Anthony Hickling | Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead / 2012

savage christ

by Douglas Messerli

 

Anthony Hickling and Amaury Grisel (screenplay), Anthony Hickling (director) Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead / 2012 [30 minutes]

 

This is now the third time I have watched Little Gay Boy, chrisT is Dead, not to mention a couple of its scenes which have been posted on porn sites. The first two times I saw it, I perhaps interpreted it as most viewers had, as a slightly homophobic work that portrayed a young boy treated so abusively by the society around him that he himself has become a BDSM performer, ending up the film in basement sex in gay bar in a sling with a belt around his neck while being brutally fucked.

     After all, the poor cutie Jean Christophe (Gaëtan Vettier) has hardly begun his day when on his way to his job on the metro a man sitting nearby suddenly describes him as a faggot and a “fucking puff,” gets up and verbally abuses him before slapping his face. It appears that incident might even have ended in the boy getting an erection.

     At work as a cleaning boy in a moderne furniture shop filled with outrageous crap, he encounters a boss who is at first somewhat friendly, before a few minutes later, as Jean Christophe is cleaning the toilet, enters, dunks his end into the toilet bowl and pisses on him while screaming out that the boy is a queer who probably likes it.

      Jean Christophe has dreams of possibly becoming a fashion model. But the first photographer he visits (François Brunet), while at first seeming to be interested in having the boy model different outfits, quickly asks him to keep his shirt off, then take off his jeans, pull down his underpants a bit lower, and finally to pose naked.

  He forlornly returns home only to be confronted by his grossly overweight English mother (Amanda Dawson) who works as a prostitute, demanding he massage her feet, while managing to display her vagina and trying to encourage him to explore it with his fingers. When he refuses and storms out, she too disgustedly names her own son as a poof.

     As he exits his building he accidently crashes into a transvestite, who outraged that he has made her drop her newspaper in the collision, demands he pick it up. Soon after, whether in reality or simply in his head, we see her whipping the boy as she plays the role as dominatrix.

     The second “fashion” photographer he visits (Alvaro Lombard) is far worse than the first, who by the time we see them together has not only demanded that the boy be completely naked but is instructing him in how to spread his legs and reveal his bare butt. Insisting that he put on a pair of skimpy pink shorts, he demands he get down on all fours and reveal his ass to the camera.

      Between each of these indignities, performance actors and dancers play out the internal hurts with, in one case, a dancer (Biño Sauitzvy), covered in white chalk growing more and more bloody as events accrue.

      Several others are tied up and bound BDSM style as they swing in space. While the second photographer touches and arranges his ass one actor plays out a fist fucking scene. Others stick needles into their chests as the blood slowly drips down their bodies.

     By the time day is almost over, Jean Christophe returns home despondently, ending up in the bathtub with his mamma who simply holds him, as tear runs down his cheek.

     At night, he visits the gay bar I already mentioned, downs a half-pint of beer and heads toward the basement sex den. Is it any wonder in a world of such hatred that boy should have come to associate pain with love?

     As if to prove their point, director Anthony Hickling and his co-writer Amaury Grisel eventually portray their hero as a kind of savage Christ. Not the Christ the Holy Bible, but an alternative Christ of outsiderness, of gore and blood.

     But that is perhaps to take all of this far too seriously. And I now realize that was why I kept turning away from this nonetheless fascinating film. It was simply too painful to watch, let alone to speak of it objectively.

      I have finally come to see this work, however, as a kind of comedy. The clue came in observing the cover of the original DVD. In the image the words make clear that the title also serves as a kind of anagram, spelling out that the LGBT, like Christ, is dead.

   And suddenly, I realized that this is more of a comedy than a tragedy. No young gay boy could possibly suffer, even if he sought it out, so much abuse in a single day. This film, rather, stands as an almost comic fantasy of the abuses still facing queer individuals despite all the supposed gains made by the Rainbow community. And it serves as a sort of underground comic vision that is no more or less fantastical than the LGBTQ approved scenarios such as the Doritos ad of only year earlier (2011) that fantasized that even a straight neighbor might be interested in the cute gay boys next door or, later works such Love, Simon (2018) in which everyone in his high school is desperate to help Simon find his gay love. Even more recently, the fantasies have multiplied, such as the more recent Heartstopper (2022-2014, a fourth season recently announced) where the openly gay boy Charlie not only wins over the bullies, finds love with the head of the ruby team, but befriends two young lesbians, one white and black, while his nerdy Asian friend falls in love with a black transexual girl, and his overweight friend, his face always buried in a book, happily discovers he’s Ace or asexual. Everyone here lives in world that can’t possibly exist but which is firmly approved, the film having checked off all the proper boxes of sexual representation, by the LGBTQ community. So too is the fantasy of Red, White, & Royal Blue (2023) in which the son of the female President of the USA falls madly in love with the future King of England pure hogwash, yet gushed over by the LGBTQ community in general.

      Hickling simply takes an alternate view, creating a fantasy of cruelty, an exaggeration of the issues which the LGBTQ community seems to have forgotten in it is demands for disparate representation. Both versions, the positive and negative, are mirror fantasies of sorts, although I believe Hickling takes himself less seriously, and, in fact, may be closer to the truth. What happened to sex in the Rainbow world? Hickling grabs us by the balls or the cunts and demands we feel something again about our sexual organs.

      Of course, there is a middle ground. One can take joy and pleasure in the Rainbow fantasies of the now hundreds of works such as Heartstopper and still work as an activist for real change in the actual homophobic world, one that over the next four years, with Donald Trump once more as president, will surely grow even more unfriendly to our sexual differences. Hickling, in 2012, could perhaps not even imagine just how right he was in his fantasy of a world that had retreated into a hate of queers. In his film, even the transsexuals hate “them.” Only time will tell whether the original goals of the LGBTQ community have been lost or rediscovered, whether it is moribund anagram or still shows signs of meaningful life. Will all those now happy married queer couples, living basically heterosexual lives, come to its rescue? That is a question I have had to ask even of myself.                                                                                                                                               

Los Angeles, December 11, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).