Ethan Wellin and Ron Hill | No Homo / 2010

open sesame

by Douglas Messerli

 

Blake Larson (screenwriter), Ethan Wellin and Ron Hill (directors) No Homo / 2010 [6 minutes] 

 

Nick (Jonas Marukas) arrives at college with his bags, knocking on the dorm room to which he’s been assigned. He’s greeted by his future roommate, Trevor (Blake Larson), who almost as soon as Nick’s gotten into the room announces, “Glad to see that you’re normal. I was all worried you’d be weird or some shit.” As Nick quietly disavows any abnormalities, we already sense that there may, in fact, be something strange about Trevor.

     Trevor asks if it’s true that Nick’s an engineering major, to which his to roommate responds, “I’m in my third year, so I guess I’m on my way.” Nick turns to find his new buddy’s face nearly up against his own, Trevor puckering up for a kiss which he attempts, so it seems, to immediately plant on Nick’s face. As Nick falls back to the couch, Trevor immediately steps back and shouts, “No homo, bro.”

      When Nick admonishes him for just trying to kiss him, Trevor answers, “Yeh, so?”

      “Well, I’m not gay,” Nick responds.”

      “Wait a minute. Have you never heard about “No homo?”

      “What the hell is that?”

      “It’s a joke dude. You do something that seems super gay to another dude. And then when they freak out you rip on them for being weird about it. No homo. Get it?”

      So begins a series of perverse actions of Trevor’s part that create an almost terrorizing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde creation, a roommate who at any time of night or day suddenly for a few seconds turns into the very thing he claims he’s not, namely being gay. It’s clear that whoever created this game, as well as those who play it, as Trevor says all of his frat boys do, is desperately searching to discover what he claims not to be. What might happen if when you throw a “no homo” kiss, the other guy were give it right back?

     Like any normative heterosexual, Nick doesn’t quite get it. How can licking another guy’s ear to watch him get freaked out be truly funny?

      But of course, in its very absurdity, it is funny to us, watching this obviously horribly closeted kid try out the territory time and again, as if he were attempting to break down his roommate so successfully that he might not really mind a kiss, a lick of the ear, a jab of the cock.

      Nick, obviously a true heterosexual, is slow to comprehend. In the next frame, Nick seated at a table is treated to a shoulder rub and told his hair smells like strawberries. In another instance, Nick is in the bathroom staring into the mirror when Trevor comes up behind him to jab him in the ribs, obviously another “no homo” moment. Asleep in his bed, he is awakened by Trevor lying beside him who asks him to quit hogging the covers—“No homo!”

      Nick shares the problem with friends, recounting the worst of the “No Homo” events when, just that morning, he suddenly turned around in the shower to discover Trevor standing behind him, completely naked, pointing out that he just dropped the soap. Nick’s friends also fail to see the humor in the situation. 

       But when Trevor shows up in the middle of the conversation and grabs Nick’s ass on his own way to the gym, even Nick’s friends have to laugh—just as we do for the absurd desperateness of the act.

      In Trevor’s world conventional behavior is turned on its head; having created a society of friends who use homophobia as a way to secretly perform gay sexually illicit acts. All he needs in his topsy-turvy reality to permit him to kiss another male without his permission, to lay down with him in bed, and even appear nude with him in shower is the secret passwords: “No homo!” It’s as if declaring oneself not to be gay has given him permission to actually be queer.

     Nick still doesn’t quite get it, determining, like a Puritan father to provide his roommate a lesson. When Trevor returns home from the gym, he finds Nick standing in his underwear (a pair of red boxer shorts with white hearts). Nick begs him to come forward and touch his penis. Trevor appears somewhat taken aback, and comes forward seemingly unwilling, reaching down in his friend’s shorts as if it were a sort of punishment. Nick repeats the open sesame and briefly lectures Trevor, “Now you see, it’s not funny when someone else says it to you, is it?”

      By this time Trevor has clearly reached Nick’s penis and is obviously not only touching it, but rubbing it. Nick begs him to stop, but having been given permission, Trevor continues despite Nick’s protests. Trevor yells out “No homo,” as Nick finally looks down—the camera discreetly not following his eye. He begins to laugh. Suddenly, he gets it, he declares, having witnessed apparently his own erection. “All this time when you were rubbing my nipples and tickling my balls and I was freaking out, that’s why it’s funny. I absolutely totally get it!”

