Daniel Guyton | I'm Not Gay! / 2010

trapped in the closet with another man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Daniel Guyton (screenwriter and director) I'm Not Gay! / 2010 [7 minutes]

 

A nerdy business man, Gary (Jeremy Riegel), enters an empty elevator and quickly pushes the button to close the doors. At the very last moment a hunky man, Michael (Anthony Pino), dressed in gym clothes with a gym bag on his shoulder, rushes to slide his body through the closing doors,

quickly moving toward Gary in an attempt to push the button to his floor.

      Immediately, Gay pulls back, in near terror, shouting out “I’m not gay!”

     Michael, having pushed the button for his floor pulls away and moves to the other side of the elevator as the door closes.

     Inside the elevator the conversation continues: “Not that there’s anything wrong with being gay. It’s just that, you know, I’m not.”

     “Right,” answers Michael.

     Gary continues with the old homophobic trope to salve the situation: what people what to do on their own time is their own business. “If they want to some wild crazy gay sex with another guy in their own bedroom, so be it!”

     Again Michael responds with a shrug and a “Right.”

     But apparently Gary can’t stop, insisting that he would certainly never play a game with another guy of naked twister. “Because I’m not gay.”

     Michael, finally exasperated, answers: “I know you’re not gay. We have discussed this.”

     Gary just wants to make it clear.

     Michael assures him that it’s perfectly clear.

     But Gary almost immediately turns him, still bothered: “You believe me, don’t you.”

     “I believe you.”

     But there is Gary’s look of semi-gratitude also a small visual shrug of disappointment.

     He turns to Michael: “So what’s it like being gay?”

   Michael, obviously now playing with Gary, answers almost ecstatically: “It’s the most beautiful feeling in the world.”

      “Really?” Gary eagerly responds.

      “No, not really. It’s whatever…. What’s it like being straight?”

      “It’s great. I love it!”

      “You going down?” asks Gary, seemingly not even recognizing the other possible meaning of that question.

      “I’m certainly not going up,” Michael sardonically replies.

      “I’m going down.”

      “Thanks Gary, I would never have guessed,” he motions to the button he had pushed.

     Gary now wonders where Michael is going, the latter announcing, somewhat irritated, that he’s going to work out.

      Gary wonders why he’s not going to work, and Michael explains he called in sick. Confused by the news, Gay responds, “But you’re going to work out!”

       Michael leans over, putting his finger to his lips and shushing him, “Don’t tell.”

       Gary looks over at the highly muscular man to ask, “Do you work out often?” a question which echoes with the empty come-on of many a neophyte trying to start up a conversation.

       “I think you ask me that every time you see me.”

       Suddenly Gary boldly asks what it’s like kissing men, Michael wondering why he cares, with Gary assuring him yet again that he doesn’t care and he isn’t gay.

       We’ve now seen enough surely to realize that, in fact, Gary is fascinated with and even envious of the gay life, perhaps even attracted to the possibility that he might…. But that would be as far his mind might stretch.

       Yet Gary now can’t stop, asking Michael “Do you like it up the ass?” the situation now growing out of hand, especially when he repeats it, a bit louder, presuming Michael may not have heard his question.

       Again Michael, now fully frustrated, wants to know what business it is of his?

       Gary reassures him yet again that he’s not gay, he’s just curious. “I’m just not used to being around gay people, that’s all.”

       Michael reminds that he lives in New York City and that he better get used to it.

     Gary takes it ever further by suggesting that he thought all gay men lisped, and he’s noticed that Michael doesn’t lisp. He’s also aware that Michael is a cop, hard for him to believe imagining him with “all those hardened criminals and those big metal handcuffs…,” apparently a kind of S&M fantasy for office worker.

     “I’m not a Village Person, and just because I’m gay does not mean I’m wild and crazy sex fiend, okay!”

      Gary looks even more disappointed.

