Peter Anthony Fields | A Silent Truth / 2012

help!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Peter Anthony Fields and Evonne Fields-Gould (screenplay), Peter Anthony Fields (director) A Silent Truth / 2012 [43 minutes]

 

This short well-meaning film comes very close to reading as a self-help coming out guide for young gay men. Produced evidently by churches and community groups in and around Akron and Kent, Ohio A Silent Truth focuses on a young 14-year-old boy, Ian Foster (Daniel Sovich) in the painful throes of coming out. Fortunately, a new boy, Tyler Pendleton (Dylan Aaron White) has just moved into town, who with bi-racial parents is openly introduced as a gay boy.

 

     Ian is also fortunate that he has already found a good friend in Tricia Todd (Joy D. Borland) who, as Tyler later describes her is the perfect “beard”—an old term that used to signify a woman or man to whom a homosexual movie star got married in order to create a cover for his or her own sexuality—which now appears to have been adopted by younger people to describe what used to be called a “fag hag,” a girl who enjoys the company of a gay male friend and serves the role to his friends and family as his cover of a “girlfriend.” In this particular case, she along with Tyler, serve as loyal friends who attempt to help Ian come to terms with himself.

      Through Tyler’s gay activism, moreover, the film can introduce its audience to LGBTQ alliance centers and preach a few homilies about how biblical interpretations of sexuality and gender an only be understood within the context of their times, while still injecting faith-oriented values into the film.

       Ian’s mother in this film, Linda (Kimberly J. Mahoney), despite being the source of the boy’s troubles in her ignorance of what being gay means and in her subtle religious bigotry, is a loving single-parent mother who eventually—unfortunately only after a suicide attempt by her son—comes around and supports Ian, promising to learn everything she can about the subject.

      Yet for all of its good intentions, one has to wonder whether any of its creators are truly gay given their seeming ignorance of what coming out and even defining oneself as “gay” truly means. For example, does even the healthiest self-possessed young gay man truly enjoy his parents introducing him as “my gay son,” as if his sexuality were the defining feature of his being? Imagine some straight guy’s parents going around introducing him as “my heterosexual son, Sam,” or “My son who likes girls, Sam.”

       Even worse, sex or even attraction to the same sex seems to have nothing at all to do with describing oneself as gay in this film. Understandably, given the young age of the movie’s central figure, involving him with another boy might be tricky; but surely his struggle to deal with gay identity must have something to do with his sexual attraction to other boys. You wouldn’t know it from this film, which describes being “gay” more as a badge of self-identity than exploring any of the hormonal or even bodily sensations of homosexual attraction. In Ian’s world it is as if being able to label oneself were the ultimate goal of “coming to terms with who one is,” the mantra of this film. What that someone “is” remains quite hidden, off camera, as if the writers and director were terribly embarrassed that it might actually involve touching or kissing, let alone ejaculating with or within another person of the same sex. It is as if being gay meant simultaneously being castrated or neutered. “Gay,” is a “thing” in this film, not a human being who loves and actualizes that love through contact with other boys or men.

 

     Although the actors all do a credible job, the script is definitely amateur with silly fantasies, representing Ian’s “coming out” writing “therapy”—another word on which the movie keeps harping—about a queen (Ian’s mother) who cannot (and one might add, will not) recognize her own son, all performed with terrible British accents. Even the creepy teenage friends of Ian after he’s seen coming out of the LGBTQ center and actually talking with Tyler, seem more out of some second-hand notion about homophobic abuse rather than the real horrific beings such brutes generally are. But even their pushing and slugging of Ian and their threat to tell “everyone” is still rather frightening.

     Finally, the worse thing about the world which Ian finally inhabits once he has managed to tell his mother, uncle, and grandmother about his being gay, is that it is the most boring place on earth that one can imagine, the three teenagers and Ian’s younger brother sitting down each afternoon to throw balls in the air while clapping as many times as they can before catching it again, sharing long walks in the green grass of the local suburban neighborhood, and staring off in bemused contemplation over the local pond. Not once do they attend a film, visit a museum, even read a book, let alone put their hands upon one another’s bodies. If this is what defining oneself as gay really means to a 14-year-old boy, I’m so glad I waited until I was far from home before coming out.

     This film’s heart is definitely in the right place, but it forgot to involve its brain and sexual organs.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2022).