    Trevor pulls away in the joy of finally having his friend come to see his point of view. Nick immediately moans, “I didn’t ask you to stop.” As Trevor puts his hand back into Nick’s shorts, they both agree, “No homo though.”

      Nick has suddenly realized the power of being able to use just two words to wipe away all fears of enjoying male-on-male sex, as the film simultaneously demonstrates how ridiculous the fears of straight folks actually are.

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2024

Ryan Turner | I'm Not Gay / 2013 [music video]

in denial

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse Pepe (screenwriter and lyricist) Ryan Turner (director) I’m Not Gay / 2013 [4 minutes] [music video]

 

An actor and model, Jesse Pepe made his acting premier in Depravity (2012), and since has continued to perform in numerous TV series and film shorts. But today he is perhaps best known for his own, highly clever and ironic music videos, performed under the name J. Pee, in which he tackles difficult issues from the mundane question of whether a watched pot truly boils (Watched Pot, 2018) and Santa Claus’ terrifying Christmas wish lists (Santa Claus Is Coming with Guns, 2015), to far more complex social, cultural, and psychological problems of Inadequate (2018).

     More typical of his music videos, however, are his several comic explorations of various gay and generally queer and nefarious activities expressed in works such as his break-out video, I’m Not Gay (2013), and in numerous other works including Sensual Masturbation (2014), Jellyfish (2017), 21st Century Cockblock (2017), and Candy Rapper (2018).

     I’m Not Gay is a rap song that might be send to capsulize all the figures I have spoken about in “The I’m Not Gay Syndrome” into the central character who just hanging out with his friends (Mathieu Forget, Nicholas Rush, and Gregory Shelby) behaves in some very odd ways.

     For example:  

 

“Chillin' with my homies at the Home Depot

  (Home Depot)

  Buyin' screws and nails, manly shit you know?

  (You know?)

  My homie says to me "What kind of drill you want?"

  (He asked me)

  So I said I wanted one right in the ass”

 

“What?” his friends react.

Immediately attempting to cover up, J. Pee raps out his standard response:

 

"I'm not gay

  I'm not gay

  It was a joke guys, come on

  I'm not gay

  I like vag more than a pornstar scandal

  But can I get the drill with the bright pink handle?"

 

    Soon after while playing football with his friends in the park, he discovers once again, that he can’t control himself:

 

“Playin' tackle football with my homies in the park

  Had to wrap it up cause it was gettin' dark

  (Gettin' dark)

  The other team was looking straight scary as shit

  (Ooooo)

  But my quarterback, he ain't having none of it

  (He ain't scared)

  He looked at me and told me no matter where I was at

  My priority job was to protect the sack

  (Okay)

  So fourth down, he bends over and yells "Hike!"

  So I went and grabbed his balls!”

“Huh...” his best friends back away.

     And again, J. Pee explains:

 

“I'm not gay

  I'm not gay

  I'm just doing my job, step off

  I'm not gay

  It's not like I was purposefully tryin' to feel them

  (I wasn't)

  I just care about the safety of your future children

  (Godfather)

  ……….

  Next time I'll just let your balls get mangled, son

  P.S. I didn't know that you were so well hung”

 

     Yet another incident occurs as he strolls down the street with his friends in West Hollywood. Suddenly a dude walks by him with his shirt off, J. Pee unable to resist responding, “Damn bitch, you fine!”

     Once again he declares he’s not gay, just “comfortable with his own sexuality,” so comfortable that he can admit it when he sees a handsome face, and pretty eyes, and—continuing on—“a rock hard chest, and rippling abs / And the tightest ass, and those sculpted calves / And those bulging quads, and the perfect bod / And ohh my god, take your pants off.”

This time there’s simply no longer any room for denial, as he sings out:

“I'm so gay

  I'm fucking gay

  I'm the dude wearin’ nail polish yelling "Hey!"

  I'm the dude at the party who'll grab your butt

  (That's me)

  And when you turn around and look at me I'll be like "What?" ……….