      As Gary starts up another possible fantasy, Michael puts a stop to it: “Look, I’m a regular guy, okay. I don’t lisp. I don’t have wild trysts in woods with strange men. I’m not a flaming drag queen. I’m just a normal guy the same as you.”

     “You work out more than I do!” Gary comes back, admitting he doesn’t even know what he means by that statement.

     But now Michael can’t let it go, insisting he’s just a normal guy who works and goes home each night.

       Gary however notes that he does go to bed with another guy. And a moment later, he intrudes with yet another crazy fantasy: “You ever lick a man’s balls?” he asks holding out a hand as if cupping someone’s testicles.

         Suddenly Gary is all over Michael, cornering him, demanding he fuck him up this ass.

 

       As Michael pushes him away, Gary sadly comes back to his reality. “Oh, my God. I don’t know what came over me.”

         “Gary, I can’t help you with your problems.”

      In horror, Gary points to Michael: “I’m not the one with a problem, you’re the one with the problem!”

        Finally, the doors open and Michael leaves the elevator, Gary calling after him: “I’m not gay.”

     This comic skit, which might have been something performed on ‘Saturday Night Live,” nicely mocks the situation of not only many true homophobes but of many men who truly doubt their own masculinity, confusing their sense of sexual inadequacies or simple unattractiveness to women as having something to do with homosexuality.

       In this case, however, it appears that the character is so desperately closeted that he’s no longer safe even in an elevator with another man. But in Gary’s case, he may also be better that he isn’t out and searching when we realize that he would perhaps have even less chance to find someone in a gay bar, on Grindr, or even in anonymous bathroom sex. His fixation on Michael is the closest he can get to want he truly desires.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (May 2024).

Andy Heath | Gay Is the Word / 2011

A WORD WITHOUT MEANING

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominic Byrne (screenplay), Andy Heath (director) Gay Is the Word / 2011 [5 minutes]

 

     A nervous young man sits down with his friends in a pub. “Anyway guys, you’re probably wondering why I invited you here tonight,” he fearfully begins. “There’s something I need you to know about me. And I guess now is as good as any time to say it. The thing is I’m gay.”

     Suddenly they all seem to pay attention where previously all eyes where the telly and the soccer game.

     “You’re not gay. I’ll tell you what’s gay. Man United getting ravaged by Arsenal,” his first friend insists.

     “Pure gay,” adds another.

     And the third: “It’s a generous helping of gay pie.”

     “I don’t think you’re getting me. I’m trying to tell you, I’m actually gay,” their young friend once more attempts to report.

      “You’re not gay.” They argue instead that their friend “bloody John” is gay because he wanted to stay home with his “gay little girlfriend.”

      “That’s typical gay behavior,” continues the second.

      The third summarizes: “John’s gayness is so vast he defines a generation.” 

      The first rejoins: “John’s gayness would make a grown man cry.”

      Our young friend tries once again, but they interrupt to describe more things in their life and on the TV that are most definitely “gay.”

      Finally, he tries a different approach. “Look guys, I’m a homosexual.”

      And for a moment they all look up and over at him as if he might possibility have gotten through their inane chatter. But all they can do is ask if he’s feeling alright, reassuring him that he’s not gay, he’s a “legend.”

      They go on with their soccer talk recalling when they “bummed him in the ass,” etc., admitting he was gay to cry. “But most of time, seriously, you’re just a dude. We’re talking 9 to 10 due to the gay ratio, and that’s a respectable split by anyone’s standards.”

       Another adds, “Yeah, I mean you’re such a dude it makes me want to kiss you.”

       Fed up with his friends, whom he describes as “idiots,” the young man gets up to leave, walking over to his waiting boyfriend.

       One of his former tablemates asks, “What was that all about?” Another responds, “So gay.”

