When speaking to director John Cameron Mitchell, do not make the mistake of referring to his latest film as pornographic.

“I do not really call this pornography,” he said. “Pornography has a specific use rather than a specific explicitness. Pornography is made to arouse and is watched to be aroused.”

Not surprisingly, Mitchell, on the Shortbus promotion trail, spoke with great candor from a hotel room in Boston.

“In this case, the sex in the film is not pornography. If you look in the dictionary…,” flustered, he paused for a moment. “I just get a little annoyed by that term. It’s very limited. I like pornography. In this case, we actually tried to de-eroticize the sex. Pornography is for jerking off to.”

There probably won’t be a lot of stroking going on during the watching of this film, if for no other reason than audiences will be laughing too hard.

Mitchell agreed. “That’s what it’s like in life. Most of the sex in this is rather unsuccessful, desperate and at times ridiculous. Good, spontaneous sex is good for porn, but it’s not good for drama. Shortbus uses sex as a way to reveal more about the characters. I think narrative lowers the hard-on.”

After hearing the title, the first thought that came to mind was a documentary concerning the mentally retarded rapid transit system, not a comedy about a New York sex salon. That is in part why Mitchell went with it.

“All the kids that were on the short bus somehow didn’t fit in. They didn’t measure up.” Mitchell speaks from firsthand experience. “Actually, I was on the short bus for a while there because I was coming from a military base. I was a freak in a different way for a couple years as a kid.”

The film’s main gathering place is an underground club called Shortbus. One of the characters refers to it as “a salon for the gifted and challenged.”

Mitchell took it a step further. “It’s about all those things that separate us from what is so-called ‘normal,’” he said. “Everybody who made this film and all the characters in the film were in someway metaphorically on the short bus.”

Early in 2003, an open casting call went out inviting anyone to visit a Web site and send in audition tapes. The director suggested that on their tapes they talk about a sexual experience that was emotionally meaningful to them.

“More than half a million people visited the Web site, and nearly 500 people sent in tapes. Some talked to the camera, some made short films, some sang songs and some jerked off. We chose about 40 people for the audition stage. Everyone was told that the auditions would involve improvisation, but nothing sexual – I didn’t want to scare the horses. I wanted an in-depth audition process where the actors were creative partners and where trust could be built.”

Shortbus, opening this week at the Ken, centers on two couples and their developmentally disabled sexual relationships. Sofia (Sook-Yin Lee) is a sex therapist who, with or without her husband, Rob (Raphael Barker), never experienced orgasm. After years of living together, James (Paul Dawson) tells boyfriend Jamie (PJ DeBoy) that he feels the time is right to invite a third partner into the relationship. It is during a session with Sofia that James and Jamie invite her to hop on the short bus.

Backing up the two main couples is a trio of central characters. Loneliness is wreaking havoc on Severin (Lindsay Beamish), a dominatrix who longs for a deep, lasting relationship. She and Sofia meet and agree to swap services. Severin offers to help Sofia climax, and in return Sofia will give Severin free therapy. Meanwhile, Ceth (Jay Brannan) falls for James and Jamie – not separately, but as a couple, and pursues the idea of a monogamous three-way relationship with them. Then there’s Caleb (Peter Stickles), whose apartment across from James and Jamie’s gives him a rear-window view that Jimmy Stewart would die for. Voyeur Caleb is disturbed by the arrival of Ceth and sees him as a danger to James and Jamie’s ideal relationship.

Mitchell played a little hard to get when asked to mention what so-called mainstream films featuring explicit sex might have influenced him. “In the very question there are assumptions that are specifically limiting from an American audience’s point-of-view,” he said.

Can sex and art coexist on film? “They do in life, why shouldn’t they on film?” he responded.

I pressed on and finally a few inspirations sprung forth. “There’s actually dozens of films that came out of Europe in the last 10 years that use real sex,” Mitchell said. “I think Romance, Intimacy, Fat Girl and O Fantasma are all very powerful films.”

The difference between those titles and Shortbus is that they are all bleak, and at times downright negative when it comes to sex. For me, Shortbus is the feel-good picture of the year.

“I agree,” Mitchell said, sounding as though his mission was accomplished. “I mean, our grandparents aren’t going to see it, but I think it’s an audience-friendly film. It isn’t trying to push you away by saying ‘look how harsh sex is’ or ‘look how hot it is.’ I really wanted people of all sexualities to see other people of all sexualities being sexual and realizing that we’re all not that far off.”

He must have realized somewhere during the creative process that the image of a man in a yoga position performing self-fellatio and swallowing his happy ending was bound to horrify a lot of people.

“Fine,” he said. “I’ll be the first to admit it’s not for everyone. We just had a screening of it here in Boston, all ages and all sexualities. I’m sure that a lot of straight guys will hear about the gay sex and think of it as a deal-breaker because straight guys are in some ways the most nervous nellies of the film-going audience. They tend to decide that what they watch is what they are.”

It was inevitable that Brokeback Mountain came up, and Mitchell nailed it by referring to the film as, “a gay version of a Sidney Poitier picture from the ’60s.”

The only reason Crash won instead of Brokeback was because it took on all minorities instead of just one. Mitchell added: “There is also a lot of homophobia in the upper echelon of the Academy. You can’t avoid that. Larry David wrote an op-ed piece in The New York Times stating that he wouldn’t see Brokeback because it had two guys kissing. Well, maybe he’d like to see them rimming.”

What about the possibility of Mitchell eventually directing porn? “I probably will some day,” he said. “Lately, I find pornography to be limiting when it comes to the full spectrum of sex. It’s all very formulaic. Everyone seems to have sex in the same order. Everyone gets shoved into various roles.”

Hopefully the door to his hotel room was shut when he suddenly became animated and started yelling: “I’M A TOP!” “I’M A BOTTOM!” “I’M BARELY LEGAL!” “IF YOU’RE A BEAR, I MUST BE A TWINK!”

Without taking a breath, he quickly shifted gears. “It’s like there’s this desperation to find some sort of amazon.com profile for your life, which I think is absurd. I would actually like to use what I learned in this film and make a real porno.”

How important are film festivals to a movie like Shortbus? “Gigantic,” he said. “Cannes totally put us on the map. It was probably better that we weren’t in competition. The underdog position was the perfect place for us. We had 12 U.S. offers [to distribute] after the first screening at Cannes – all from non-studios, of course. The studio people loved it, but there was no way that they’d risk Rupert Murdoch hearing that Fox Searchlight was going to put out this film, ’cause the parent companies would freak out. We had our pick of the independent distributors.”

The current state of distribution will actually guarantee Shortbus a much larger audience than it would have five years ago.

“Nowadays,” he said, “the delivery systems make the viewing of it much easier. DVD, downloading – eventually – [and] video on demand, all these things are perfect for such a film as this. Even though AMC won’t show it, an audience still has many more ways to find it.”

On a personal level, I am forever indebted to Mr. Mitchell for clarifying a point that This Film is Not Yet Rated should have, but failed to. When asked if he is worried that newspapers will refuse to run ads for the film, he noted: “It is only NC-17 films that newspapers have official proscriptions against. There are more restrictions on NC-17 than if you played unrated.”

Finally, what are the chances that he’ll use an Oscar as a Shortbus hood ornament? Mitchell let out a low murmur, followed by a laugh. “Original song, maybe.”