   

     By this time, he’s not only a full-fledge fairy, but is busy, bright lettuce green shower cap on his head, taking what appears to be an endless shower, so long that even is buddies complain. All he can do his rap back once more “I’m so gay, etc.”

     Their response is that that they're gay too, and they need to use the shower. J’s shocked, as they explain that they weren’t reacting to his being queer but for the fact that he was quite literally accosting them and others, joining him in a celebratory dance.

     Pepe, a musical student graduate from Weber State University in Utah comments that his parody reminds him of “a few guys I met…and slept with.”

 

Los Angeles, May 16, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (May 2024).

Douglas Messerli | The I'm Not Gay Syndrome [essay]

the i’m not gay syndrome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gay boys with a crush on straight friends has long been a regular fantasy and a film genre so very popular that it would be almost impossible to provide a complete list of such movies.

    The essay I just posted above, “How to Lose Your Best Friend,” in fact, might almost be seen as an introduction of this same genre, and the numerous films, short and long I mention in that essay, might be seen as a beginning resource also for the more focused heterosexual / homosexual bond between friends that gradually slips into such an absurd territory that it becomes comic. Although there is also a real possibility of violence in these situations as well, the central figures more often demonstrate their impatience and frustrations with and a humorous disdain of their clueless companions.

     In the eight films I chosen to include here, the boys’ friendships are not only endangered by their sexual differences, but by the near absolute naivety or purposeful ignorance of one of the pair, usually the heterosexual who finds it hard to even imagine that there is any other sexuality, let alone that it might be manifested in his best friend.

      The naivety or seeming ignorance, however, might also be seen, in certain instances, as far more purposeful than it appears, the young straight men who pretend their total commitment to heterosexuality keeping their close (gay) friend near to them with the desire that he might possibly help to engage them in sex, permitting them the possibility of exploring something by which they are completely terrorized. And there is perhaps another sub-set of films and real-life figures who engage in gay sex while steadfastly and quite adamantly maintaining the banner phrase of utter denial: “I’m not gay!”

     It is just that pretense, moreover, that often intrigues and engages the gay friend. The goal becomes not only to win over the straight boy on the verge of coming out, but to test their own powers of seduction, sexual merit, and power—what might almost be described as a gay version of the Don Juan or Casanova complex.

      If these gay types might be said to be precisely the queer figures that the Christian Right most fears: those that somehow hope to convert or “out” otherwise heterosexual males, we must remember, of course, this has nothing with truly straight men who have little interest in gay sex, but only for those who are, so to speak, on the line, perhaps truly gay men who have been raised to be so terrified of sexuality in general, and their own sexuality in particular, that they clearly need help.

      And far more often, women perceiving the same wavering sense of selfhood in the boyfriends, step in and sweep such men off into marriage wherein these borderline heteros either come to believe that they have found true happiness and fulfillment or discover themselves in the bind of a bitter sexual relationship from which, even in today’s more open society, it is difficult to escape.

      Throughout these My Queer Cinema volumes, I have been hard on such figures as the last group I describe because of their youthful cowardice and the later pain they inflict upon their wives and children. But perhaps we must also sympathize with their trauma since many of these man as boys clearly had parents who were utterly intractable in their hostility to the LGBTQ world.

      I touched on some of these same issues also in an earlier gathering of films in the 2003 essay “Opening the Door,” in which I wrote about Bruce Leddy’s Mad TV skit A Football Thing (2003), Justin Viar’s Bucket List Night (2009), Adrià Llauró’s Alirón (2019) and Alirón 2 (El Descanso) (2022), Martin Chichovski’s I’m Not Gay (2020), and Sophie Kargman’s Query (2020). These works also explore straight boys moving toward the possibilities of exploring gay sex.

      Interestingly, the eight films I’ve chosen here to represent issues which mirror and expand on the films of both “Opening the Door” and “How to Lose Your Best Friend” are gathered around a short three-year period, from 2010-2012, with one final flourish in the remarkable general statement of J. Pee’s (Jesse Pope) hilarious 2013 music video, all products of Anglo, British and US creators. 

