Levan Akin | და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ (Da chven vitsek'vet) (And Then We Danced) / 2019

dancing for joy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Levan Akin (screenwriter and director) და ჩვენ ვიცეკვეთ (Da chven vitsek'vet) (And Then We Danced) / 2019

 

The Swedish/French production of the Georgian-language and Georgia-located film And Then We Danced was perhaps one my most delightful of recent film discoveries. I have to admit I am sucker for gay love films in which the characters encounter nearly impossible adversity and still manage to love, forget, and move on. It might be said to represent the melodramatic pattern of gay behavior that is bred into our bones through having to face a youth of just those difficulties, of coming to terms with ourselves, falling in love—sometimes with a straight guy or a gay man who is not yet ready to fully accept his sexuality—and then stumbling on nonetheless.

  

   I have always loved dance and even struggled for a year or more to become a dancer, so it is easy for me to see this pattern, metaphorically speaking, as a kind of inevitable dance that comes with the territory: a painful battle with the body to seduce, embrace, and make love to another only to discover him pulling away.

     It is even more compelling, accordingly, to see that metaphor played out in terms of one of the most traditionally conservative of forms, the National Georgian Ensemble which in the past few years has “cleansed” itself of all seemingly individualistic gestures, and reintroduced a notion that perhaps never even existed before in traditional Georgian dance, a “masculinization” of the entire series of movements.

     Young Merab (the marvelous dancer/actor Levan Gelbakhiani) is beautiful, but in his slight stature and still-adolescent movements, he is everything but the notion of pure masculine form, however one might attempt to describe that ephemeral concept. Both his mother and father were involved with the company in the “old” days, both having been left empty with no financial futures after their inevitable ouster from the dance company for the sin of having become old and dancing in an outdated style.

      Both Merab and his brother David (Giorgi Tsereteli) have studied with the company since childhood, David evidently having demonstrated the superior talent, at least according to the smugly imperious and always disapproving choreographer Aleko (Kakha Gogidze).

      As David later in the film makes clear, Aleko and the company’s director are not at all impressed with their parents, who, after all, were part of the old, now banned school of Georgian dancing. And David, of the age in which he prefers to spend his drunken nights with women and his close male friends, has become delinquent, purposely working to get himself expelled from the company despite Merab’s attempts to wake him up in time for the daily rehearsals.

      This family’s father has moved off from Tbilisi to a larger city where he works in the market, while Merab and David’s mother and grandmother live in a small Tblisi apartment, making do with the leftovers Merab takes home from the restaurant in which he works and, particularly, when their power goes off for non-payment, the “special gifts” provided by David’s good friends—which we only later discover involves his selling them drugs.

      Merab has hooked up with a fellow student in the second company with which he rehearses, Mary (Ana Javakhishvili), with whom he is featured in an important company dance. Despite his years of study, however, and his studied performances of the dances he has long agon learned, Aleko, it is clear, is not at all happy with the boy’s demeanor, asking him again and again to be more masculine, aloof, and rigid instead of putting his all into the often clumsy-looking complexities of the footwork of traditional Georgian dances.

     The boy would be happy just to continue as he has been—despite the intensive days of painful muscles and the late nights he spends in the restaurant—were it not that, seemingly out of nowhere, somewhat like a Kafka story, a “replacement dancer,” Irakli (Bachi Valishvili) suddenly appears out of nowhere. Nobody know who he is a replacement for—rumor has it that one of the major dancers in the primary company has been found having sex with another man, has been beaten up by his fellow dancers, and sent away by his parents to a monastery for the Georgian method of “curing homosexuality.” We later learn that a monk has taken sexual advantage of the dancer, who has been forced also to leave the monastery and now has no choice but to work as a male prostitute.

