Lawrence Ferber | Birthday Time / 2000

a kiss is never just a kiss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lawrence Ferber (screenwriter and director) Birthday Time / 2000 [18.33 minutes]

 

Birthday Time begins in the high school men’s room where two boys, Christopher (nicknamed Toffer) (Cory Grant) and his friend Jonathan (Mark Pacitti), are crowded into a toilet stall exploring one another’s bodies. When Christopher attempts to meet the boy’s lips in a kiss, the other turns away, at that very moment another student entering the room which allows his timid friend to escape. Toffer looks off in disappointment. On his way out of school, a young man kissing his girlfriend calls the boy “fag” as he passes, so obviously Toffer has not attempted to hide his sexual identity.

      On his way home from school, he stares longingly into the local gay bar Flapjax, catching the watchful eye of the older bar tender. Clearly the boy is not sexually of age in New York state (the legal age is 17)* or able to consume alcohol (the legal age is 21). He is eager, but utterly disappointed.

       Back at home we discover his mother in their back patio. Evidently on Sunday her son will be celebrating his 18th birthday, and his mother asks if Jonathan’s coming to the birthday celebration, to which Toffer replies: “I don’t think we’re going to be friends anymore.” 

       Despite this boy’s own acceptance of his sexuality, it is clear that his schoolmates do not share his open viewpoints, giggling over the fact that he reads in his evening drama class from Oscar Wilde’s Salomé; and it’s clear from the speed with which he reads his lines that he is nervous in openly displaying himself as a gay individual in front of his peers.  

     That evening he again stares into the gay bar, observing a couple in the midst of a kiss. Spotting only the young bartender, Toffer bends down and speeds through the room into the bathroom where he encounters an older man pissing behind him. The man gradually extends his hand to grab the boy’s ass, and startled, Toffer spins around, the elder equally startled by how young his prey is. Claiming he’s drunk, the man apologizes, but it appears he might still go through with a kiss were it not for the sudden intrusion of the older bartender who insists the boy leave the premises. “Get puberty and come on back,” lisps the barman.

       This time when Toffer returns home, he discovers his mother packing. She’s gotten a freelance job in Pittsburgh and she has to leave until Sunday. She asks if he remembers a boy from New Jersey, Scott, Toffer describing him, somewhat dismissingly as a “jock.” “Yeah, but he’s a nice kid,” she insists. In any event she has asked his father to look after Toffer until she returns, her son protesting that at almost 18 years of age he doesn’t need a guardian. She is not up for an argument. Before she leaves she introduces him to Scott’s father Tom (Simon Woolley) the same man he had previously encountered in the Flapjax bathroom.

       Tom seems somewhat appalled when he recognizes the boy he has been asked to look after, while Toffer now has other designs.

       The moment they are alone, the elder again apologizes, claiming he was drunk and, after pondering what Toffer might have been doing there, suggesting he avoid “those kind of places until he’s out of school,” presumably meaning to wait until he graduates, yet another of the several age and time limits imposed by adults upon youths.

      Tom declares, since they have cleared their air of any confusion, they might return to their normal child and adult positions. But the boy interrupts him to ask a personal question, just as quickly getting embarrassed by what he’s about to say and backing away. Tom encourages him to speak freely, but the question shifts everything back to where it was: “What is buttfuck like?”

      “Go do your homework,” responds the astonished adult.

      But that is just the first of sexual declarations, innuendos, and seductions that the boy has planned for his Saturday stay-in during which he determined to discover what being gay truly means, spying on Tom as he showers, leaving the door open several inches as he himself showers so that Tom might watch him (a treat of which, we observe, Tom takes advantage), and essentially torturing the poor closeted father of his supposed jock friend Scott. 

      At one point, Toffer sits on the couch with Tom, unwrapping and eating a banana as he inches closer and closer to his guardian in the process. Tom attempts again to talk reasonably with him, trying to explain that although he admittedly “likes to play around a bit,” Toffer has no business being in a place like Flapjax.

       Toffer, in turn, summarizes his problem: although he’s tentatively explored gay love, he’s almost 18 and hasn’t yet been kissed. Reminding Tom that in the bar he was about to kiss him, he lays out his terms: “I want my kiss god dammit!”

       When Tom refuses he calls him “a closet queen.”

       “Stop it!”

       “Then kiss me!

       “I can’t”

       “Then have a drink.”

And so it continues throughout the day as the boy attempts to break down all of Tom’s defenses.

      When Tom wonders whether the boy going out at all, Toffer answers: I”m going to get my kiss from you or I’m twirling straight back to Flapjax without any underwear on.”

      You might almost describe what takes place after as a kind of sexual showdown, as each of them is seen, the clock ticking away, peering into mirrors, Tom checking out his greying temples and Toffer his facial features, the latter kissing himself intensely in the mirror, presumably as practice for what is he will be facing by sundown.

      Tom finally dares to enter the boy’s room. They share small talk until Toffer wonders whether or not he should grow his hair longer or keep it short, inviting Tom to feel it. When he again refrains, Toffer challenges him: “You sure you don’t want to feel my hair...or have a drink?”

        After more chatter, Toffer gets right down to the issue: “Am I not your type or something? Am I too young or too gay or something? Why won’t anybody kiss me?”

        Tom answers seemingly with wisdom: “You should get your first kiss from someone who loves you. Do it right.”

      “He [presumably Jonathan] won’t kiss me, and you won’t kiss me either.” After a pause, he continues, “I’m ugly, I mean I’m so fuckin’ gay and I’m going to be 18 and even retarded people who can’t read get kissed. I went in there because I wanted to get kissed.”**

         Tom answers, “Count on me, you don’t just want a kiss Toff.” He strokes his hair, and we know what’s in store, particularly when Tom declares that it’s not the boy’s birthday yet, whereupon Toffer sets the clock ahead.

         When his mother arrives home the next morning, her son is still in bed, Tom evidently  having left. She knocks on her boy’s door wishing him a happy birthday. Get dressed, she demands, “Don’t you want your present?”

     Christopher lays back in his bed with a large smile on his face, making it clear that a kiss is never just a kiss.

    

*Although this film clearly appears to have been shot in New York where the legal age of consent is 17, meaning that the character would be 16 about to turn of age, somewhat explicably, but perhaps simply to quell any criticism of a 16 year-old-boy behaving as Christopher does, the movie establishes that the boy is 17, turning on 18, which he and others describe as the age of consent. In more than half of the US states the legal age is 16.

**It’s interesting that the desire to be kissed, which quite obviously stands for a whole set of other sexual possibilities, is also the great desire of the character Ben in Adam Salky’s 2005 film, Dare, perhaps another example of a young man coming to terms with his homosexuality in a much less painful way than the standard plot of the “coming out” movie generally requires. He too wants to simply kiss someone before he graduates from high school.

 

Los Angeles, May 22, 2021 / Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (May 2021).