Larry LaFond | Gaydar / 2002

fantasy is better than reality

by Douglas Messerli

 

Larry LaFond and Terry Ray (screenplay), Larry LaFond (director) Gaydar / 2002 [20 minutes]

 

US director Larry LaFond’s Gaydar is a comic movie of the old school that nonetheless is absolutely charming because of its unassuming narrative and simple intentions of entertainment as opposed to probing deeper subjects.

      Randy (Terry Ray) and Frankalina (Jennifer Echols) share nearby office cubicles, both of them on the watch for the Tom Cruise-like beauty who works in their office, Jack (Bryan Dattilo).

     Randy, a slightly effeminate male, believes that Jack might possibly be gay, and from the language the movie puts into his mouth and the hand he delivers up to Randy’s shoulder when he communicates, it might well be that he is. But unlike the many gay men—myself included—who believe they have the power of determining such things on the basis of gestures and language, Randy claims no special powers of “gaydar.” Besides Frankalina is convinced that his beautiful behind is a pair of cupcakes ready to be delivered right up to straight women like herself.

 

    Together they watch Jack’s coming and goings with a mixture of awe and perspiration, at one point when Jack seems to be particular friendly, Randy almost passing out in sexual anticipation.

      Randy is also the type of gay man who simply can’t pass up a yard sale, and during the weekend he stops for just such a sale by a gay man (Jim J. Bullock) whose lover has announced his intentions to break off their relation by packing up all of his partner’s possessions in boxes, so that when he returns home he has no choice but to sell them off quick at very lowest price.

       Deep within one of the boxes is a contraption titled “Gaydar,” a noisy machine that supposedly identifies any to whom the pointer is aimed as gay or straight. Randy immediately tries it out, the meter identifying the hunky man also shopping for trinkets at the yard sale as straight—surely a sign that the machine doesn’t really function, he presumes, until a woman, presumably his wife soon after joins him. Pointing it at Maurice’s distraught lover, the yard-salesman, the meter reads definitely gay.

       Excitedly, Randy buys the machine and takes it home, trying it out further on photos in his tabloid magazines. According to the machine, Elton John is gay, Brad Pitt is not. Melissa Elthridge, yes. But when he is about to “check out” Tom Cruise, his cat hisses so strongly that he becomes distracted, finally pointing it at the cat herself, who turns out to be a lesbian which, as he declares, “explains so much!”

      Randy becomes so distracted that when his uncle Vincent (Charles Nelson Reilly in his last film role) arrives for his weekly movie-watching evening with a Doris Day film in hand, he’s forgotten completely all about it, and bows out by saying that he’s planning on going out to a disco—something that according to Vincent he has never done before.

      Obviously, he becomes determined to check out Jack at the office, but when he attempts to do so in the parking lot he encounters a fellow employee, Dewayne (Thomas Cagle), a true nuisance who’s about to marry another employee, Marlene. As Randy attempts to train his device on Jack, Dewayne gets in his way and—much to his surprise, if not the audience’s—Dewayne registers as gay.

      Once inside the office, Randy is still determined to discover the truth, but after he shares his intentions with Frankalina, she suddenly rushes after him in an attempt to dissuade him, ending in a bodily confrontation with Jack who drops all his files, forced to bend over continually in order to pick them revealing for both what Frankalina has described as his Cinnamonbuns.

      When she finally gets an opportunity to talk with the much flustered Randy, she explains that if he settles the issue for once and for all, he will most certainly remove the joyfully imagined possibilities for the other, destroying at least one of their daily pleasures. Fantasy, she proclaims, is so much better than reality.

     Seeing her logic, Randy gives up his attempt, but she borrows the machine, nonetheless, just to check out another employee who is about, she tells him, to marry her good friend, Marlene. The film ends with Randy muttering to himself, “and I was so looking forward to giving him away,” which can be read either of two ways, as serving as a best man or friend, giving him “away” in marriage or, of course, “outing him,” letting everyone know what he already does, that Dewayne is most certainly gay.

      Nothing serious here, just good campy fun. The film, accordingly, has appeared in over 120 gay film festivals.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).