t seem to have much chemistry – and have even less in common – but they fall for each other. Although the romance is unconvincing, you can tell it is true love because the dating montage sequence is overlaid with such cheery music.

I don’t mind telling you that it turns out Steve is the go-go dancer Adam brought home in the opening sequence.You won’t mind, either, since it is immediately obvious to everyone except the film’s characters. It’s a plot twist that is ridiculously untwisted, almost straight.

Perhaps in Steve’s world of nightly anonymous gay sex, his failure to recognize Adam is plausible. His lifestyle might just be dehumanizing enough to destroy the possibility of connecting with, much less remembering, other people. But what is Adam’s excuse? Although Adam confesses to occasional sex with strangers he meets in chat rooms, he is much less promiscuous than Steve and his memory lapse is much less believable. Or are we to assume that even Adam’s lifestyle is debased enough to erase the faces of the people he brings home? Maybe the memory board in his coke-addled brain has short-circuited.

Steve’s realization that he has fallen for the other man involved in what he regards as the most humiliating incident of his life splits the couple apart. After a brief period of desperation, they reunite. Cue picturesque wedding scene. Cue credits.

Are there any redeeming features of “Adam & Steve”? Well, no one has AIDS, so we are spared the tired politics of that debate.You will be grateful that Chris Kattan’s screen time, in the role of Steve’s straight roommate, is kept to a minimum. Ms. Posey is charmingly quirky when she can keep her acting from slipping into hysterics. And, thankfully, the film is much shorter and less impressed with itself than “Brokeback Mountain.”