 

     At first, Aleko is wary of the newcomer, demanding he immediately remove his earring. But Irakli is tall, lean, and highly masculine, representing just the look in demand, and besides that proves to be an excellent and skilled dancer. Merab’s role is quickly assigned to the newcomer and it appears that the rest of the film might be a resentful battle between the two handsome young men.

     For a short while, it is precisely that, as Merab comes in even earlier to rehearse, hoping to keep his other roles. But word has also gotten out, since a major dancer has left the company (clearly the rumored gay boy) that the director will be auditioning members of the second company. And soon after, the list is announced which includes both Merab and Irakli, as well as a mean-spirited competitor, Luka (Levan Gabrava).

      Although Irakli immediately claims to have a girlfriend back in Batumi, he soon befriends Merab, the two learning from one another and quickly growing close as friends. With Mary and Irakli, Merab visits his father, who argues that his son should give up dancing since it will leave him, like them, with nothing. But that familial visit and Irakli’s own befriending of David, begins to draw the two even closer.

      One night, when several dancers find themselves together in a downtown bar, they observe some locals entertaining tourists with “traditional Georgian dancers,” and recognizing their total inabilities to make the proper movers, Irakli suggests they provide the tourists a true vision of Georgian dance. What begins as a simple performance soon becomes a personal sense of simply celebration in their youth and ability to express that through their bodies, Merab and Irakli dancing together in an almost frenetic expression of the traditional and personal, eccentric joy of their lives.

      For Merab, suddenly, it opens up a new world as he realizes, through his nightly dreams and daily obsessions that he is, in fact, is not only in love with his competitor, but—without any of the attendant fears which even we, as outsiders of the Georgian culture, now know about which Merab should be highly circumspect—is the recognition that he is gay.

       Ah, the beauty of fearless youth! At home, his silly and playful embracement of his grandmother and mother betray a young man madly in love. And every moment that he is with Irakli the obsession grows, the boys finally, on a kind of country outing, masturbating each other in the nearby woods. Soon after, they share a bed.

     Although they have been careful, Mary has noticed where her former boyfriend’s eyes are now almost aways focused on his fellow dance, and angrily realizes what has happened, although she remains quiet, knowing that any mention of the relationship would destroy both of her friends.

      Almost as suddenly as the two boys fall in love, however, David is kicked out of the company for his absences. Without any source of income, he begs his brother to help him get a job at the restaurant where he and Mary work. David is hired on provision, but on the very first evening is ordered out, along with Merab, for having been observed selling drugs to a customer. Mary joins them.

      Even more devastating for Merab is the sudden disappearance of Irakli, whom he can no longer even reach by cellphone. Despondent and in anger for no longer being able to share the sexuality into which he has just jubilantly opened himself up to, Merab picks up a young male prostitute who he has already spotted on the bus. The boy takes him to a gay bar and later even introduces him to his prostitute friends, all opening up the new work which he’s now accepted to the beautiful dancer.

      But Luca has seen him leaving the bar and in no time at all has revealed Merab to the rest of the company as a queer. Hungover and furious about the situation, Merab performs badly at rehearsal and seriously injures his angle. Aleko attempts to discourage him from the audition, but Merab continues to believe he can rehearse and perform.

      While Mary tries to nurse him back to health, he finally receives a call from Irakli reporting that he is back in Batumi caring for his ailing father, and will probably not be there for the audition.

       Leaving practice, Merab is now heckled by Luka and others, Mary warning him to be careful so that he too doesn’t end up like the rumored ensemble dancer.

       As if things could not get worse, Merab returns home to discover that his brother David has gotten a local girl pregnant, infuriating his mother and grandmother, even though the girl’s father, desperate to cover up his daughter’s condition, has already arranged a wedding with plans to take David into his employment.

 

      At the wedding, Merab suddenly spots Irakli, just returned to town. And after a traditional religious ceremony which incorporates an entire segment about God’s first couple, Adam being and Even being a female—the church reiterating the importance of gender in all such situations—Merab goes on search of his beloved dancer friend, finally finding him alone in a back bedroom. There Irakli tells him the devastating news that he intends to marry his girlfriend and return to Batumi, leaving dance forever behind.

