John Greyson | Pissoir (aka Urinal) / 1988

mission impossible

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson (screenwriter and director) Pissoir (aka Urinal) / 1988

 

Canadian director John Greyson’s first feature film Pissoir nicely represents the tropes and genres of the majority of his longer films, but he hasn’t quite determined how to interpolate his essayist and documentarian approach with the fictions he introduces, and there are some rough spots throughout Pissoir that one doesn’t find in the works from Zero Patience (1993) going forward. If his later works are often accused of being too intellectual and complex, in Pissoir perhaps Greyson has somewhat underestimated his audience, although as early as 1988 there was clearly not the depth of knowledge about gay literary and art history that there is today, and one can hardly blame him for forging new territory a bit clumsily.

 

     The story is an enchanting one, a fantasy of nearly everyone interested in the artistic past. Who might you most like to sit down to dinner with? In this case Greyson conjures up a group of gay people with whom it might be interesting to spend an entire week.

      Summoned from the dead, somewhat like the figures in Agatha Christie’s famous mystery novel, And Then There Were None (originally titled Ten Little Niggers after the children’s rhyme and minstrel song) writers, artists, and filmmakers begin to show up to “the church,” the home at 110 Glenrose Avenue of Canadian lesbian sculptors Florence Wyle (1881-1968) and Frances Loring (1887-1968). When Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein (1898-1948) arrives unexpectedly at their abode, he finds that others, receiving the same letter that he has, have proceeded him, including Harlem Renaissance poet and political activist Langston Hughes (1901-1967), Japanese fiction writer Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), and artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) who is already painting a portrait of Oscar Wilde’s notorious fictional character Dorian Gray.

      Florence offers to put them all up if they are not allergic to cats, although some have already checked the train schedules finding there is no further transportation until a day later. A tape recorder is suddenly delivered up which provides them with the reason that they have been called together. The voice asks them together to help solve the problem of the police raids on gay men in the public bathrooms of Toronto and elsewhere in Ontario province, actions which have caused many gay men to be arrested, fined, and sometimes after public humiliation, destroying their careers and family lives, in few cases leading to suicide.

       The message, presented in the manner of the popular TV series of the day, Mission Impossible (1966-1973, and revived for two seasons by the American Broadcast Company in 1988, the year of Greyson’s film) begins with the standard: "Your mission, should you choose to accept it is…” and ends with the famous line, “"This tape will self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck.” The tape does indeed explode.

       Virtually forced into service for a week, and intrigued by the strange project, the famed artists begin on a series of personal arguments and reports on everything from the history and evolution of public toilet facilities, the use of public spaces for urination and defecation as used for male sexual gatherings, a study of the immediate problem in Ontario, and various personal recountings of the necessity for and joy of using toilet facilities for sexual pleasure, including a brief listing of the favorite “tea rooms” of Toronto. One even recites the proper procedures for bathroom sex, all which seem to cause great disgust among the women. In other segments, individuals involved with tearoom sex are interviewed, some dressed in outrageous disguises, while one brave individual arrested for indecent behavior, is determined to speak out about his case. Parliament representative Svend Robinson details the changes in Canadian and Ontario laws over the years, outlining the remaining problems.

 

      Indeed, the issue of public bathrooms used for gay sex and police harassment is an important issue in the gay world, and one that obviously troubled Greyson enough that he put it front and center in this cinematic mulligan stew of character studies, political issues, and comic interludes.

