Michael Ogden | the Only Gay on the Estate? / 2011

 the art of denial: keeping it in and keeping it in and keeping it in

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Ogden (director) The Only Gay on the Estate? / 2011 [24 minutes] [TV episode]

 

Part of an ongoing documentary series titled First Cut, beginning in 2007 on Britain’s Channel 4, The Only Gay in the Estate? aired on March 11, 2011.

    In this work freshman London-based documentary filmmaker Michael Odgen determined to make a return visit to his home in Manchester, England, in order to explore his past as a closeted gay teenager as well meeting up with his best friend of that time, David, a boy who he now feels terribly guilty about have bullied. 

    Ogden attempts to explain to himself and his audience that he grew up in a horribly homophobic neighborhood, Wythenshawe Estate, and in order to hide his own sexual orientation from others and, perhaps, even himself, he led a double life, pretending to the world around him that he was straight, a teenage boy playing football and dating local girls while secretly lusting over Ryan Giggs posters.*

    Fearing that he might be outed, he suddenly broke with his best friend David, turning on him and beating him on the school playground. Now 16 years later, he has decided to retrace his past. The director most particularly wants to know what happened to David, and how he remembers him given the circumstances.

      But visiting his old girlfriend, David, and his own family, the focus of the film quickly switches from a look into his past to a recognition of the failures of the documentarian, as it becomes clear that he has not entirely ever recognized the resilience and intelligence of his own friends and has not yet to terms with his own past, particularly since he has not yet told his parents that he’s gay or that his flatmate of the past five years is his lover.

      Sometimes even those LGBTQ individuals who feel abused growing up, must relook in the mirror to see how they, in turn, had abused those around them, an issue which becomes the central one in Odgen’s film.

 

    In one of the first moments of the film, Ogden discovers that indeed his old friend David has responded, and is willing to meet with him and “catch up.” Conveniently, Odgen only remembers the break up as involving some “sort of row,” without being able to call up all the details. And he even seems the possible meeting with David as something to “jog his memory”—this despite the fact that he attests to a sense of guilt regarding the boy who at the time was his very best friend and now, on his site, lists Madonna as one of his favorite performers.

      Like all individuals who return home, everything about his own Manchester neighborhood, now has shrunken. After 16 years of not seeing it, the world which was once so large and menacing is now a bit like a miniature world into which his Gulliver or his out-sized Alice now peers into with curiosity but also with some disdain.

      To help clear up some of his vagueness about David, Odgen first meets up with another former classmate, Claire. She, now married with children, comments that she never perceived him as gay and that he certainly had never discussed it with friends. She admits that she was good friends with David and that he seemed “out” to all, never apologizing for who he was, joking and becoming close with many other classmates. David, in hindsight, seems much better adjusted than the metaphorical Alice who must now come to terms with the questions of her/his own past fantasies.

      His next visit is to another classmate Davinia, who he feels might still be in touch with David. Davinia makes the situation about David a bit clearer: “He had that two sides about him. Everyone knew he was gay except for him.” (Oh, how that hits home!). Davinia, a heavy woman herself, feels that he never came out because he’d then be bullied for two things, being “fat and posh” and then being gay on top of it. She certainly sympathizes with David for the former. Asking her what was his fault in all of that, Davinia puts it straight-forwardly and quite brilliantly: “You were scared.”

      But what did happen is not yet established. He finally visits his schoolmate Mike “Cozzie,” the next of his visits, who does truly remember what happened: “You just went from…someone I knew…to someone totally new and different and that shocked me more than anything when you did do it. …At one point it looked like you would kill him. Your comments were all sexual, hitting him as much as you could. And when you finished you couldn’t have done anymore. And we all commented ‘What was that?’” He continues, “To now find out, after all these years, how you managed to keep it in and keep it in and keep it in, I think you got used to it, I think you got used to the fact that that was your thing that you never told anyone and you find it hard even now to let go of it.”

      With total understatement, Odgen, sniffing a bit of what might have been tears, suggests “It was really uncomfortable to hear Cozzie talk about the fight. And what I’d done to David. After that day, our friendship was over.

      He admits that he started to spend more time with girls, that he spent almost every night with Deborah, and a visit to her is next on his agenda. But what he discovers her is perhaps just as disconcerting and his violent episode with David.

 

     She suggests that they clicked immediately and reminds him of a moment when her girlfriends came back to find him trying to grope her “boobs.” Deborah, still a sort of giggling girl, asks him how old he was when he first “felt a tingling for a man.” Oddly, Odgen doesn’t answer. She heartily laughs. “Well that’s what it sails down to, isn’t it? I just think you felt it difficult to open up.” Her mother sitting beside her, she adds, “I mean you’re not abnormal. I mean it’s something to celebrate because it’s part of you.” She goes on to salute his London life, his city boyfriend.

