Andy Heath | Gay Is the Word / 2011

A WORD WITHOUT MEANING

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Byrne (screenplay), Andy Heath (director) Gay Is the Word / 2011 [5 minutes]

 

     A nervous young man sits down with his friends in a pub. “Anyway guys, you’re probably wondering why I invited you here tonight,” he fearfully begins. “There’s something I need you to know about me. And I guess now is as good as any time to say it. The thing is I’m gay.”

     Suddenly they all seem to pay attention where previously all eyes where the telly and the soccer game.

     “You’re not gay. I’ll tell you what’s gay. Man United getting ravaged by Arsenal,” his first friend insists.

     “Pure gay,” adds another.

     And the third: “It’s a generous helping of gay pie.”

     “I don’t think you’re getting me. I’m trying to tell you, I’m actually gay,” their young friend once more attempts to report.

      “You’re not gay.” They argue instead that their friend “bloody John” is gay because he wanted to stay home with his “gay little girlfriend.”

      “That’s typical gay behavior,” continues the second.

      The third summarizes: “John’s gayness is so vast he defines a generation.” 

      The first rejoins: “John’s gayness would make a grown man cry.”

      Our young friend tries once again, but they interrupt to describe more things in their life and on the TV that are most definitely “gay.”

      Finally, he tries a different approach. “Look guys, I’m a homosexual.”

      And for a moment they all look up and over at him as if he might possibility have gotten through their inane chatter. But all they can do is ask if he’s feeling alright, reassuring him that he’s not gay, he’s a “legend.”

      They go on with their soccer talk recalling when they “bummed him in the ass,” etc., admitting he was gay to cry. “But most of time, seriously, you’re just a dude. We’re talking 9 to 10 due to the gay ratio, and that’s a respectable split by anyone’s standards.”

       Another adds, “Yeah, I mean you’re such a dude it makes me want to kiss you.”

       Fed up with his friends, whom he describes as “idiots,” the young man gets up to leave, walking over to his waiting boyfriend.

       One of his former tablemates asks, “What was that all about?” Another responds, “So gay.”

       British filmmakers Dominic Byrne and Andy Heath’s short cinematic fable presents a world in which being gay has seemingly been so assimilated that the word itself has lost all meaning, being applied by heterosexuals to everything but what it truly means—perhaps a way to detonate any possible reaction the true meaning the word might illicit. By using the word to mean anything except a person who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex, they have once more made the real act and its signifier unspeakable, as Oscar Wilde described it more than a century earlier, “Something that cannot be said.”

       It’s clear that by the end of his conversation that our young brave soul, attempting to come out to his best straight friends, will never be heard and definitely not be accepted. How could he be “gay” when the word now signifies everything but what he actually is. Saying you are gay is to now declare that you are definitely not someone who engages in same gender sex. Perhaps he might succeed better at convincing them if he, like most of the others in the films I discuss in this exploration of the “I’m not gay syndrome,” insisted that he wasn’t gay, as does the obviously gay man in Daniel Guyton’s film of 2010.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2024