       It points, moreover, to films before and after it that concerned themselves in different ways with the same issues, from Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks (1947), James Bigood’s Pink Narcissus (1971), Rosa von Prauheim's It Is not the Homosexual Who Is Perverse (1971), Francis Savile’s Equation to an Unknown (1980), Paul Morrisey’s Forty Deuce (1982), Stephen Frears’ Prick Up Your Ears (1987) to later works such as Eytan Fox’ Time Off (1990), Constantine Giannaris’ Caught Looking (1991), Ferzan Özpetek’s Haman (1997), Patrice Chéreau’s Those Who Love Me Can Take the Train (1998), Simon Shore’s Get Real (1998), Kōschi Imaizumi’s Angel in the Toilet (1999), João Pedro Rodrígues’ O Fantasma (2000), Lawrence Ferber’s Birthday Time (2000), Welby Ings’ Boy (2005), Pedro Almadóvar’s Bad Education (2004), Adam Baran’s Love and Deaf (2004), Stephen Haupt’s The Circle (2014), Antonío Hens’ Doors Cut Down (2017), and Sebastien Muñoz’ The Prince (2019). See my essay on each of these films and my group essay on others “Gay Bathroom Sex” in the 2000-2009 volume of My Queer Cinema.

      Even closer to Greyson’s concerns are Monte Patterson’s short film Caught (2011) and, most notably, William E. Jones’ recontextualized compilation of police tapes of bathroom sexual encounters in the small Ohio city of Mansfield, Tearoom (2006).

      In other words, Greyson’s work came almost midway between the numerous films that in some form or another deal with this subject, films which continue even into the present.

      While the significant gay figures gathered together each present their reports, Dorian gets a job within the police force itself, inserting himself, so to speak, at the center of the controversy. But at the same time, the police, represented by Sergeant Jones (Karl Beveridge) and Inspector Smith (Clive Robertson) are disturbed by the strange of “hippies and bohemians” at “the church” and begin to investigate the artists themselves, trying to uncover what they are plotting—the very role Greyson assigns to the police force in his later film Un©cut (1997). Particularly when they discover that one of their own, Dorian, resides at the same address they grow even more suspicious, arranging for cameras to secretly spy on the residents, just as they have used such devices to arrest the men in public bathrooms.

      Ironically, whoever has brought these various celebrities together couldn’t have chosen a more ineffective group. As the police, using their early computer-provided biographies long before Wikipedia, begin to reveal, all of the men and women are homosexuals very uncomfortable with the fact, most of them for political and social reasons still in the closet. Mishima (David Gonzales) was notoriously interested in homosexuality which he discussed at great length in his fictions, while covering up his personal life, which in any event was made secondary due to his own right-wing political activities and his death by traditional seppuku, self-immolation by sword.

     Although Langston Hughes (George Spelvin) wrote many gay poems and like several other Harlem Renaissance figures* was rumored to be gay, he himself. because of his political commitments and the Renaissance leaders who insisted that their focus remain on black identity, worked to keep the fact secret, his heirs refusing to grant rights to reprint his works within a gay context until just recently.

      Sergei Eisenstein (here played by Paul Bettis) was a favorite of Joseph Stalin, but fell out of favor several times for his rumored gay sexuality, particularly after his return from Mexico (where he had encountered Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera) after he was arrested for carrying gay pornography. Eisenstein continually denied his homosexuality, and yet displayed it openly in his films through the interactions and simply the physical beauty of his sailors and male citizen rebels. (See by comments of his works in My Queer Cinema: 1930-1939.)

       Because of her relationship with Diego Rivera, Freida Kahlo’s (Olivia Rojas) own extensive lesbianism has often remained muted and not as fully discussed as her heterosexual affairs. But here she seems not at all shy about suggesting a threesome between her and the two owners of the house.

       The Canadian sculptors Loring (Pauline Carey) and Wyle (Keltie Creed), although living together as partners for many years, kept their relationship semi-private. Even today in the Wikipedia entries there is absolutely no discussion of their sexuality or whether it effected their work, despite the fact that each other is listed as their “partner.”

        And finally, although anyone who reads The Portrait of Dorian Gray will perhaps assume his gay sexuality, Dorian’s (Lance Eng) terrible behavior consists mostly of sins of the flesh with women; although his beauty is the constant subject of all of the males, he himself never speaks of a male sexual relationship, so presumably homosexuality is not among the sins he discovers openly revealed in the hidden painting, although clearly his deep friendship with Lord Henry suggests they may be sexual friends in the manner of Wilde himself and his boys.