      The films included in this discussion are No Homo by Blake Larsen (2010), I’m Not Gay by Daniel Guyton (2010), Gay Is the Word, by Andy Heath (2011), The Favor (2011) and The Favor 2 (2012) by Harrison J. Bache, Light Bulb Sun by Jason Larkham (2012), Shabbot Dinner by Michael Morgenstern (2012), and J. Pee’s I’m Not Gay, directed by Ryan Turner in 2013.

 

Los Angeles, May 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Luchino Visconti | Le Notti Bianche (White Nights) / 1957

weavers of dreams

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luchino Visconti (screenplay, based on a story by Fydor Dostoevsky, and director) Le Notti Bianche (White Nights) / 1957

 

Let me begin this review of Luchino Visconti’s 1957 film White Nights by doing something I’ve never before done, recommending that you first read a piece titled “Meet Me Tonight in Dreamland—Luchino Visconti and White Nights” written by critic David Melville published in Senses of Cinema. In fact, I will be sharing many of Melville’s ideas to support my own views.

 

    Melville argues that this film, based on a work by Fydor Dostoevsky, which Visconti transferred from the canals of St. Petersburg to the arched bridges of the provincial Italian town of Livorno, represents a landscape that is “slightly false” (I’d call it purposely “theatrical”) while yet pretending to be realist. We must recall that Visconti, a truly theatrical filmmaker by the end of his career, began as a kind of neo-realist. But then almost all the neo-realists later turned to somewhat exaggerated and unordinary landscapes by the end of their careers. But in White Nights it is clear Visconti wanted to present a kind of realism that moved closer to the world of dreams, being, in this one case, perhaps a precursor of what later South American writers attempted to do in their works of “magic realism,” creating landscapes that blurred reality to demonstrate the psychological issues of their characters.

          Melville doesn’t argue for this issue, but I do feel in the street-life settings of this film that the director is creating a kind of hallucinatory world that parallels its heroine’s, Natalia’s (the outsider character portrayed by Maria Schell) state of mind. She, who comes from a land of rug-makers, and whose parents once sold rugs and now repair them, might as well be a figure right out of the Arabian Nights like Scheherazade, a dreamer who weaves stories to save and redeem her life. Only, in this case, Natalia tells stories to herself, turning her one-time sexual encounter with a handsome older man (Jean Cocteau’s lover, Jean Marais), into a dream-like obsession. She tells her tales to Mario only to save her dreams.

       The man she loves, who has been a border in their home, tells her, in a mysteriously-laden explanation, that he must go away for a year to “take care of some business,” but asks her still to try to remain available for him upon his return. Only a fool, of course, would agree to such a proposition. But then Natalia, in her dream-like imagination, is just such a being.

       The man she meets just before her “lover’s” return is also a strange figure, Mario (Marcello Mastroianni), a man of the working class, who roams the night streets of this small town to discover and share in exciting liaisons, an activity that Melville compares, again convincingly, to gay cruising.

      The night he meets Natalia, it appears he has arrived home too late to truly hit the bars, so to speak, as lights on the small main boulevard go out around him, shutters close, and only one bar remains open. He wanders the rainy streets, looking for something and someone, but, at first, only finds a hungry dog, whom he befriends. Quite by accident he spots Natalia, and later overhears her crying on one of the small bridges that dot this magical landscape. He is, as he later reports to her, “a shy man,” perhaps itself a clue to his own sexuality (although Visconti is very careful to maintain Mario’s heterosexuality in the plot). And he uses that fact as a method to attract her; she sees him, ultimately, as friend more than a would-be lover, which allows him to remain in her company.

     Mario, as we later discover, is not quite as innocent as he pretends. When she does reject any advances he retreats, on another night, to the local bar frequented, it is clear, by both prostitutes and gay boys; as Melville points out: “The most erotic moments occur, not between the protagonists, but in a sleazy after-hours nightclub where a black-clad, snake-hipped dancer (Dirk Sanders) cavorts to ‘Thirteen Women’, a song by Bill Haley and His Comets.”

      Yet, the honesty and obsession of Natalia clearly intrigues him, and changes him as well, helping him to keep a distance from her even as he falls more and more in love with her. Her request that he help write and mail a letter to her former lover, who apparently is back in the city, is met—at least at first—with his consent; he later, however, tears up the letter without sending it. It is his one obvious betrayal of her; but even then, he remains passive rather than completely admitting to his love for her. It is only later that he admits his actions, too late it appears, since the Marais character has returned to claim his prize.

