Douglas Messerli | The I'm Not Gay Syndrome [essay]

the i’m not gay syndrome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gay boys with a crush on straight friends has long been a regular fantasy and a film genre so very popular that it would be almost impossible to provide a complete list of such movies.

    The essay I just posted above, “How to Lose Your Best Friend,” in fact, might almost be seen as an introduction of this same genre, and the numerous films, short and long I mention in that essay, might be seen as a beginning resource also for the more focused heterosexual / homosexual bond between friends that gradually slips into such an absurd territory that it becomes comic. Although there is also a real possibility of violence in these situations as well, the central figures more often demonstrate their impatience and frustrations with and a humorous disdain of their clueless companions.

     In the eight films I chosen to include here, the boys’ friendships are not only endangered by their sexual differences, but by the near absolute naivety or purposeful ignorance of one of the pair, usually the heterosexual who finds it hard to even imagine that there is any other sexuality, let alone that it might be manifested in his best friend.

      The naivety or seeming ignorance, however, might also be seen, in certain instances, as far more purposeful than it appears, the young straight men who pretend their total commitment to heterosexuality keeping their close (gay) friend near to them with the desire that he might possibly help to engage them in sex, permitting them the possibility of exploring something by which they are completely terrorized. And there is perhaps another sub-set of films and real-life figures who engage in gay sex while steadfastly and quite adamantly maintaining the banner phrase of utter denial: “I’m not gay!”

     It is just that pretense, moreover, that often intrigues and engages the gay friend. The goal becomes not only to win over the straight boy on the verge of coming out, but to test their own powers of seduction, sexual merit, and power—what might almost be described as a gay version of the Don Juan or Casanova complex.

      If these gay types might be said to be precisely the queer figures that the Christian Right most fears: those that somehow hope to convert or “out” otherwise heterosexual males, we must remember, of course, this has nothing with truly straight men who have little interest in gay sex, but only for those who are, so to speak, on the line, perhaps truly gay men who have been raised to be so terrified of sexuality in general, and their own sexuality in particular, that they clearly need help.

      And far more often, women perceiving the same wavering sense of selfhood in the boyfriends, step in and sweep such men off into marriage wherein these borderline heteros either come to believe that they have found true happiness and fulfillment or discover themselves in the bind of a bitter sexual relationship from which, even in today’s more open society, it is difficult to escape.

      Throughout these My Queer Cinema volumes, I have been hard on such figures as the last group I describe because of their youthful cowardice and the later pain they inflict upon their wives and children. But perhaps we must also sympathize with their trauma since many of these man as boys clearly had parents who were utterly intractable in their hostility to the LGBTQ world.

      I touched on some of these same issues also in an earlier gathering of films in the 2003 essay “Opening the Door,” in which I wrote about Bruce Leddy’s Mad TV skit A Football Thing (2003), Justin Viar’s Bucket List Night (2009), Adrià Llauró’s Alirón (2019) and Alirón 2 (El Descanso) (2022), Martin Chichovski’s I’m Not Gay (2020), and Sophie Kargman’s Query (2020). These works also explore straight boys moving toward the possibilities of exploring gay sex.

      Interestingly, the eight films I’ve chosen here to represent issues which mirror and expand on the films of both “Opening the Door” and “How to Lose Your Best Friend” are gathered around a short three-year period, from 2010-2012, with one final flourish in the remarkable general statement of J. Pee’s (Jesse Pope) hilarious 2013 music video, all products of Anglo, British and US creators. 

      The films included in this discussion are No Homo by Blake Larsen (2010), I’m Not Gay by Daniel Guyton (2010), Gay Is the Word, by Andy Heath (2011), The Favor (2011) and The Favor 2 (2012) by Harrison J. Bache, Light Bulb Sun by Jason Larkham (2012), Shabbot Dinner by Michael Morgenstern (2012), and J. Pee’s I’m Not Gay, directed by Ryan Turner in 2013.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).