       It is interesting that in the brief biographies the police keep investigating, nearly all of them end with the comment, “presumed homosexual.” Accordingly, the police can never quite figure out what these various “hippies” might be up to. All they can perceive is that their young officer is terribly upset about something he keeps in the attic under a cover—as we know the painting that is beginning to change before his very eyes.

 

      Meanwhile, all these obviously randy closeted gay men and women do is try to convince one another to have sex or, in Eisenstein’s case, at least share in mutual masturbation in the shower.

       Mostly, it appears they succeed, at one point Frieda even interceding in the close relationship between Loring and Wyle. Mishima gets into bed with Hughes, and Eisenstein tries out both men.

       Consequently, they do nearly nothing about the problem they’ve been tasked to solve. And the real beauty of the work, Dorian goes untouched and mostly unnoticed until, stabbing the painting, he dies. It turns out that the was in the fact the one who called them all together, and despite their being unable to literally accomplish anything concrete—they are after all dead—their very presence has brought further attention to the issue, having, accordingly, served their purpose. They disperse like the wind, but the perfumes of their existence help homosexual women and men everywhere to survive and speak out where they were unable to.

    

*Among the gay and bisexual artists of the Harlem Renaissance besides Hughes, were Alain Locke, Countee Cullen, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Wallace Thurman, George Hanna, Lucille Bogan, Mae Cowdery, Jimmie Daniels, Gladys Bentley, Bessie Smith, Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Alberta Hunter, and of course Carl Van Vechten, a white man who brought much of wealthy white folk to Harlem and wrote about and photographed the celebrants and their lives.

 

Los Angeles, December 13, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review December 2022).

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).

 

Daniel Castilhos | Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020

vortex of guilt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castilhos (screenwriter and director) Fedra (Phaedra) / 2020 [25 minutes]

 

In all the original myths, plays, and commentaries about the beautiful young second wife of Theseus, Phaedra falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus. She attempts to seduce him into her bed, but he refuses, either because of the fact that she is his stepmother, and more commonly in the myths, because he has pledged a commitment of chastity to his favorite goddess, Artemis, the goddess of the hunt as well as chastity.

 

     Either because of Phaedra’s own sense of betrayal or in some versions became of Aphrodite’s jealousy, Phaedra tells her husband that her son by his first wife attempted to rape her. In all versions, whether through the hands of Aphrodite or through Theseus’ revenge, Poseidon or some other god or goddess frightens Hippolytus’ chariot, sending them into such a frenzy that the young beautiful boy is dragged and torn apart by his own horses.

       In most versions Theseus discovers Phaedra’s lie, she killing herself over her treachery.

      In Brazilian director Daniel Castilhos’ uncut version from 2020, Hipolito (Marlon Schuck), called Lito by his mother Fedra (Mariana Boni), is a gay boy in love with Angelo (Thomas Ghelen).

       As in the original, Lito’s father and Fedra’s husband is away concerning his shipping business for long periods of time. He has married the 19-year-old college student after his wife, Fedra’s sister, died in an unspecified accident. The poor beauty, accordingly, is not only new to marriage but locked into a relationship with an older man who doesn’t spend much time with her. In that sense, it is the worst situation imaginable for a young teenager at the very age when she should be out exploring life. Teseu has tried to encourage her to join him, but she argues that she must continue her college studies.

     Equally frustrating is that with his father away, her son-in-law is busy parading his boyfriend Angelo through the house, kissing him openly, and having passionate sex with him in his bedroom—all of which Fedra not only observes but purposely listens to through the doorway.

      Even worse for her is the fact that her aunt Enone (Anita Dal Moro) comes for an apparently open-ended visit. Enone is an outspoken woman, quite free-thinking who openly comments on Lito’s beauty, suggesting even she would go to be with him were it possible. Surely her niece should take up with Lito and leave an old man like Teseu to herself. Enone, may be heterosexually open-minded, but when Fedra tells her that Lito is not interested in women, and that he is having an affair with Angelo, the aunt is quite taken aback, suggesting that surely this is just a passing phase since it would be a shame to waste all that beauty on sex with a man.