      The lonely and still-unloved Mario, at film’s end, is left alone without anyone to truly turn to. In the very last frames of the film, he is befriended again by the equally searching dog, and they walk away into the night together.

      Although White Nights has seemingly remained an under-valued film even by Visconti aficionados, as Melville argues: “With its setting of dark alleys, deserted canals and random encounters, White Nights may well be Visconti’s ‘gayest’ film—even though it contains no homosexual characters or situations. It is perhaps the most evocative film ever about the gay phenomenon of ‘cruising’ and the nocturnal city as a realm of boundless sexual fantasy.”

      Clearly this is not the same world of Visconti’s later richly color-infused, gay transgressive films such as The Damned, Ludwig, or Death in Venice—without even the sweaty and violent gay sexuality of Rocco and His Brothers. Nobody (except the director in the subliminal ways I pointed to) even says anything about being gay. The smitten prostitute is rejected by Mario. And Mastroianni, despite his handsome face and physique, is no Alain Delon or Helmut Berger, the latter one of Visconti’s lovers. Yet the glittering, rain-spattered streets of White Nights portray a love quite outside the normal confines of heterosexuality. These figures all know love as an attraction which is based on obsession and temporality, a thing of body and time rather than tradition, family, and commitment.

     This beautiful film has a territory upon which Visconti treads much more delicately, like its set placing it in a world of in-between.

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2018).

Leandro Tadashi | Tomorrow / 2014

the new world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Paul Johnson (screenplay), Leandro Tadashi (director) Tomorrow / 2014 [13.30 minutes]

 

The two best friends of this short film, Clark (Daniel Rashid) and Trevor (Zachary Roozen), begin their lawn-bound discussion by Trevor suggesting that if Clark moves to Chicago for college, he’ll just come visit him and hang out. The boys laugh uneasily, knowing clearly that if Clark does move away they may not be able to retain their deep friendship that goes back to grade school. While using Clark’s camera as a viewfinder, Trevor’s friend recalls the day he first got the camera and what happened back then.

     Yet there are even more gnawing difficulties even as they speak, in particular the fact that Trevor is highly attracted to Sarah (Katie Baker), who is a close friend of Clark’s, who just happens to show up while they’re talking, inviting them both again to a party to celebrate in the new millennium.

     Trevor confides to Clark that he’s finally “going to make a move on Sarah” and wants him, as her close friend, to be his “wingman,” helping to talk him up and lead Sarah to become interested in him.

     We recognize almost immediately just by slight facial gestures from Clark and from Sarah that we are about to experience the possible break up a friendship that fits all the patterns of a gay crush that the one (Clark) has for the other, Trevor being a figure who goes out of his way to express himself as a heterosexual, in part to deny any of the truly close feelings he has for his friend. In this instance, it’s clear that he’s asking the boy who secretly loves him to help fix up a heterosexual romance, a situation that given what I have described in the films surrounding “How to Lose Your Best Friend,” does not look promising, particularly since the evening on which Trevor has determined to make his move signifies so many other changes, the beginning of an entirely new century and a break in the thread of friendship woven by two boys throughout the years.

    But how can Clark, the more passive of the two, possibly turn his friend down? The moment the party begins with a toast to the last sunset of the millennium you can see Clark’s smile quickly fade to a look of quiet desperation. As the room full of partying teens moves in a celebratory frenzy the two boys stand on either side of Sarah, Trevor pushing himself upon the girl with Clark working hard just to keep the fairly one-sided conversation going.

      We recognize that things are not going well. When Sarah suggests to Trevor that she needs a refill of her tequila, he quietly confides to his friend, “You’re supposed to be talking me up, come on you’re killing me,” and the moment he is out of sight, Sarah reports to Clark, “He doesn’t let up, does he?”

      It’s also clear that Sarah has a crush on Clark which surely doesn’t help given that it puts him in the middle of two friends, and positions him into a kind of emotional corner regarding his feelings for Trevor. Even if Sarah is not interested in Trevor, he has utterly no clue as to whether Trevor might ever truly be able to show any love for him.

