The new film “Shortbus,” quite literally out this week, is John Cameron Mitchell’s attempt to find a welcoming place for sex in cinema. As sex onscreen is most often sidelined to titillating films that people watch in private, “Shortbus” is committed to bringing the act and the filming of it into the open.

Mr. Mitchell, most famous for his role writing, directing, and starring in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” is very concerned with dissociating sex on film from the backrooms of pornography or what he considers the negative judgments of mainstream film. And true to his intentions, here the fun doesn’t happen until after the well-endowed plumber fixes the chesty blonde’s sink.

No, of course there isn’t a plumber or a triple-D cup in sight. Mr. Mitchell has hired a crew of non-porn stars and sometime actors for his new film, which, like many explicit entertainments, is more sex heavy than sexy.

The plot follows Sofia, a Chinese Canadian sex therapist (played by Chinese Canadian radio host Sook-Yin Lee) who has never had an orgasm. She admits this to two of her patients, James (Paul Dawson) and Jamie (PJ DeBoy), a gay couple hoping to fix their relationship problems by sleeping with other people, and they all go on to befriend a dominatrix (Lindsay Beamish) who has trouble starting real relationships (all very unexpected problems here).

They all meet at the orgiastic salon Shortbus in New York, in which Mr. Mitchell has created a sort of Sextopia, where New York’s self-proclaimed misfits work on life problems by finding new and varied sex partners. As the club’s mistress (Justin Bond) playfully proclaims: “It’s just like the ’60s, but with less hope.”

Indeed, the film does seem to be spun from a certain hopelessness. Mr. Mitchell has said that he started working on “Shortbus” as a way of dealing with the outcome of the 2004 presidential election. In one of the film’s trailers, he declares the film to be “everything you need to get through the next two years of George Bush.”

The final frontier for cinema (and rebellion against President Bush) appears to be sex on camera. Mr. Mitchell has said he regrets that most portrayals of sex on film “seemed just as connected to negativity as it was for, say, Christian conservatives.” But it remains unclear why actors, who are supposed to be faking everything else onscreen, need to actually have sex to make the act acceptable.

Mr. Mitchell concedes that keeping sex private is fine for some people, but “Shortbus” takes as its mission outing sex in every sense. Aside from the fact that the actors are actually having sex on camera for the viewing pleasure of the audience, almost every sex act takes place in front of others or on film. Mr. Mitchell has said that the actors themselves are not exhibitionists, but everywhere the characters are filming themselves having sex, having sex with multiple people, or letting others watch.

The main plotline of the film involves Sofia sharing her sexual difficulties, something that some might still consider a private matter, with everyone she encounters. She is the lone uncomfortable person in the omnisexual orgy that takes place at Shortbus and before long, she becomes the pity case for the other characters. Her discomfort in the situation is quickly exposed not as a preference but a means of repression, and implicit is the message that any feelings of discomfort in watching these scenes (as the film happily declares, “voyeurism is participation”) is a symptom of repression.

For Sofia, the problem is never really explained — it’s certainly not for lack of trying, as her introduction to the film shows her in the midst of a marathon sex session with her husband Rob (Raphael Barker) — but some of her symptoms are obvious. For starters, she’s married, and has only had sex with one person. Shortbus fixes that right up for her. As soon as she gets involved with other people, her marital woes (or better yet, her marriage) seem to dissolve.

And though sex is everywhere in this film, the omnipresence of nude forms soon blends together to make room for other things on Mr. Mitchell’s mind. The film opens with close-ups of a decoupage Statue of Liberty to the tune of “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby” and the attempt to understand life in New York after the attacks of September 11, 2001, is an ongoing theme. Also, attempts are made to prove the inherent silliness of sex, and Mr. Mitchell fills the film with his own twist on slapstick humor.

But the camp aside, “Shortbus” is meant to break taboos and prove points, because in today’s society, merely doing something that hasn’t been done before has become “revolutionary.” Though there was a time when appearing in pornography was a quick end to a budding film career, it is hardly the case today. Sex on film certainly attracts more attention to a film, but it is not the career killer it once was (see: Sevingy, Chloë, and “Brown Bunny”).Today, having sex for the right camera is probably the best thing an unknown actor can do for his or her career.

But “Shortbus” has a decidedly rebellious tone, and since the Bush administration has taken no steps toward making anything portrayed in the film illegal, the oppression that Mr. Mitchell seems to be rallying against must be the recurring notion that Bush and conservatives want to encroach on individual Americans’ right to privacy. This certainly makes the attempts of these individuals to do away with their own privacy an interesting means of rebelling.