      Angelo, himself, is quite outspoken about Fedra’s beauty and at one moment when the boys are playing in the swimming pool even flirts with Fedra. Actually, he simply treats her like the attractive young woman she truly is, suggesting she attend the swimming meet in which Lito is competing. But it is Hipolito seems jealous of his lover’s attentions to the girl, and we realize in his discomfort about his young mother that there are obviously other feelings about her that he is hiding, whether they be a kind of disgust over the choice of his mother’s sister or, as we soon discover, his own heterosexual urges is not made clear.

 

     But in the very next scenes, as Fedra watches her step-son step naked out of the shower, turning to leave, he grabs her and brings her into his bed for sex which she clearly enjoys.

      Guilt almost immediately sweeps up these two individuals into a vortex not entirely of their own making. Lito refuses to answer Angelo on his cellphone, while Fedra breaks down into tears in the shower.

      In a kind of antiphon, the two central characters admit their “crimes,” Lito confessing his acts to his lover Angelo, who at first his shocked by his acts but when, for the first time his friend insists that he loves him and they he had sex for the first time ever with a woman out of a sense of the forbidden, finally suggests he leave the house and move in with him. If Hipolito may feel that he does not deserve Angelo’s offer given what he just admitted to, it doesn’t take him but a few moments to agree, soon after pulling a suitcase down the stairs and jumping into Angelo’s waiting car.

     Fedra meanwhile, admits to her auntie that something terrible has happened, an event which Enone quickly intuits when she sees Lito moving out. Unlike Angelo’s expressions of continued love, she demands her niece immediately deny the whole thing, that if something comes up, she should put the blame on him.

     Something, so to speak, does come up, as Teseu returns home that very evening to find his young wife, having taken drugs, dead in the bathtub.

      If we have long felt the unsettling chords of José Florēncio’s music track throughout this teleplay, we now feel a different kind of nauseating feeling. If as Vito Russo long-ago taught us most queer individuals have had to die for their sexual acts in the end, so too through cinema history have women been forced to die for the sins of the male hero. To replace the pattern of homophobia with a somewhat misogynistic ending does not resolve the problem—although we all know that if Enone tells what she knows to her brother they may be further vengeance.

      Perhaps Castilhos felt that in killing off his Fedra he was evening the balance for all those centuries in which the innocent Hipolito had to die for his young mother’s mendacity. If nothing else, the gay man’s acceptance of his lover’s failures, shows at a way out from all those centuries of macho reaction in response to sexual infractions other than overpowering guilt, vengeance, and suicide. Queer people have always suggested to heterosexual beings that sex is nothing more than what it is, not something that enslaves one to another.

 

Los Angeles, December 20, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).

Daniel Castilhos | Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) / 2016

real ghosts

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Castilhos (teleplay and director) Meninos Tristes (Blue Boys) / 2016 [45 minutes]

 

One of the numerous television mini-series about social and political issues that appear in Brazil and many other South American countries, Meninos Tristes, in 4 short sessions, revisited the commonplace theme of schoolboy bullying for mostly gay boys. As the regular reader of my essay / reviews will know this is one of the hundreds I have written about over the years, but this one being among the most extreme and tragic in its ramifications.

     If the casual reader might wonder why this subject is repeated in so many films, I would immediately suggest that it is not an issue of popularity but of the continued need to educate and hopefully change a situation that is evidently getting worse as the LGBTQ+ community finds its international voice. The bullies of every society seem to get more terrorized in their homophobic fog than they were decades ago when one simply whispered such issues, young gay men and women being left to themselves without any knowledge that he or she was not entirely alone.

       This work subtly reasserts, moreover, that homophobia itself often stems from the fear of those who are themselves unable to accept their own nascent desires, proving to themselves that they could not possibly be gay by hating others who they suspect of being or are openly queer.