      Sarah moves Clark out to the dance floor, and while he suggests they hold back until Trevor returns, she counters, “And I think you should stop worrying about him.”

      How does a closeted gay boy come to terms with love given these circumstances where it’s clear that the wrong person who truly cares for him? As they begin to dance, he suddenly abandons her, perhaps the only way out.

      And when he spots Trevor he runs from him as well, Trevor following in an attempt to comprehend what’s going on. Where’s Sarah and why has Clark abandoned them both? 

 

     Fortunately, several people appear to be moving in a specific direction and when the boys check it out they discover they are heading to the large pool of this ranch-style desert house. Clark, seeing it as a way back into a connection with Trevor, suggests they join the others, and together they swim for a while, lost perhaps in the memory of the hundreds of times they’ve swam together, diving deep into the waters and suddenly popping up behind one another in surprise. At one moment paddling in place a few feet from each other it appears that they have momentarily lost track of time, staring deeply at one another as if to admit all those years of their special friendship.

      Trevor pulls away, but still remains as if almost puzzling it all out, as Clark again comes near. One could almost imagine them saying what they both need to say or briefly awarding one another a kiss, but Trevor, true to his type, pulls back into himself: “Sarah’s waiting for her drink,” something Clark knows to be absolutely not true.

      Clark dries off, taking a long look at himself in the mirror. As he returns to the main room, Sarah intervenes once again with a hopeful greeting, “There you are....”

    “I think I’m goin’ to head out,” he answers. But she insists he stay, “It’s almost midnight,” finally cornering him and embracing him in a deep kiss at the very moment that Trevor shows up, Clark running off, with Trevor following.

     When he catches up, he shouts, “What the fuck was that?”

    “Sorry, I promise it wasn’t what it looked like.”

     Trevor moves closer, and Clark tries to reassure him, placing his hands outward.

     “Fuck, don’t touch me!”

     Clark finally spits it out: “She’s not even into you!”

     “Fuck you,” Trevor responds, pushing him to the floor and leaning over the prone body of his friend as if he were about to beat him, but pausing as he literally straddles him and finally leaning into a long a desperate series of intense kisses. Clark is so absolutely and delightedly surprised that by the time he loosens his arms to embrace his friend, pulling Trevor back towards him, his sudden lover, resisting all he feels and has just begun to express, slowly pulls up and away and leaves the room.

     Clark looks off in the direction that his friend has left in astonishment. What has just happened is nearly as shocking as if he has suddenly been raped, even if he has perhaps desired it all his life. Longing is sometimes far easier that recognizing the other has been holding an equal feeling back apparently for years. Surely their friendship can never be a simple buddy connection ever again.

     Almost inexplicably everyone has abandoned the party, while our three friends have remained late into night, Sarah falling to sleep drunk on the couch, with the two boys obviously hidden away in different spaces in an attempt to process what has just happened. Waking up to find both Trevor and Clark still there, Sarah asks if she might catch a ride home. Once more, she unknowingly intrudes upon a moment when they might have been able to begin to work things out. But as it stands, the long ride home with Trevor driving is so quiet that it’s deafening, the car motor being the only sound.

     As they arrive at Clark’s house he looks in his friend’s direction but his face makes it clear that any attempt to speak would be pointless. How can he tell him what surely the other has not yet been able to forgive himself for and even if he could explain cannot with Sarah sleeping in the back seat.

   The seat belt snapping loose is the only sound director Leandro Tadashi allows, other than the opening of the car door and its small slam back as Clark walks off into what surely must appear to be a future of emptiness.

     But suddenly Trevor rolls down the window, calling out for Clark. The boy pauses, looks back and slowly returns to the car bending down to the open window. Trevor hands him his forgotten camera. Clark takes it, somewhat disappointed, but observes that now Trevor is also holding out his hand as if to shake. “See you tomorrow?”

     Clark smiles, takes the hand and holds it for instant, Trevor slightly smiling. Trevor starts up the motor and drives off.

      Clearly Trevor has accepted what has happened. The only question now is whether he wants to forget it or to see it as an event upon which to build a new kind of relationship with Clark. If nothing else, he has opened up the possibility that their friendship has come to be something different: a tomorrow instead of an endless series of days spent just hanging out.

 

Los Angeles, August 5, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021).