William Stead | All the Young Dudes / 2020

showering with sequins

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Stead (screenwriter and director) All the Young Dudes / 2020 [9 minutes]

 

William Stead takes us back to conservative Georgia in 1973, when short-shorts were in, and the homophobic punks controlled everything, including the school shower room. Into this world walks Billy (Blake Lafita), dressed in full glam rock costume, long haired with glitter shoes and flowing black and dark turquoise flowered blouses and silk pants.    

     It’s only been a year, as he later tells his square-boy admirer Jacob, a wonderful but terrifying year in which he turned from someone exactly like Jacob into a glam-rock devotee. It’s hard even find the records in their Georgia town—Jacob has only a David Bowie single—but somehow Billy has obtained even the rarest of albums demonstrating the British revolution in music about which their bullying peers know absolutely nothing.

     When he’s bullied, Billy brings his guitar to the locker room, hooking it into his vox speaker and pounding the ear-drums of the mean local yokels, an act that brings Jacob to follow him home like a puppy who’s suddenly found his new master.

      In his bedroom in the company of the neophyte Jacob, Billy can finally admit how this music “helped him a lot, it helped me,” obliquely referring to his cross-dressing tendencies and his feeling as a gay boy of being utterly isolated from the world in which he lives. But just before putting on the record for Jacob, Billy catches a look of himself in the mirror which reveals the trail of tears through his eye makeup. Despite his wonderful ability to bluff, he clearly is still terrorized by the brutes around him.

      Jacob appears in the mirror behind him, and in any other film the implicit bond between them would have resulted in a kiss; but as IMDb commentator scottymena emotionally responds:

 

“…My favorite part of the film is when Billy and Jacob have this moment where they realize the other's pain. But instead of consoling each other by a kiss (which many queer films always do to answer someone's frustration), Billy puts makeup on Jacob. It feels like a more intimate moment between the two characters rarely seen on film. You felt the sincerity of both boys trying to find meaning in their lives and in each other.”

 

     As Billy moves toward Jacob, makeup kit in hand, Jacob quotes: “People stared at the makeup on his face,” Billy continuing, “and laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace.” He paints Jacob’s face and just as suddenly Stead’s film transports the boys, now both electric guitars, having taken over the late-night football field—symbolically having reclaimed heterosexual reality—as they sing, at least in their imaginations, David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes”:

 

Television man is crazy

Saying we're juvenile delinquent wrecks

Oh, man, I need TV when I got T-Rex

Oh, brother, you've guessed, I'm a dude, dad

 

All the young dudes (hey, dudes!)

Carry the news (where are you?)

Boogaloo dudes (stand up, come on!)

Carry the news

      Certainly not a profound short film, Stead’s work is nonetheless effective in demonstrating how gay youths often find alternative worlds in order to survive the heteronormative societies in which they find themselves trapped.

      This short film would be a natural to accompany a screening of Todd Hayes’ Velvet Goldmine of 1998.

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).