We've been a little obsessed with Richard Linklater's latest film, Everybody Wants Some!!, and the homoerotic overtones that permeate the trailer.

Vulture has, as well—and this week, they finally cornered Linklater to find out what all this "inadvertent" gayness was all about.

"I've been around a long time," the director teases. "[It's] not inadvertent."

Part of it, he says, is just presenting the film's young athletes as preening peacocks.

"I think there are some early shots, like when we're driving with Jake [Blake Jenner], it's all male gaze," Linklater says. "It goes back to ancient Greece—Those early Olympics were performed in the nude."

You don't say?

Linklater credits the late film critic George Morris, a mentor of his who wrote for the Austin Chronicle and died of AIDS in 1989, for expanding his worldview.

"He would interpret every movie through a gay lens. He could find the gay subtext or the gay view in anything, and he would let me see that. So he opened up a world to me that I hadn't known, and that I was lucky to be privy to, but I've never forgotten," he says.

"Still, to this day, I look at films and go, 'Oh, George is going to love this.' I always kind of felt like George would like these guys in this film, because it's in there. It kind of speaks for itself."