       In movie after movie, young gay men are beaten and terrorized every time they walk down the hall or walk home after school. But Blue Boys reveals, like many others, that the terror often doesn’t end there. In the case of the handsome Andre (Vinicius Machado), he is not only attacked at school and elsewhere by Marco (Luiz Kumer) and his fellow thugs, but at home must face a righteous religious mother, Olga (Suely Pinheiro) who, swayed by the uneducated counseling of her pastor, makes things worse for the boy, who has already made clear that he is being tortured at school. Moreover, Castilhos has written-in an almost campy monster of a sister, Priscila (Renata Selmo) who is nearly as hostile to homosexuality as Andre’s classmates and shares as about much empathy as she might have for cockroach; she’d be happier if someone would just come and get it out of her way. I wonder if there is any hidden meaning in the fact that she is busy throughout much of the film reading Harry Potter?              Like most 17-year-old closeted gay boys, Andre has a best female friend Manuela (Ana Victoria Camargo) who is there for Andre as some of his worst minutes, but in the end, she seems more concerned about the decorations she’s planning for the school prom.

     Compared with most such boys in this situation, Andre certainly does have problems. Beyond the threats and the incomprehension of his situation at home, Andre is truly attacked, this time with a baseball bat, escaping only before it is about to be used. His fears lead him to attempt suicide through an overdose of pills. Fortunately, his mother returns home from church in time to demand her daughter call 911, who stands there for a while before doing so, as if she’d prefer not to be bothered.

    

      This film, like some others, also includes an openly gay boy, Diego (Arthur Paz) who is not only friendly to Andre, but is determined to get him into his bed and make him is boyfriend. And it is his comments that help finally to get the terrified and pouting Andre to realize that he too has the right to love and even have sex. Indeed, the most pleasant moments in this film are when the two boys finally do get together and almost fall in love, Andre, even at those moments, fearing what might happen in the future.

       And with good reason. Worried for her son, Olga is plotting with her spiritual leader how to move the family off to Brasilia for service in the church, hoping to involve Andre—who is clearly a nonbeliever who refuses to even attend church—in a closer relationship with God that might save him from his abnormal desires. She may think of the move as simply a beneficial involvement in community, but underneath the soothing words of her pastor we can small the walls of a gay conversion camp.

     But the worse is yet to come. After their love-making, when Andre leaves Diego, Marco, evidently having planned a sexual outing with Diego, rapes him before beating and knifing him to death. After his caring teacher Mariana (Cheri Vivan) and his mother gently report the news to him, Andre asks for some time alone and going upstairs opens a drawer wherein his mother evidently keeps a gun. At the last moment of the film, we hear it go off.

      The last 5-minute segment begins 9 months later, during which time, apparently, a very much changed Andre—now bearded with tatts—has been locked away in an asylum, evidently for his own protection. We watch him in the shower, fighting fiercely with an imaginary revenant of Marco, the doctors quickly putting him under sedation.

       Another 3 months pass, and a more serene Andre is about to be released in another week as the doctor tells him that today is visiting day, and his mother will be with him for breakfast. The movie ends there, and one can interpret it easily as the beginning of a new life for which Andre hopes, or alas, a repeat of the old if his mother has not yet come to realize her own culpability. Presumably Andre has learned how to forgive her and put to rest all the other real ghosts.

      When I was visiting the Soviet Union during its very last days in 1991, my poet friend Arkadii Dragomoschenko told me that in Russia the word for gay boys was the Russian equivalent of the words “blue boys.” I wanted to tell him that in such a culture as his, much like that of Putin’s Russia and the current situations in Poland, Hungary, The Philippines, Egypt and numerous other African nations such a description was certainly appropriate given the situation of both their spiritual and physical beings, their souls feeling as “blue” as in the black musical expessions, and their bodies often being beaten black and blue.

 

Los Angeles, September 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).