      What suddenly becomes clear is that Odgen has totally misread these Manchester folks, who are in many respects more open to his own sexuality than he has been. His unperceived haughty removal of himself to London has perhaps left him imagining his former classmates as still being the unforgiving children whom he feared is school, while he has been far more unable to integrate himself in the larger, more open-minded world in which he now lives.

      But then there are still the consequences of his inability to stop from “keeping it in”: Deborah reports, “I just felt very comfortable with being with you and thought we would get married someday.” She once more giggles her way out of impossible situation.

      Ogden reports, however, that he feels terrible about Deborah feeling like that. It is clear he has not yet dealt with his own past, and certainly not imagined what those figures of the past must now feel about him today. He now realizes that he hadn’t thought about anyone else’s feelings, and now realizes that he needs to speak to his own “mum.”

      He calls her and describes the movie he is working on, about the past and, suddenly slipping in the words in a sentence, the fact that he is gay and he is coming to terms with this in relationship with his own childhood experiences. The voice on the phone simply asks, “Are you gay?”

      Ogden later reports that she’s not necessarily disturbed about his being gay, and wants to know why he didn’t tell her sooner as well as why she needs to be involved with his film. Another shibboleth has been removed, but Odgen still appears clueless about what his inability to share his life might mean to others.

      This documentary filmmaker now realizes that he had started out intending to communicate with his old friend David, but ended up coming out to his mother. The hero had been transformed into a brute who hadn’t realized what his fears about his own identity had done to others. Ogden now contacts his sister Lisa, who has long known about his being gay and has even met his lover Tim, asking for clues about his mother’s reaction.

       Lisa explains that the mother is asking questions about what his friend is really like, whether she knew about the relationship, etc. She ends with the cry repeated throughout: “You should have told her before you left for London.”

       Closeted sexuality is clearly not something that effects the man in the closet, but everyone around him who can’t understand who that crouching, hiding, individual really is: a violent beast ready to spring out at them in anger and a timid failure never able to admit to his own identity?

       Nothing of the sort is said in this documentary, but those are the issues behind his mother’s and his friend’s conclusions. Who is this man who has suddenly leaped back into their lives, full-blown, who has been a totally other person from whom they knew growing up. If he was a “scared” boy, who is he now, and how to counter his unstated judgments and cinematic observations?

       Ogden finally admits that he knew he was gay from about age 13, but it was years before he know how to do anything about it. Suddenly we’re introduced to Gareth, with whom Ogden evidently had early sexual encounters which we might never have imagined given the descriptions of himself presented in the earlier parts of the movie. Gareth is now a self-described geek who “does comic books,” no drugs, liquor to speak of. Ogden asks him to call up the several times they messed around together, which he readily admits. But when asked, “Did you know I was in love with you?” he emphatically responds, “No, I never did.” Indeed, Gareth can only repeat what everyone else has said. “It’s just that you go around in life telling people one thing, and, after so long, telling them that everything they known and think they know about you is different.”

     “Horrible isn’t it?”

      “It’s really horrible.”

     We never discover if Gareth is now gay or whether he might have been seriously interested in Odgen. There continue to be missing parts to the puzzle whose figures keep blaming Odgen for the fractured cut-ups his film presents them as being.

       Finally, the director speaks the obvious: “I’d been so terrified about what other people thought, that I’d ended up hurting the people closest to me.” As he realizes now, “It wasn’t just David I needed to say sorry to.”

      Ogden returns to London to talk to his lover Nick, to whom he wants to explain his new realizations. Nick asks an important question: “What did you want to find David, to make it better for him or make things for you?” He suggests that in working to “straightening things out from his teenage years,” that he will “probably unearthing a lot painful things for [David] as well.”

       David, it is finally revealed, now lives in Kent, and Odgen finally insists on visiting him there.

       “I’ve always thought our friendship ended quite badly because of my behavior.”

       “Yep,” barks David in a bright red hoodie.”

       His childhood friend Michael apologizes.

      “Unfortunately, it shouldn’t have ended the way it did. But we were young then, and things do happen. Unfortunately, growing up where we did, it wasn’t acceptable to a lot people to, as you know, admit I was gay.” He again expresses the facts that Odgen knew he was gay but wasn’t ready to accept it and was afraid that it would reflect upon himself. “….And it was hard, growing up in Wythenshawe it was very, very hard.” But then David finally speaks a truth that no one at the time might have imagined: “But it would have been easier, had we probably still spoke, because I think people would have accepted you more, and if you come out earlier we’d probably still be friends and carried on as we used to.” “We both now know who we are and what we want in life.” Nothing could be more simply and truly spoken.

      “Did you know you were gay?” asks Odgen.

      “Yes.”

      “Did you know I was gay?”

