Alain Hain | Curious Thing / 2009

anorexia of the heart

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Mills (screenplay), Alain Hain (director) Curious Thing / 2009 [8 minutes]

 

This is a story about closeted gay boys and straight friends who nonetheless fall for one another. What to do, where to draw the lines, and how to resolve the conflicts that come into their relationships are the central issue in Alain Hain’s 8-minute film.  

     Jared (Danny Bernardy) is a closeted gay man who, as he himself puts it, is on the brink of coming out. He is currently dating a girl, Becky (Rebecca Pappa), who he truly likes and through whom he might imagine he might be able to retreat into a heteronormative life. That is until he meets straight boy Sam (Matthew Wilkas) to whom he is immediately attracted just as Sam is to him. 

     The two get on so wonderfully that even Becky perceives their relationship as threatening, arguing that Jared has been simply “leading her on.” What she doesn’t realize is that his attraction to Sam is just as startling to him as it is to Sam. It is not simply a physical response but some sort of inexplicable bonding as Jared describes it, a relationship that seems to suggest a normative possibility for the closeted young man that is somehow more tangible than his relationships with women.

      Hain bases this rather fascinating scenario on his interviews, over the course of three nights, with six gay men who talk about their close relationships, sexual and non-sexual, with straight men.

      What he reveals is that straight men and unsure gay men sometimes have a great deal in common their sexual identities, unsure of where they are with regard to their emotional base. The bonding and intimacy they feel with males sometimes trumps their desire for female company, and that often spills over to their sexual identities.

     Straight men, one of the interviewees argues, often like the attention of the gay gaze. And gays often form sexual crushes on straight men as an attempt to allay and perhaps simply to delay their own homosexual identification.

        What they all stress is their youth, their confusion about sex, and their inabilities to focus on issues of gender, what any psychoanalyst might be easily able to explain except that for youth actually going through that experience there is no explanation and given the societal mores, there is a great deal more of disapproval.

        This short work even posits the idea that the straight boy can grow jealous of the gay boy’s attempt to define himself as straight through dating women. The complexities of the feelings only reveals how flexible we might all be to sexual responses if only we had not been societally trained to delimit out sexual identities. And ultimately this short work brings up, once more, the possibility that many of us, male and female, are born with sexually ambiguous desires which are delimited by the normative among us, who demand we chose sexual paths that may or may not be suitable to our own youthful propensities.

         It’s not at all a “curious thing” that thousands of young gay men have at one time or another in their lives been seriously attracted to men who describe themselves as straight, and those straight men have been equally attracted to their gay or just “coming out” brethren. Throughout these pages I have perhaps too often drawn a line between the heterosexual and homosexual, when, in fact, that line is fairly often a tenuous link between boys and girls seeking out their sexual identities as young beings.

       More than we want to recognize, the feelings between the two “break through,” as one of the interviewed figures describes it, into sexual action, most often rejected in the aftermath. As he quite intelligently argues, “I think it’s one thing to be confused as a gay man coming out of the closet as opposed to a confusion of a straight man. One is a confusion that is actually starting to make sense, and the other one’s a confusion that you can’t really explain.”

       In the growing context of the basic fluidity of all sexual feelings, that lack of explanation, of course, has just begun to change. But it is uncertain how quickly our culture or any other may begin to actually accept that fluidity, to see that love is not something at all necessarily to do with gender, let alone that even gender itself is absolutely fluid.

      Meanwhile, movies such as Hain’s, written by Jason Mills, begin to poke holes in the theory of straight vs. gay, allowing us to begin to comprehend that sexuality is something we still know very little about or, to put it another way, is something we have never truly permitted ourselves to fully embrace and enjoy.

      Too often, as this film reveals, the so-called “straight” boy simply declares, after the fact, that “he just couldn’t,” meaning he can’t continue to explore what his desire—or his hormones—has led him to. That’s a rather remarkable statement when you carefully think about it since what the person is expressing is a sentiment saying that what he or she has been taught and learned through societal behavior has just cut off what the body is calling out for him or her to fulfill its needs—which, metaphorically speaking, represents a kind of anorexia of the heart.

 

Los Angeles, February 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).