       British filmmakers Dominic Byrne and Andy Heath’s short cinematic fable presents a world in which being gay has seemingly been so assimilated that the word itself has lost all meaning, being applied by heterosexuals to everything but what it truly means—perhaps a way to detonate any possible reaction the true meaning the word might illicit. By using the word to mean anything except a person who is sexually attracted to people of the same sex, they have once more made the real act and its signifier unspeakable, as Oscar Wilde described it more than a century earlier, “Something that cannot be said.”

       It’s clear that by the end of his conversation that our young brave soul, attempting to come out to his best straight friends, will never be heard and definitely not be accepted. How could he be “gay” when the word now signifies everything but what he actually is. Saying you are gay is to now declare that you are definitely not someone who engages in same gender sex. Perhaps he might succeed better at convincing them if he, like most of the others in the films I discuss in this exploration of the “I’m not gay syndrome,” insisted that he wasn’t gay, as does the obviously gay man in Daniel Guyton’s film of 2010.

 

Los Angeles, May 17, 2024

Francis Ford Coppola | The Godfather / 1972

i’m with you now

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola (screenplay, based on a fiction by Mario Puzo), Francis Ford Coppola (director) The Godfather / 1972

 

Suddenly in facing writing about one of my favorite films, The Godfather, I become stumped. Not because it’s a “difficult” film to discuss; it’s absolutely a straight-forward work, with an easily recountable plot, which is central to the form of this narrative “gangster” film. But to simply focus on the story would do a great injustice to this complex work.

    The first third of the movie (at least it feels that way) is devoted to a lavish wedding that is meant to be demonstrable evidence that Don Corelone (Marlon Brando) is a wealthy being, willing to lavish everything on his beloved daughter, Connie (Talia Shire) and his large community of “friends.” Ironically, he himself must spend hours during the immense celebration in a dark room, listening to the demands of some of these “friends” or want-to-be friends about their sufferings as they seek his blessings and answers to their problems. One, in particular, a small-time undertaker, Bonasera, complains of the rape of his own daughter by young American boys; he wants revenge. The Godfather’s entire position is laid out before us in his response; the supplicant has first sought justice in American courts rather than attempting adjudication—most often violent—through the more palatial court of the Don himself. Money is not required, but absolute devotion and later demands for services are. In short, once you sell yourself to the devilish Don, you are his servant for the rest of your life.

 

     The transactional world of The Godfather, in short, is quickly presented to us in the very first scenes, and the rest of the movie, heavy on plot machinations is simply a playing out of those transactions.

     Johnny Fontaine (Al Martino), a stand-in for Frank Sinatra tearfully requests the Don help him obtain the part in a new film, controlled by the studio head, Jack Woltz (John Marley)—the role I presume Sinatra eventually played in From Here to Eternity—resulting in one of the most horrific scenes in the film—after Woltz refuses and abuses the Don’s consigliere, an adopted family member, Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall)—with the decapitating and placement of Woltz’s prize horse in his bed.

      Other such "transactions" include the heir-presumptive son Sonny’s (James Caan) fucking of a young party-goer, his wife below joking about the size of, presumably, the groom’s penis, and one of the don’s thick-headed underlings begging for a meeting with the Godfather, simply to thank him for being invited.

      Meanwhile, back at the party, the spirited Mama Corelone (Morgana King) sings the Italian favorite "Luna mezz' 'o mare" (an important song in this film, of which in Godfather II the local Nevada-based orchestra has no knowledge) while another of the Corelone’s sons, Fredo, gets quite drunk. Photographs are snapped, and the photographers ejected, their negatives destroyed. This is a closed affair. But even the hired wedding photographer cannot easily get the family together for a group photo since the beloved youngest son, Michael, has not yet arrived.

     When he (Al Pacino) arrives, with his girlfriend, Kay Adams (Diane Keaton), he introduces her to the rambunctious family, remaining somewhat apart from the rest of the celebrants, recounting to his girlfriend some of their savory actions, while insisting he is not “them.”

