boys, beware!
by
Douglas Messerli
Jane
Pickett (screenwriter and director) The Men's Room / 2012 [15 minutes]
A
cute young man dressed in red socks, Thomas (Russell Sams) enters a park late
in the afternoon and heads to the men’s room, choosing to cruise it as if were
a pro, first laying down in the grass nearby to pretend reading his book,
before checking out the landscape.
Thomas finally gets up and enters the
bathroom, perhaps taken aback a bit by the squalor and mess of the place, still
cautiously checking it out, making it now quite apparent that he is, in fact,
not at all experienced, but has simply planned it out, perhaps his first men’s
bathroom encounter.
Finally, he enters a stall, the man from
outside in the one next to it, both being visible through the glory hole.
But before he can even begin any actions
he might have imagined he stands suddenly in a kind of panic, finally
speaking—something that very seldom happens in such situations—stating that he
can’t move.
The second man responds and they begin a
conversation, Thomas expressing his own fears and how he planned it out, the
other suggesting he think seriously about the situation before proceeding. When
Thomas decides to go through with it, the man cautions, “Don’t,” and when he
answers, “But you’re here too,” the elder repeats what he has previously told
the boy, “This isn’t about me.”
No, he does not, answers the man, still
suggesting there’s time to leave.
Now the boy, however, is ready for the
encounter, again seated on the stool, ready to engage in any sexual activity
that may be available. As he goes to reach out, the man who as we have long
suspected is a park security guard, handcuffs Thomas. But at the very moment a
group of punks who have been playing around in the park previously enter,
goofing around until they spot the two in the stalls and back out, calling them
queers and fags.
Thomas pleads for his release, and after
a long moment or so, the guard uncuffs the boy, who quickly rushes off.
Frankly, I resented this film, having
long thought that by 2012 that such bathroom arrests were basically a thing of
the past, bathroom makeovers (full length heavy metal dividers and open stall
doors) having made it far more difficult for sexual activity.
But even worse, frankly, is Pickett’s
prurient interest in the subject only to employ her film as a kind of lecture
for any young person out there so sexually alone, as Thomas suggests he is,
that he seeks out others of his kind in the most obvious of locations.
That men and boys need still be
terrified of even considering these public places, as grungy and unpleasant as
they can be, as dangerous cruising spots wherein they might be arrested smacks
of the deep homophobia that remains in our society.
This may not be a pleasant thing to
hear, and given that random sexual behavior today is indeed playing the lottery
with your life because of AIDS, such words may pit me against the entire LGBTQ
community, but some young people learn a great deal from their early sexual
encounters during bathroom sex, a far easier meeting-up spot for younger men
than a bar or the complex meetups of internet (and for more dangerous I would
argue). I might simply refer the reader to one of the earliest of the type B
“coming out” movies, Get Real (1999), for just such an example.
Los
Angeles, October 21, 2022
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (October 2022).
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