Jedi master: Industrial Light and Magic artist Billy Brooks fulfills a childhood dream by animating R2-D2 in this summer's new Star Wars movie. (Summer Movie Special).

Few of us have the kind of job in which we watch a year's worth of work fly away in less than 2 1/2 minutes. But Billy Brooks does. He's a Rebel Unit artist at George Lucas's stealthy Industrial Light and Magic studios in San Rafael, Calif. And millions of Star Wars fans saw his handiwork when R2-D2, the universally recognized little droid, took to the air for the first time ever in Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

"Computer graphics are getting really good," the openly gay Brooks says. "The movie you're going to see in theaters is going to blow you away. Some of the visuals are just stunning." Most viewers won't even realize they're watching computer-generated images, and that's really the point. But as with the original Star Wars (now known as Episode IV, Lucas and his ILM crew continue to revolutionize technical effects, setting an ever-higher bar. Forget about paint-and-glue models and ordinary film techniques--if they need R2 to walk up stairs, as they did in the new film, they call in the Computer Graphics department or Rebel Unit artists, who create their magic on the latest Apple computers.

As a 9-year-old living on a farm near Cameron, N.C., in the heart of the Bible Belt, Brooks was blown away by the first Star Wars. "I needed stimulation in the head," the 34-year-old remembers. "I used my imagination a lot." He still has the picture of R2 he drew a quarter century ago. Classmates once teased him about his obsession with the Star Wars trilogy--"Aren't you a little old to be messing with R2-D2 and robots and stuff?." he remembers hearing--but with his coveted position in the film industry, Brooks has the last laugh.

His love of gadgetry landed the postcollegiate guppie at a Circuit City store in Fayetteville, N.C., where discretion about his sexuality was mandatory, given the proximity of Fort Bragg and its abundance of redneck bruisers. He quickly returned to his university town, Greensboro, N.C., when he was able to land a multimedia job, launching his career and shutting the door on the closet forever. But the real coup came when his fantasy job opened up at ILM. Once he learned the company provided domestic-partner benefits to gays and lesbians, that was the icing on the cake. Two decades after R2 first captured his imagination, Brooks found himself moving to California, where he now lives happily with his partner, Joey, "the love of my life," a sporting goods salesman. "It's a blast," Brooks says. "Just being R2-D2 for a year was awesome."

As for gay content in his work, Brooks wonders aloud--much to the ILM publicist's chagrin--if maybe R2 isn't a butch lesbian, despite the fact that the droid is always referred to as "he" around the office. There's also some question regarding R2-D2's pal C-3PO, whom Brooks has always found rather effeminate. "I could see him in gold lame," he quips.

Wilkinson currently writes for sfgate.com and Lesbian News.