    As we immediately sense, they have sent Michael out in the world (he is an educated war hero) to live a life separate from theirs, serving as a kind of symbol of the aspirations to which this immigrant family has aspired. Michael is a man beloved creation who exists outside the family, in every sense of what that word might mean. He is their talisman for the world at large—despite Corelone’s great wealth, more importantly, despite all the criminal activities it has taken to achieve their wealth—that represents not only their American dream, but oddly justifies everything they have cheated from the world about them.

       Yet Michael is at the heart of this entire family, father, mother, sister, brother, friends: he is their “spoiled prince,” the emblem of what they are as a family. And unless you recognize this at the very beginning of this powerful movie, you will never understand the tragedies that lie within the narrative of the remainder of the first move and the other films following. Michael, is the beloved family member who must remain an outsider. And for the first several scenes in this film that is how he perceives himself, the protestant school teacher, Kay, being the perfect mate for him, precisely because of their obvious differences in social and cultural experiences. Unlike later immigrant and religious families who disapproved of marrying outside of the culture or religion, Michael has been raised to do precisely that, to represent the full assimilation of the Italian family within the larger culture.

  

    Most of the rest of this nearly encyclopedic fiction, including all the complex plot intricacies that take the film and its later manifestations through the family’s rise in New York with returns to Sicily and Rome, including the Vatican City, are almost tangential to the central story: Michael’s Faustian pact with the devil.

       In short, it hardly matters “what happens” for the rest of the story. Of course, it does very much matter in terms of the cinematic experience of Coppola’s beautifully filmed myth. It’s Christmas 1945, Michael and Kay shopping in the lush stores of midtown New York. They’ve just enjoyed a film at Rockefeller Center and have been shopping at the stores thereabouts. How could they have known that in the days following the wedding, Michael’s father, meeting with another outsider, “The Turk,” (Al Lettieri), backed by the Corleones' rivals, the Tattaglias, another crime family, had rejected his offer for the Corleones to become involved with drugs? How could they have known of Sonny’s impetuous interruption of his father’s careful rejection, which has made it clear that there are cracks in the family ideologies? The details, in some respects, are insignificant to the larger rhythms of the film. Suddenly Kay notices the newspaper headlines: Don Corelone has been “hit,” is possibly dead.

       One might say it is at the very moment that plot is swept up into the psychological portraiture that Coppola has established, as Michael, with no other alternative, returns to the family circle, the purposeful family outsider returning to the den, a house presented in Coppola’s designer’s set as a kind of cave of warmly-lighted rooms where the men are in control, but the women hover over them. It is a world right out of myth, particularly Sicilian life.

       Their discussions remind one of a war-time movie, plans of attack being intensely debated. Michael, the ex-soldier, is an expert warrior. Although he is kept out of the early discussions, the absence of his father allows him to reenter family conversations from which he has previously been purposely excluded. Still, basically he is ostracized, remains the outsider. Sonny and Tom are in charge.

       A visit to the hospital, however, one of the tensest scenes in Coppola’s work, changes everything. Strangely enough, little happens in this desolate world which Michael suddenly uncovers. The large, unlit structure is suddenly empty, all guards, nurses, doctors (one cannot even imagine doctors within this space), all ancillary help has disappeared. If there was ever a vision of a collapsed center, here it is. No one is where all of us expect everyone to be, protecting, doctoring, bringing people to health. There seem not to be even any patients—except one, Don Corelone, all alone, a single nurse still there despite the abandonment. All have been told to evacuate the place.  

       We follow Michael’s traumatic recognition of the events. Clearly, enemies—one must be paranoid, obviously, having grown up in the world that Michael has—have emptied the public space in order to kill Corelone. With the help of the dawdling worker Michael transfers his suffering father to another room, ordering a surprised and subservient visitor to the Don to stand by the entrance, pretending to have a gun.

