Roberto Pérez Toledo | Brújula (Compass) / 2017

pointing him in the right direction

by Douglas Messerli

 

Roberto Pérez Toledo (screenwriter and director) Brújula (Compass) / 2017 [4.20 minutes]

 

Two Explorer scouts, ages 14-20 (Sergio San Millán and Jaime Rosa), are walking through a rather open woods, one of them with compass in hand. The other soon discovers that the compass doesn’t work, but that his friend has asked him to accompany him because.. “I just wanted,” the other fills

in the difficult words “To be with me…alone.”

     The young man with the compass agrees, “I wanted to talk with you, yeah.”

     Evidently the night before the two have been engaged in a kissing episode, and the boy with the compass is, as he puts it, is “a little confused.”

     “’Cause?”

     “Because of what happened last night.”

     “Last night we kissed and it’s OK…”

     “So, I can’t stop thinking….”

     “About?”

     “I don’t know…Man, you can help me a little.”

     “Don’t be afraid.”

     “I am not…”

     “Gay?”

     So the pattern continues, the one demonstrating his discomfort and distress with his confusion about the event, the other reassuring him, in a gentle voice, and filling in the words that the boy with the compass cannot yet employ.

     Before their conversation is over, the friend as been able to allay all the fears the compass boy has about being gay, and explains to him—when the confused boy wonders if the other’s parents know and whether perhaps even other scouts know of his sexuality—that he doesn’t have to tell everyone at once. “You take your time…And feel what you must feel…that’s all. You don’t need to go running and tell everyone at the camp right now…There’ll be time.”

      In short, the more experienced scout gently helps his confused friend to come out without every forcing him to say “I’m gay,” without any sort of general announcement. As his wiser friend explains: “Start by…telling it to yourself.”

      “And then what?” asks the ever-curious boy in the process already of coming out.

      His friend laughs since is no telling of what will follow. He wisely explains “Outside there’s always stupid people who will attack you cause of what you are. …But let’s go on to the big stuff. Do you like me, or not?”

    His friend laughs, finding it just as we do nearly impossible not to like his very handsome advisor, the man who has made the transition from denial to acceptance feel like it were less than a hillock in the grass.

      As the two walk off together, the man with the compass finds that it’s suddenly working.

      “So you’re less lost then….”

      And the film closes with a kiss.

 

     Since 1999 Canary Islander Roberto Pérez Toledo has been making such gently wry films that comically invite his audiences into the gay world with all of its eccentricities and normality, demonstrating to the world just how loving and human the LGBTQ world truly is.

 

Los Angeles, March 28, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2024).