Louis Norris | Scene from the Men's Toilets at a Ceilidh / 2018

the right place

by Douglas Messerli

 

Louis Norris (screenwriter and director) Scene from the Men's Toilets at a Ceilidh / 2018 [10 minutes]

 

In the middle of the Ceilidh, a social evening of Scottish music and dancing, Rory’s (Ben Walsh) boyfriend Dan (Joe Sefton) has retreated to the men’s bathroom, a sad affair where one of the toilet bowls is obviously filled with something fowl and one of the pissoirs is turned up, obviously unusable.

    

     Moreover, everyone who comes into the room knows Rory, whose father is performing in the band as the fiddler. It’s made even more difficult since Rory hasn’t told anyone that the boy who has locked himself away in the one useable toilet is his boyfriend who has traveled from England to be with Rory at his Scottish home. It’s what you might call a prickly situation.

     Rory’s forced to beg, “Just come out and fucking talk to me, Jesus Christ. I can’t read your mind.”

    Dan is angry because when he came over, evidently to ask Rory to dance, his friend gave a quick look about which Dan summarizes “I’ve never seen you look so scared.” It’s apparent that even though Rory’s invited his lover to his home, he hasn’t yet come out to his family, let alone is he willing or perhaps even able to announce his love at a public social event by dancing with his boyfriend.

      Dan’s anger clearly is justifiable.

  

   But as Rory also rightfully counters, this is not the time a place for such a conversation.

   On the other hand, so Dan righteously points out, when will there be the right place and the right time, given what Rory has already hidden from him?

    In films from of the second decade of the 21st century, the issue of coming out has often shifted from self-acceptance to the problem of telling the parents and others, to sharing the individual’s sexual identity with the larger community. This is a very different issue indeed from coming out of the closet personally. What the new “openness” of gay issues has led to, clearly, is a kind of gay hypocrisy, an open acceptance of one’s own sexuality in places and situations where it is openly permissible—where open-minded people easily accept such things as in a university setting or in a large city—while keeping it secret from the social situations of family and small-town homelife environs where it might be met with disapproval and even shock.

      A bathroom at a Scottish Ceilidh is indeed a strange place for a showdown, but in terms of the larger issues at stake, perhaps it is the most perfect place, the ideal challenge to closed notions of patriarchal power and conservative values: the sacrosanct all-male space where men touch their own genitals and release their bodily fluids, while even, at times, taking note of their friends’ nakedness, is perhaps the perfect place, so to speak, “to let it all out,” exploding the myth of male heterosexual isolation and privacy. 

      Or, as Dan adds, two months ago when Rory asked his friend to come and stay with him: that might have been an even better time to discuss the “situation.”

     But here they are, Dan having just endured, the day before, an endlessly long conversation with Rory’s father about “fly fishing,” a long conversation he might have thought would be interrupted eventually about a question about his and Rory’s friendship or relationship. But the elder just keep talking about fly fishing, which ultimately Dan found rather odd but still endearing given the situation, a most valiant attempt, one might suggest, to ignore the situation at hand.

       Dan has been deluded, feeling that he and Rory might have danced to his father’s music, the two of them, the father’s son and his English lover enjoying the event and sharing the father’s artistry. But he recognizes now it has been a total delusion. Why, Dan pleads did Rory bring him to the dance without him being able to participate. As he puts it bluntly: “What in the fuck am I doing here?”

      Finally, as more and more individuals enter the bathroom at an event that includes a great deal of alcohol, Dan begins to introduce himself to them as “a friend of Rory’s,” he turned to the pisser, Rory turned away to the sink. Accordingly, the film gradually shifts from the accusatory dialogue to the comic. But then, just as suddenly, it also turns bitter as Rory reacts with embarrassment and his own special sense of righteousness: “Oh, come to Robbie’s 50th, …you mean ‘Rory and Dan’s coming out parade, fucking Stirling Pride,’ is that what you thought I meant?” Apparently, the party is for a man named Robbie.

        It now becomes an issue of tradition, as Rory insists, two lines, one for women and one for men. Unfortunately, Dan, although insisting that he respects the culture, plays it easy with an aside to the fact that everyone is in skirts (kilts), an interesting gender issue, but not appropriate for the argument they are having with one another.

       Or perhaps it is. Perhaps that is precisely the problem, the traditional way of seeing things, the bilateral lines of flowing men and women coming together to recreate heterosexual normativity. So, as Dan projects, their dancing might have shaken things up.

        Rory argues that he didn’t bring Dan there as a “statement,” but Dan as quickly counters, “Why have you brought me here?”

        “Brought you here tonight, or brought you to Scotland?”

         Dan wants answers to both questions.

         “I wanted you to see where I’m from, and I guess I brought you here because I wanted to see you, because I want to see you, like, all of the time [italics mine].”

       Dan tries in interrupt, but Rory continues, “You being here, in Scotland, with me, does that not mean anything to you?

        Director Louis Norris, breaks up the sentences with cuts between each of the commas, bringing the narrative from a vague “here,” to a specific place, to the individual himself that says it all, taking a long trip from the subjunctive, something wished for, to the specific, the now and immediate “me”—a voyage which he has asked his lover to take without being able yet to take for himself.

 

      Finally, recognizing that it is truly love that has brought them to this impossible entanglement to this very strange place, they hug, deeply, without embarrassment. And improbably, nearly impossibly, they dance to Rory’s father’s fiddle in the loo, Rory instructing about the proper steps as the two move together in a Scottish jig.

        The issue of Rory’s coming out to his parents appears to be put on temporary hold.

        London-based director Louis Norris’s film might appear as an art-house dialogue film, but its effects are aimed straight at the heart, and its issues resonate with the structure of the entire tradition of gay coming-out movies.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).