John Greyson | Prurient / 2020

revolutionizing the prurient rainy day

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson (director) Prurient / 2020 [8 minutes]

 

Canadian director John Greyson’s 2020 8-minute documentary began with his discussions of various AIDS activist friends from the 1980s, involved in the safer-sex wars regarding how they were going to survive the COVID pandemic.

     The conversations quickly grew into discussions with sex workers concerning their abilities to even survive the pandemic since there was no longer any way to see their clients in person and even imagine how to continue without financial help.

      Set to the music of Handel, Greyson explores through scenes from the film by Gérard Corbiau, Farinelli about the great 18th-century castrato Carlo Broschi, known popularly as Farinelli. The important lyrics of the Handel song from Lascia ch’io pianga speak to the issues of the day: “Let me weep over my cruel fate, and let me sigh for liberty.”

       The two figures of the poem, a sex worker named Jacob, and presumably Greyson himself attempt to write a poem together about the issues of COVID, with Jacob quickly suggesting he doesn’t have the “emotional fortitude” to write and admits that he is attracted to the idea of camboy, a word to which he will soon return.

     Indeed, Greyson suddenly came to insight that Corbiau’s shot-reverse-shot arias of Farinelli, creating an interchange between the superstar castrato and Handel were essentially camboy sessions.

       Jacob describes how he got started in sex work when as an unemployable grad student, he put up his name on Craig’s list. Before COVID he averaged 5 to 6 clients a week, now down at least 85%, and most of those being “camboy” experiences in which he performs sex on camera while communicating with the client. Despite the difficulty with the apparatus he describes, the client seemed happy with the result.

 

      Jacob also describes his work with organizations in Toronto who are attempting to financially help sex workers. He also discusses an application for COVID sex workers, in which the applicant must claim that he does not present live performances of a prurient sexual nature or derived directly or indirectly di minimis gross revenue through sales of products or depictions of any displays of prurient sexual nature,” which he describes as being “so American,” which obviously excludes any sex workers from applying for small business loan help. Greyson describes them as more vicious poets that they themselves are.

      Jacob also describes sex workers as always being on forefront of technological changes through VHS, DVD, and of course computers. And immediately when COVID began a great number of memes appeared such “I guess I’m going to be a cam-girl now,” etc.

      The two also discuss an extremely humorous set of drawings of sexual positions in which one should not or might engage during COVID, the ones most appropriate being almost impossible to maneuver into, and the ones most important in sex work, of course, have a red x beside them.

 

     Jacob describes his sudden realization that how much of his social life was involved not only with other sex workers but with his clients themselves.

       The film ends with more of Farinelli singing as the documentarian asks his audience to “Refuse precarity. Denounce di-mini-mister. Balanced and bouncing, We kiss and sway. Thus we revolutionize…each prurient rainy day.” The poem has been created.

       By presenting his film in a curved wide-angle lens and placing his speaking figures and other images in small circular images dotting the screen, Greyson creates a sense of isolation of the individuals from the larger, global, out-of-doors where we often see the filmmaker running the dark lonely streets in the frigid cold. Strangely, the small circular figures seem more warming and inviting that the vast space of the misshapen universe.

       No answers are provided in this work, nor even perhaps full questions. But Greyson certainly makes it apparent through his experimental and often humorous approach that the difficulties of those desiring sex among those of us isolated from others in the pandemic are perhaps far lesser than the problems faced by those who provide some people those sexual pleasures and who make their livings by doing so.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).