      There is no proper expression of Merab’s reaction; he can only had back Irakli’s earring which he has stolen, offering it up like a marriage ring for the relationship between the two of them that can never happen in Georgian culture and symbolizes the endless series of future disappointments he will have to face.

      Returning home to cower in bed, he is surprised to find David returning to his old bedroom after himself being beaten, having defended his brother’s “honor” when several males at the wedding called his brother a queer.

     In a remarkably loving scene, Merab makes it clear that the honor fight was meaningless, that he, in fact, is gay; and David admits that he realizes that his own future entails growing into a fat old Georgian man unhappy with the way his life as gone, yet is nonetheless able to accept his fate. In perhaps the most touching scenes in the film, however, the brother argues that such a life is not for Merab, that his beautiful brother deserves so much more, including happiness that he will never find by remaining in Georgia. Merab can only shake his head in agreement, well knowing that given his new sexual identity, he cannot stay at home.

      Nonetheless, he surprisingly shows up at the audition, Mary being there, despite what has happened, just to support him.

 

     Despite his passionate dancing, his ankle has not yet healed and he falls. The director is clearly unimpressed. Yet despite his dismissal, Merab continues, gradually turns the traditional forms into what the Wikipedia entry on this film nicely describes as “his own unbridled, androgynous style.” Surely, both men have to realize that Merab has just expressed that his dance was for joy rather than coming from a statement of a nationalistic toxic representation of male sexuality.

        Outraged, the director stands and leaves, while Aleko remains to see Merab play out his defiant expression before he bows and departs.

      The homophobia talked about in the film exists in perhaps even worse than the movie in reality.

      In July 2019, the film won the Grand Prix Award at the 10th Odessa International Film Festival. The next month the major actor, Levan Gelbakhiani won the Best Actor Award at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival. In October of that year And Then We Danced won the Best Feature Film Award at the prestigious British LGBT Iris Prize Festival. And in January 2020 it played in the Spotlight section of the famed Sundance Film Festival.

      Swedish born director Levin Akin, whose parents were born in and left Georgia when it was under Soviet rule, has put a great deal of love and passion into the film about his parents’ homeland, and was insistent that it appear in Geogia as well. But when the premiere was announced in Tbilsi and Batumi, ultra-conservative groups threatened to cancel it. The head of the Children Protection Public Movement, Levan Palavandishvili, as well as the leader of the ultra-nationalist movement in Georgia, March Sandro Bregadze insisted that they would picket the venues to protest the film’s showing which they argued was “against Georgian and Christian traditions and values, popularizing the sin of sodomy.” The Georgian Orthodox Church also came out against the film, while trying to distance itself from any potential acts of violence.

     In November 2019, the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Georgia mobilized police troops, putting them around the Amirani Cinema where the premiere was to take place, and in nearby streets, which itself might be perceived as a way to delimit audiences. When the rightist protesters, however, tried to break through the police cordon, they were restrained, and although one civil activist, Ana Subeliani was severely injured by protestors, the screenings took place as planned, while nonetheless revealing that Georgia is indeed probably not a place for young open gay men such as the character in this film to seek out their futures.

     All of this should remind us, moreover, of another Tbilsi born artist, the great filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov, born into an Armenian family, arrested and imprisoned by Soviet Union authorities who controlled Georgia at the time, because of his bisexual activities.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).           

Ralph Dunn? | The Pursuit of a Gentleman / 2009, reedited 2012

sunday in the park

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ralph Dunn (director?) The Pursuit of a Gentleman / 2009, reedited 2012 [12 minutes]

 

As a man, dressed in denims, wearing a backpack, enters into the woods, most viewers might imagine that this is to be a film about hiking, perhaps a lovely tour of rural countryside or a large city wilderness such as Rock Creek Park in Washington, D.C.

