Frédéric Moffet | The Job / 2024

three polaroid pictures, one with an erection

by Douglas Messerli

 

Frédéric Moffet (director) The Job / 2024 [15 minutes]

 

The real “job,” as Canadian photographer John Phillips describes it, was finding the boys which he would take three color polaroids of, all of them naked, at least one with a full erection. Although he claims to have taken photos of all who showed up, he didn’t even way, in some cases of the slow erection.

   

       Having moved to Los Angeles from Canada after being diagnosed as HIV-Positive, Phillips suddenly felt he might not live long and needed, particularly as an illegal alien in the US, to find a career which might allow him to support himself. If he had once imagined himself as being a fashion photographer in the manner of Herb Ritts, he was now reduced to finding appealing male erotica models for the numerous gay magazines of the 1990s, the more liberated inheritors of the 1950s and 1960s Beefcake mags.

     His telephonic message, repeated twice in this short film, tells interested clients that he will meet with them, ask them to strip naked, to get an erection, and to provide proof of being 18 years of age. Their pay, if a gay magazine should happen to take interest in their images, would be from $150 to $300 depending on the publication and the number of photos in the “shoot.”

      It wasn’t really the money for most of them, he recalls, but the ego, a sense that their body, particularly their butts, penises, and faces might be worthy of being included in the then popular mags of the day such as Playgirl, Playguy, Honcho, Fresh, Spurs, and Mandate.

      In the last year of his life, Canadian director Moffet interviews Philllips, who reveals just how difficult to was being gay and HIV-Positive in the 1980s and 1990s, not only with regard to the homophobic elements outside of the queer world, but within it where being HIV meant sudden ostracization.

      He makes it clear that his Hound Dog productions was not run as a casting couch, and that perhaps only 4 or 5 times within the several hundreds of men he photographed did he and his subject engage in sex.

      Filmed in 2023, the year of his death, Phillips, who kept control of his photos was attempting to scan and post most of his archival photos, although given most of the images the film shows us, most of these are not remarkable photos and often not even significant erotica. But Phillips nonetheless felt some pride in representing the vast range of gay men of that era and attempted, so he declares, to create male erotica rather than porno, which he describes simply as sex.

     These were many of the images in which people of my generation grew up with, representing a truly more open attitude toward gay sexuality, despite the specter of AIDS. And one might have imagined such a film to be provocative and fascinating. Unfortunately, Moffet simply sets up his own camera and lets Phillips talk between showing dozens of images of nude men with erections and their butts pointing into air. And any of the true significance of such photographic archives and their relationship to the queer society at large is basically lost in the process of his almost tedious explanation of how he scans his beloved images.

      Despite his aspirations, Phillips was no Ritts nor even Bob Mizner or Frederic Kovert for that matter.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2024).