      “I had a feeling you were gay.” At one point we confided in one another, he suggests, but we didn’t know what to make of it. “We stuck together,” David argues “because we were the same.” The conversation brings the interlocuter back to the full realization, that despite how difficult it all was, if he had simply opened himself to the truth it might have all been so much simpler—far more pleasurable for all involved.

      He still needs to have a conversation with his mother, who refuses to appear on film. We hear only a few moments of their recorded conversation, wherein the mother asks about his boyfriend and, finally, her son Michael admits that he is very happy.

 

 

*

 

 

This film moved me in ways that I hadn’t imagined it might. Living in a very different time and place, I might have easily dismissed the film’s complications. Except as a man now in his late seventies I suddenly had come to perceive that I too had long deluded myself, believing as I had for decades, dismissing the real lives of my many classmates, that I might have been the only gay man in my class, the only gay individual living in the youth “estate” in which I blindfully grew up.

      Suddenly, however, in a matter of a few months, making contact with an old friend from my high school days I came to discover that he had been involved in a serious sexual relationship with one of my very favorite and attractive of my classmates, the elder being only two years older, and a friend I deeply admired. Soon after I discovered that another of my classmates, although later marrying, eventually discovered herself to be a lesbian. Moreover, I realized that had I not been so impenetrably unable to express outside of my imagination the feelings of deep gay sexual desire I felt within, I might have had a wonderful sexual series of encounters with the senior high school football quarterback, one of the most beautiful of young men I have ever encountered over my now 77 years of life. He, a senior the same age as my other friend, had invited me one night for a ride home, which even the innocent I pretended to be, realized was an invitation to experience gay love.

      Had I not continued endlessly in my self-denying mania, I might have had quite rewarding  sexual encounters with the Sandefjord, Norway junior speedskating champion, a dark-haired beauty at my Norwegian school at age 16, who one evening, in an desperate attempt to help me come to terms with what he recognized was my sexual closetedness, came into my room and laid on top of me, face-down in my bed, while I remained rigid below—all of my sexual dreams having been actualized, with my cultural fears disallowing me to grind them into sexual action. As David asked Garreth, “Horrible isn’t it?” Horrible that my mind could not come to terms with what my body so desperately ached for.

      Years later, the high school quarterback, probably by then a frustrated, slightly overweight gay man in a small Iowa town, so I was told by his cousin, took up a gun, put it into his mouth, and pulled the trigger. Surely, I can’t find myself to be responsible, but I cannot resist asking what if I had demonstrated to him that I truly loved him, that someone else was there to accept his sexual needs? I don’t know whatever became of my Norwegian dark beauty. I hope he found someone who could truly fulfill his desires. I have to presume he did.

      I feel guilty now for making friends with geeky straight high school boys only as a front, while lusting after all the beautiful boys, one of them engaging in a gay relationship which I wasn’t mature enough to even have imagined. And I was startled a few years ago to hear from the former Football Prom Queen that she highly admired my gay film and other daily postings. No one is truly who he imagine them to be, just as Ogden’s film reveals.

       And then there were the women of my own life. The high school photographer I took to the prom, who brought along her camera and spent the evening behind the lens—also a horsewoman who once taught me how to ride horses—who one day unexpectedly showed up on the Madison University of Wisconsin campus, I having no choice but to show her around as if she might be considering attending the university. But I knew as she knew, that she was there to remind me that I had left her behind, that, she still not knowing that I was gay, was wondering what had become of me and why I had so quickly neglected our “relationship,” which to me had simply been a sham, a cover to my own real desires. We said nearly nothing as we waltzed across the campus together, but I knew that she believed I had lied to her. And I had.

      There was also the college freshman girlfriend who had convinced herself and even my parents that we would soon be married, who when I finally was able to gather the courage to tell her I was gay, quickly married a Milwaukee factory worker who she had been evidently seeing on the side as a substitute to my polite, gentleman caller-like visits to her and her wax-work mother and grandmother, both of whom, in hindsight, I now realize that the young girl was desperate to escape.

      “Keeping it in and keeping it in and keeping it in” is what gay closetedness is all about, the art being in how effortlessly you hide the emotional turmoil going on daily in your loins and more important in your heart, an art never to be desired that destroys everything and everyone around you until one day you suddenly wake up to a deep embrace, a kiss, a release of semen upon or within a person of a gender he wasn’t supposed to be. But then, only then life can truly begin.

 

*Ryan Joseph Giggs was a Welsh international football player, who began his career with Manchester City and in 1987 joined Manchester United. He retired from playing at the end of the 2013-2015 season after playing for 23 years. Soon after, he became the coach for that team. Also, he played with the Wales national team 64 times between 1991 and 2007, and later captained the Great Britain team in the 2012 Summer Olympics. He later became manager of the Wales national team in January 2018.

 

Los Angeles, November 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).