 

    In most respects, it many seem that to some of its audience even after it’s 12-minute run, but as any gay man almost immediately perceives, the gentleman—who is as young as he may at first have seemed—who keeps stopping and turning back to look at the camera and presumably the cameraman following him is not simply on a leisurely stroll into the wild.

      As he slowly meanders through the maze of winding paths in this park, turning back every so often almost as if to reassure himself the camera is still following him, he pulls out a cigarette and reaches up to a branch of one tree to pull down a condom left there. Almost any gay man who has experienced a wide range of gay sexual practices will recognize that this park is the perfect place for the art of early Sunday morning cruising. Here men all ages, gay, closeted, heterosexually married, can tell themselves, their mate, or wives that they are going out to get some exercise and somewhat righteously wander through nature in search of others like them who just might want to share in the dangerous pleasures of outdoor sex.

 

     Our suspicions are quickly confirmed as we watch not only our titular gentleman lure the follower into more and more dense thickets and isolated spots, but we begin to notice other men wandering about alone, equally meandering along the paths and also occasionally turning back to look at the others who have just passed. It is something like a huge dance in which these men move about in space looking and waiting for a suitable partner while simultaneously pretending, perhaps both to themselves and the others, that their true intention is simply to take in the pleasure of the constantly chirping birds and crickets.

  

    The camera and cameraman pans the territory, blurring the spaces between these gentlemen as they momentarily stop and ponder their next movements through the forested space. Eventually, the very preponderance of such lone males becomes almost something comic, as we begin to perceive just how many elderly men have left their beds or couches on this beautiful morning to share in the splendors of the natural world, all them coincidentally wandering into rugged territories—although always close to the well-worn paths—which might be a true hiker’s nightmare.

      We never see any of the figures coming together, have absolutely no evidence of sexual activity or such desires being even on the minds of these wandering elders. But at the end, the pursued gentleman turns back, moving in the direction of the man with the camera. Has he given up the game of leading and is now ready to shift into the role of pursuer? The film goes black.

  

     This film appears to be entirely real, completely unmanipulated. There is no “coding,” not even any control of the film’s seemingly meaningless “events.” Yet, I might argue that a viewer-interpreter such as me might be described by those who cannot make any sense of this film other than it representing some anonymous Sunday hikers (and even that particular day is something admittedly I have imposed upon this film) might surely argue that I am simply “reading in” or imagining what is really taking place.

      Strangely, this is perhaps the best example of a coded film—despite the fact that there has been no conscious coding involved—imaginable. Totally transparent, the film for heterosexual individuals might standardly be read simply as “stroll through nature,” ignoring what others like me read as clues: the condom left hanging on a branch, the self-conscious posturing of the gentleman being pursued, and the very fact that he and others are being actively pursued. This brilliant work about gay cruising might almost be the perfect example of how to demonstrate to a classroom of young film students how coding can be accomplished with the very slightest of efforts.

     From the comments on YouTube about this film, one straight person, however, has apparently been able to perceive the gay subtext, his comment reading “We pray for you”—unless he’s simply cheering on the gentleman in his search for woodland sex.

      Although the film lists no director it appears with other short films on a site organized by Ralph Dunn, who may be behind the work’s creation.

 

Los Angeles, November 25, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2023).

Arthur J. Bressan Jr. | Buddies / 1985

the idea of sex

 

Arthur J. Bressan, Jr. (screenwriter and director) Buddies / 1985

 

There seems to be something almost creepy about comparing LGBTQ films about AIDS. The numerous films about the disease and its impact on the gay community (several about which I’ve already written and the many more on which I will focus over the next few years in my Herculean-like endeavor to comment on every LGBTQ-related film in cinema history) all ought to be awarded a special place simply for the courageousness of these nearly impossible attempts to dramatize the inexpressible sorrow and enshrined in an archive to which everyone should be strongly urged to view (particularly the young such as characters in Jordon Firstman’s Call Your Father [2016] and Ethan Fox’s The Sublet [2020] who argue something to the effect of “Why does every discussion about being gay have to begin with AIDS?”). Some of these works, however, admittedly explore the issues more effectively and profoundly than others, an example being Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), the first major film to focus on the subject.

