Manu Roma | Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [documentary]

rules, rituals, and resistance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael Rojas and Manu Roma (screenplay), Manu Roma (director) Anónimo (Anonymous) / 2021 [19 minutes] [documentary]

 

Spanish director Manu Roma’s short documentary on cruising doesn’t show us any sexual action or, in fact, any terribly serious cruising, the camera simply watching one elderly man walk a notorious Barcelona beach, another young man wander the famed Parc de Montjuïc, and another middle-age fellow enter and exit the men’s rooms near the Arena.

     Yet here we get a fairly broad notion of what cruising is all about. For the older man, who describes the he gradually had to learn the rules of cruising by observing others, the beach and the nearby sea wall and underpass seems to be the perfect location since at all hours of the day men regularly gather there, participating in nearly every sort of sexual act from engaging in openly nude sex on the beach, joining in mutual masturbation in the various water lee ways, or simply sharing others as voyeurs in the tunnel and elsewhere all the various goings-on.

      Our guide to this location finds it perfect for him, a married man who visits the site with some regularity, because it is safe from police observation since it is in an out-of-the way location seldom visited by anyone other than the cruisers themselves. He observes that, in fact, he has seen several policemen, in and out of uniform, visit the place, evidently seeking the sexual fulfillment of the other cruisers and knowing that this is a place where their presence will be noted only by like-minded men.

 

    The younger man who prefers the wooded, winding paths of the Montjuïc prefers it simply because of its rituals. Here one does not directly approach another male, but stands about, often pretending disinterest so as not to attract the attention of possible public visitors. After a while, one gets to know the regular cruisers, some of them disinterested in those with whom they’ve previously had sex, others quite willing for another go. Some nights, in the search of a sexual partner, it takes hours, time going amazing quickly. On other nights, our guide to the park tells us, you’d think that half of the male population of Barcelona had gathered there, and he need only spend a short while before finding someone willing to engage in sex.

      By far the most fascinating of our guides is the handsome middle-aged cruiser who prefers the bathrooms precisely because of the danger, the possibility that the person next to whom you are standing is a heterosexual not at all interested in gay sex, or, at other times, perfectly willing to join in on a masturbatory session. Here the rules of strict, in some respects. You begin my partially exposing yourself, with just a slight erection. If the man shows interest, you reveal a little more, masturbate into a more obvious erection. On one occasion, he notes, there were 6 or 7 men having sex together; fortunately no one intruded to break up their fun.

      This last anonymous cruiser, has a gay lover, who knows of his actions. The bathroom cruiser argues that his love involves loyalty, not changing his sexual behavior, which is, he insists, what makes gay life different and far more of a challenge to the heteronormativity by which the dominant culture attempts to proscribe behavior. Being gay, he asserts, is a challenge to the majority who attempt to wipe out all possible access to alternative sexual acts. He takes it almost as a challenge to seek out the riskiest kind of sexual behavior, public sex in places where he purposely endangers his own safety. It is not even the sex, the final ejaculation that he most enjoys, but the search, the act of cruising itself. The park is too predictable, the isolated beach too easy. For him, the ability to seek out sex in open public locations is a personal statement of his determination to maintain complete sexual freedom, notwithstanding the numerous delimitations that heterosexual society attempts to enforce.

       Although nothing really happens in Roma’s work, a neophyte certainly gets a basic explanation of the various kinds of gay cruising spots (sans street, car, or bar cruising). The only major thing this film fails to explain is the source of such intense sexual desire, the enormous pull of the cruising spots for those that seek them out day by day, night by night: in short, the addiction that such activities creates for the individuals involved. Sex, I would argue is more addictive than any drug—and often more pleasurable and alluring since it involves another human being, bringing equal pleasure to that other.     

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).