Dave O'Brien | Straight Boys / 2005

hold the tomatoes

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dave O’Brien (screenwriter and director) Straight Boys / 2005 [14 minutes]

 

Roommates Ben (Damian Pelliccione) and Morgan (Nick Bartzen) are “straight” boys with girlfriends, Lori and Sarah (Vanessa Born and Jenna Allen) who both realize what the boys can’t admit to themselves, that their boyfriends are totally infatuated with one another. Both boys dream of sexual encounters and let loose their testosterone frustrations with regular wrestling matches in each other’s beds.

     I know these boys or, at least, I knew boys just like them at the same University of Wisconsin campus decades earlier, the boys in this film still dining on the now almost world-famous Plaza burgers, which apparently still existed in 2005, the date this film was made. Howard and I ate there many an evening.

     When both of their girlfriends reject them—Ben obviously coming more to terms with it than is slightly more resistant companion, Morgan—the latter has no choice, so he thinks, but to violently reject him, leaving a party after his girlfriend has complained of having to share her boyfriend with the obvious “other.”

      A fight ensues, yet almost turns into their desired sexual encounter were not that Morgan simply still hasn’t the courage to come to terms with his sexuality, while still admitting his love for Ben. It’s clearly a time for a break-up between the two. All for the better perhaps, since at least now when Ben approaches him it is clear what he wants.

      Whether or not Morgan is yet ready to accept his attentions is another matter. But at least there are no dark tensions in the air, nor pretense, nor even the need for Ben to put tomatoes on his Plaza Burger just because that’s the way Morgan likes it.

       Of course, I liked the film for momentarily immersing me back into the ice-cold world where I first met my husband Howard, and reminding me of my friend Walt, a hunky Chicago Polish boy, who back in the day told me that he wrestled with his roommate and clearly, when the two of us traveled back to Chicago, was praying that I might make the first move to free him from his sexual cage. Frankly, I was more interested in Walt’s high school teacher and the “boys in the band”-like friends whom he had gathered around him.

      I didn’t touch the boy, and poor Walt married a very jealous woman, of whom, he told me when years later I met up with Walt for lunch in Washington, DC that if he dared to tell her of our meeting, she would suspect something else that might jeopardize their relationship. This, after years of my marriage to Howard, with no interest on my part in Walt’s body or sexual soul.

       Clearly, if Morgan in this movie doesn’t soon come out, he will find himself in this very same position, unhappily married to a woman who has caught the wild beast of an exploring young gay boy in a trap from which he will find no release. If I’d given Walt a kiss, perhaps offered him a good suck or fuck, he might have been able to decide for himself. But I was fully out, and young boys seeking a guide to their sexual determination was not on my radar back in 1967 or ’68.

 

Los Angeles, November 5, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2023).