 

    Released in late September 1985, two months before the NBC movie, John Erman’s equally ground-breaking AIDS film An Early Frost, Bressan’s film was a shout in the dark before gay and lesbian organizations had begun to fully coalesce around the issues. At the time of the movie there was evidently not even an AIDS clinic in the city of New York.

      The young man, David Bennett (David Schachter) who has volunteered through a local gay and lesbian center to become a “buddy” to the now friendless Robert Willow (Geoff Edholm) does not even quite know what’s expected of him or how to approach a man who has a disease that many still thought was contagious through airborne particles (much like situation with COVID-19 today, which of course does require a mask). Dressed up in protective gear, Robert jokes “Say, they really got you all dolled up for your grand entrance.” When David answers they told him to wear this—as he removes the mask, takes off the gloves and finally removes his protective paper gown—“to be on the safe side. Shouldn’t I?” the sick man’s answer establishing his contrarian nature which at first slightly irritates the meek and conformist typesetter: “Well, you know what they say, if they give you lined paper write the other way.”

     We immediately realize that the relationship between the two of them will not only be, as Bette Davis might put it, a “bumpy flight,” but that the so-called pilot will learn how to fly from his presumed passenger. As David admits that he’s never done “this thing kind of thing” before, his would-be buddy incredulously realizes that David has volunteered, asking perhaps the most important question of the film, “Why?”

      David makes his first stab at answering—“I don’t know really. I mean, I’m gay but that’s no big thing. I don’t have any friends who have AIDS. My lover Steve, he’s had two friends who’ve....”—“Died,” interrupts Robert, “you can say it.” Indeed, throughout the rest of the film David slowly learns through Robert’s brilliant mentoring the answer to not only why he has agreed to undertake this voyage—and it is truly a voyage of the spirit and the heart—but for better and worse what it truly means to be gay in a society that still cannot open its mind to totally embrace queerness.

      “Why?” obviously is a question also which anyone stricken with AIDS has to ask him or herself again and again, as Robert, who has already suffered pneumonia twice and is now fearful of never being able to leave his hospital bed again, surely has pondered. The questions of “why me?” “Why now?” Or with gritted teeth inquiring, as Robert later does in the film, “Why are so many gays being meaninglessly punished for love?” and “Why do others perceive my love as a sin?” “Why did I unintentionally cause my own death by simply acting in the most natural way that a human being can express that love, by having sex? Or, finally, the question any queer must ask throughout their lives, a question Robert presumably thought that he had long ago laid to rest, “Why am I gay? Why was I born different from the majority of human beings on this earth?”

       The answer he surely has arrived at is self-evident: there is no answer. For as Gertrude Stein expressed it in a different manner, “There is no question.” And it is Robert’s recognition of this fact and his ability to look back upon his life with the joy of living that helps even a man laying prone on a hospital to guide his fellow traveler into a gentle landing, permitting him to truly recognize the power of being himself.

     At first it almost appears that David has undertaken the role simply so that he might find a subject on which to write and reflect. He intends to keep a daily journal. Even he fears that he may have volunteered to make himself feel good. But as he finally begins to ask questions about Robert’s life, he quickly abandons that idea. Even after the first meeting he tells Steve that “He was not what I expected. ...Which is someone who was going to need real help.”

 

    Indeed, despite his extremely ill condition, Robert is quite intelligently capable of handling a situation which most of us might never have been able to, particularly being thrown out of his apartment by his current lover and left to die on the streets of New York which does not yet have sufficient programs to deal with the increasing number of young gay men coming down with the disease.

