Chico Lacerda | Virgindade (Virginity) / 2015

a history of virginal sexuality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Chico Lacerda (screenwriter and director) Virgindade (Virginity) / 2015 [15 minutes]

 

Brazilian director Chico Lacerda’s short movie Virginity serves as almost a history of virgin sexuality, those sexual experiences we have as young boys and girls before actually participating in sex. Those experiences may, in fact, determine many of our later responses to full sexual activity, or certainly, if nothing else, reveal how even as children we are sexually involved without ourselves or often even those around us being totally aware.

 

    The narrator of this work—who importantly describes all of these virginal sexual activities while on the screen we observe only mundane acts of the adult world which nothing to do with childhood imagination, such as a garbage truck pulling up to a small stucco house or people waiting at a highly graffitied bus stop, etc.—begins his catalog of virginal sex by describing how as a young boy he would ask his best friend to dress up by putting a towel around his neck and some gloves as if he were a kind of superhero. The boy loved playing with him dressed like that, particularly touching the gloved hands which excited him and made him laugh endlessly. Although he didn’t get an erection or connect it with any bodily feelings, he’d go on and on laughing until he was exhausted, much like, the narrator concludes, ejaculating.

      When he was eight, so the narrator reports, he saw the cover of a gay magazine for the first time. Hanging in a newsstand next the bus stop on his way to school, it showed a blond boy with a moustache lying on the beach towel, across which were written the words, “Super penis.”

       “I was stunned when I saw it and had to hold on to the bus stop to get my balance back.” For weeks after he saw the magazine every day on his way to school, putting him into a kind of trance and sense of excitement. After months of hanging there, one day it was gone.

      At the video store he used to hang out in the horror section, which was located right next to the porn section whose covers he would carefully scan while pretending to look at the horror films. “My favorite was a woman on all fours with a man fucking her from behind.” He’d look endlessly at the male’s waist right at the point where the view of the rest of his body was obstructed by the female’s ass, where he could glimpse the male’s pubs.

     When he achieved the right level of arousal, he’d run home and jack off. But after the tape was rented it was put back in another location on the shelves, out of his sight. But he soon fell in love with another porn tape cover.

       The narrator was ten before he saw a male cock for the first time in person in a movie theater.

When he had to go to the bathroom in the middle of the film he went into the bathroom, there to notice a man at the urinal. He chose the urinal next to him so that he might discretely spy on the man’s cock. His cock was thick, and, the narrator notes, even though the guy was white, his penis was dark, its head purple. Although nearly hypnotized by it, he controlled himself and ran back into the theater. But even now he remembers the cock’s texture and color.

      He fell in love for the first time on the school bus. At a certain stop two twins would always get on. “They were a big older than me and I remember they had short hair, thick eyebrows and were very serious.” Sometimes one would stand near him and he would find a way to discreetly touch his leg, all the while strategizing on how to move closer to them. Some times one would sit next to him and they touch thighs for the rest of the trip which thrilled him. He’d imagine a threesome with them.

 

       For the central portion of the film, the director shows rather discreet male nudes, hinting at the kind of early magazines and films which would titillate generations of gay men and interested women before porno became such a sensation. I remember these kinds of images so very well, and how excited in my childhood I was by just such images. 

       The video guide had a listing of plot summaries all the VHS movies released in Brazil, the narrator continues. He’d jack off reading the synopsis of the porn films. He had his favorites, the trouble was that when the pages loosed from the binding, whenever the book fell open, it would invariably fall open to the pages he most visited, which embarrassed him.

         In swimming class, in continues, he had the opportunity to spy on his classmates. Jair, his favorite, was well built with brown skin, a beautiful cock, and “a big bush.” He would always burp, allowing the narrator to tell what he’d eaten and drank for lunch, which, he argues, created a kind of intimacy between him and the unknowing schoolmate.

          But, of course, he had to control himself so that he wouldn’t get an erection. Only when he

got home could he let go and focus on the images he’d witnessed.

          He was also in love with Henrique who lived near his Grandfather’s house. He was chubby, and even though he was the same age as the narrator, had body hair. They used to wrestle, and since Henrique never wore underwear, he could sometimes feel his cock through his shorts. And when it happened, Henrique would stop playing as if bothered by the fact. Only much later did he discover and some of the boys, including Henrique, used to play sex games in an abandoned house in the neighborhood. They would draw lots to see who got sucked or fucked by each other.

         He wonders why he wasn’t invited, but realizes that perhaps they’d purposely left him out, fearing that he would seriously enjoy it. But we can only suspect, given what he has told us, that it may also have been because the narrator hadn’t quite matured along with the rest of them, still maintained such virginal games.

         At 13 he finally rented tapes from the store near his home, especially when his parents when out of town to the beach without him. He longed to rent a bi-sexual tape, with two well-built guys and a girl on the cover, one of the guy’s “awkwardly touch the other’s ass.” Finally one day, he got the nerve the rent that tape, hiding among others and he nervously handed them to the clerk. He ran home and came in record time.

       But soon after, he became paranoid about the bi-sexual tape, returning it to the store and pretending to be annoyed, demanding to exchange it for a straight one. The clerk exchanged it, but “dismantled [his] farce” with a look of disdain.

 

       The next year the narrator when to the movie theater to see a horror film. There was no one else in the theater but a 20-year-old guy in a tight shirt. He was restless the entire moving, constantly changing seats, but the plot of the movie was complex and our narrator didn’t want to miss anything, so he paid no attention. After the movie the guy started talking to the boy in the

hall about the film, but at one point said he was going to the bathroom. Only when he got home did our friend realize the boy’s real intentions, not only recall his movements throughout the movie, but his “implicit invitation to go to the restroom with him.”

        The narrator tells us that he was angry that in his naivete he missed out on experiencing the real thing. “But I learned my less, and from that day on, I trained eyes and ears to the wonderful world of cruising.”

        Lacerda’s brilliant deconstruction of gay virginal sex is so accurate that it almost brought tears to my eyes for its veracity. It was as if his narrator were recounting my own life, although in my day we didn’t have porn tapes to rent, although we did, however, have a plethora of magazines showing just the type of images the director in this movie, along with physical building magazines and movies that would have been impossible for someone under age to purchase.

     And just like the narrator, I am still irritated by all the sexual opportunities I missed out on when I was still so innocent, that I resisted or was blind to real sexual opportunities that I truly might have enjoyed, and would have brought me into the joys of sexuality earlier. As the final song lyrics of this delightful film declare “If I could, I would be a child again, just to be able to do more than I did when I was a little girl.”

        But what this film also cleverly reveals just how sexual children are, how deeply their feel sexual desires are even when they can’t identify them, and how clever they are in finding ways to get closer to fulfilling them, even if they are not yet able to actualize adult sex. When someone asks a gay virgin, accordingly, how can you know you are gay if you haven’t experienced sex, he need only watch Lacerda’s hilarious false documentary, which speaks the truth of thousands.

 

Los Angeles, March 6, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2024).