     But then Robert has lived a rather remarkable existence, having long lived with a gay activist, Edward, the love of his life. Accordingly, the patient asks questions of David that he has never even asked himself, some seemingly very basic such as “When did you know that you were gay?”—one of the earliest questions any new gay friend might ask—which David thinks is a “weird question,” alerting us to just how closeted, despite his open admission of being gay, the volunteer truly is.

     As Robert explains, in the first in a long series of gentle pedagogical challenges to his buddy, “I think it’s [the question] basic. A person’s real identity. Sex is what makes you “in or out. Hot or cold. You know, where your passion is. It’s not everything, but it’s a big piece of the puzzle.”

     And gradually the puzzle of both of them begins to be assembled. Even at this moment, as David remembers his first boyfriend and his parents’ open acceptance of him, Robert reveals another sad incidence of his life, recounting that when he told his parents about his sexuality in 1971 they disowned him. “It’s like one of those silent films where the father throws his kid out into the storm. Except it was me. And it was California sunshine.”

      That last word might in fact define Robert’s personality. He never sees any of the many tragic events he has had to undergo for what they were but merely perceives them as inevitable occurrences. Later Robert describes even that childhood event, which looking back, “was horrible,” as something positive. “At the time I fell right into the world of dawning gay liberation...and Edward’s arms.” There is accordingly no rancor or anger in his voice.

      Edholm brilliantly portrays Robert with almost always a sad, slightly regretful smile upon his pale face topped by golden hair. And later, after David retrieves Robert’s personal photographs, letters, and clippings from the apartment from which his current lover has turned him out, we begin to realize that with Edward, at least, he did actually live a kind of glorious life. 

      Edward’s two great loves, he recalls, was getting it on outdoors and politics—gay rights, gay community, marching, demonstrating. “Edward was so intellectual,” Robert gushes, “And I was a gardener. Very laid back. We were a hot match. The reigning politico and his hunky sidekick.”

 

      As we gradually witness these photos and hear more of their adventures, finally seeing films when David sneaks in projectors, we begin to realize not only the enormous likeability of this pair, but their importance to those around them. They represented not only the beauty of gay life but its growing recognition of its identity and desires. Is it any wonder that such a “match” might burn itself out, Edward’s actions having worn him down as they are taken over in other ways by a now much larger community. David laments at just how badly the men in Robert’s life have treated him.

     When soon after David brings him the galleys of an essay he is typesetting, an article that concerns a religious point of view that sees AIDS as something the gay community not only has brought upon themselves but deserves, the usually gentle Robert becomes terribly agitated as he asks do such people “really believe that God wants me here?” until he begins coughing, losing his breath, David having to call the nurse simply to save him. For the first time David realizes than for some people ideas matter even more than life itself. “He seemed literally more ready to die than to shut up. I’ve never met a person like Robert Willow.”

     When he later brings Robert some porno tapes and a player (all of which the doctors and nurses eventually demand be removed) David begins to perceive the importance not just of sexuality but of standing for the survival of the beings behind that important part of the human puzzle.

     One of the most important incidents in this film, it might be argued, is the moment when David, after sitting for a few seconds watching Robert trying to masturbate to the porno tapes he’s brought him and noticing the 32-year-old man’s difficulty given his isolation from both the disease and the fact that he has not perhaps been even embraced by anyone for months, joins him on the bed, simply touching and holding him as if he had become a kind of surrogate lover. It is perhaps the first time we truly begin to admire David as much as we have already fallen in love with the true hero of this sad narrative.

      So too by this time has David basically fallen in love with Robert. Even his lover Steve suspects that when they have sex David now imagines his buddy. Suddenly we see right before our faces a mind being opened up not only to a wide responses to sexual desire but to the importance of  comprehending and sharing what it means to be a sexual being. One of the tapes he has brought Robert shows a gay pride march—probably images from the directors own previous film Gay USA (1978). David admits he’s only attended one gay pride event. As he puts it, “I’m not into it.” A few years ago he and Steve went, but “it was tacky, a freak show.” Robert counters, “But Gay Day is great. Just look at all those people, most of the year passing for straight and then, wham! they’re out. The world has to see them and deal with them.” “Why should I want the world to see me?” asks the seemingly ever-dense David. “Well, it beats hiding,” Robert responds. “I don’t hide. But I don’t have to tell all the world every day that I like guys. That’s my private business.” Robert hits the mark once again, “I just thought that coming out is what everyone longs for. You know a chance to be yourself without worrying who’s watching or what they’re thinking. ...For me it stands for not letting the world say that I’m not here. That there’s only ‘supposed to be straight people, straight love....” David interrupts, “But why cut yourself off with the gay label? Why separate yourself from everyone else?” Gritting his teeth a bit, Robert restates the problem of the day: “I only feel separated when I have to lie and say that I’m straight when I’m really gay. Do you think that if straight senators and their straight sons had AIDS that all that money being held up in Washington...that all that money would take so long to come down to research and hospices?”

      Yes, this scene is didactic, but in such a film fighting, as Bressan surely saw it, a desperate struggle—he would later lose his own life to the disease—it is a necessary lesson, one which helps in the education of a young gay sceptic like David, or perhaps even like me since I now see myself at that time as sharing several aspects of David’s situation, including his good fortune at a time when so many others were suffering like Robert. In 1985, the year this film premiered Howard and I moved to Los Angeles, he having just been hired as the Curator of Contemporary Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. At the very first gathering of museum trustees and important collectors, Howard introduced me as his companion, and we were immediately accepted as a couple without a tremor of even the most cosmetically lifted of chins.

      A bit earlier in Bressan’s work a similar illuminating scene is played out. David suddenly asks Robert a question that reminds me of the possibility that the character Emily Webb is offered in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. “If you could be healthy, I mean completely healthy for one day, what would you do?”

     “No strings, just 24 hours like magic?” Robert asks.

     “One day, yeah. What would you do?”

     His answer—with its longing sense of detail and its surprising deviations of our expectations—is almost as painful to hear as Emily’s day is for us to witness:

 

“Well, I’d be with Edward. Not in the past, like in the movie [the short clip they’ve viewed of Edward and Robert on the beach]. But here. In New York City. But we’d be lovers. And we’d get it on ‘cause there’s no one I ever had who was as hot as Edward. This, of course, is a purely personal preference. But we’d be together. Breakfast. Shower. Then go out for a walk. Central Park. Okay. But, this is a little weird, but at an offbeat time, about 2:00, I’d take the People’s Express and I’d fly to Washington, D.C. And I’d have a 2 x 4 and a Magic Marker and a piece of cardboard. And I’d be a one-man picket outside the White House. Just a gesture, you know. Very Don Quixote. And I’d write something on the cardboard like ‘America, AIDS is not a gay disease. It hurts everybody. Release all the money for research and care.’ And then I’d go back to New York. And I’d be with Edward. We’d have a great dinner. Then hit a couple of piano bars for a few songs. And then go home and fuck our brains out. [He sheepishly grins.] My happy day by Robert Willow.”

 

     One morning when David arrives to talk with his buddy, the bed linens are being cleared away, Robert having died in his sleep. The hospital, as Steve tells David soon after on the phone, is sorry that they weren’t able to reach him to tell him the news before his arrival. Steve is worried about his lover. “Come home,” he begs. But David declines. He needs a little more time. He’ll be home for dinner. The Gay center also calls, asking him come in, but David insists he’ll be there the next morning. In the very last scene of the film we see David picketing the White House, a cardboard sign held erect in pride.

      School is over, and alas so is the life of the teacher and friend David has grown to love. Now has become the time to transform those lessons of love into real life acts.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).