       The entire scene, with its echoing emptiness is one of the most dramatic scenes in the film, perhaps in all of cinema. Yet its quietude represents one of the most frightening moments in cinematic history. As Michael moves his father to another room in order to protect him from inevitable “hit,” the Don confusedly awakens, Michael assuring him, “I’m with you now,” a simple pledge of protection which, in the context of the entire film, is also a commitment to evil. A tear falls from his father’s eye in recognition of what has just occurred. All the family hopes for Michael’s separateness have suddenly vanished.

      Michael does not comprehend what that statement implies, nor, I might suggest, did I upon first viewing: Michael, the purposeful representation of family “salvation,” has, perhaps unintentionally, but most certainly, become one of them and all the evil acts the family has committed.

     

      It is no wonder, that a few scenes later, after the not terribly bright and rash Sonny has rushed to the New Jersey turnpike to his death, that Michael, now truly a family member, determines to destroy “the Turk” and the Tattagila-controlled cop by shooting them at a small Italian restaurant in the Bronx.

    An escape to the beautiful Sicilian landscape and Michael’s sudden love and marriage with a stunning local beauty only reiterates the pattern: love and death, revenge and revenge again. The small town of Corelone has no males left. Michael—whose beautiful young wife is blown up in a car explosion intended for him—can no longer comprehend his own devolution, his commitment to his own and everyone else’s destruction. When he returns to the US, his “new” life serves only as a repetition of the revenge tragedy filled with lies, as he manipulates the death of all his enemies, including Connie’s double-crossing—he has been indirectly involved with the attempted killing of Don Corelone—and wife-beating husband whose marriage the movie celebrated so enthusiastically in its early frames.

     While avowing his commitment to serve as godfather to Connie’s newborn son, Michael takes on the larger role of Godfather, killing most of those who have betrayed the family, including the child’s father. Murders in Las Vegas assure the family’s takeover of the city’s major casino. Michael is no longer an individual but is a monster created by his family’s very attempts to protect him from becoming one. The infection, as his wife Kay later reports, seems to be somehow in the blood, embedded in the ritual Sicilian commitment to eternal revenge, dooming generation after generation.

       As the Don dies the natural death of a heart attack, we realize that, despite the family’s great wealth, there can be no enjoyment in that fact. One need only think back to the small New Jersey  house of the Don’s early associate, Clemenza, to realize that crime does not truly pay, that the wealth these figures might have sought is really a search for power that ultimately has no effect. If they have survived, it has given them little joy of life. An imprisonment of mattresses and homemade spaghetti is surely not what they originally sought.

 

Los Angeles, October 12, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2012).

Jean-Pierre Melville | Bob le Flambeur (Bob, the Gambler) / 1956, USA 1959

two sides of a coin

by Douglas Messerli

 

Auguste Le Breton and Jean-Pierre Melville (screenplay), Jean-Pierre Melville (director) Bob le Flambeur (Bob, the Gambler) / 1956, USA 1959

 

To describe Bob le Flambeur as a gangster film, which many critics and film dictionaries have, is a bit like describing the musical Guys and Dolls as a film noir. Yes, Bob, the gambler, twenty years before the film begins, has been involved in a robbery; he has even served time in prison. But the dapper gambler, friend of the chief of police, seems far more like a character out of Damon Runyon's head than having sprung from any of the American gangster movies which Melville so loved.

     If Bob (Roger Duchesne), is a "hood," as he describes himself, he is also, as the narrative voice-over tells us, an "old young man," a figure out of the old school who has a sentimental heart and is beloved by the inhabitants of the Montmartre underworld he frequents. He is a kind of angel in the midst of hell—Melville establishing the heaven and hell dichotomy of the Paris district in the first few frames of the film. Not only do his friends, waitresses, and waiters admire him, but Bob, having an established reputation as a "gentleman," has a young acolyte, Paolo (Daniel Cauchy); and early in the story Bob takes in a young woman, Anne (Isabelle Corey), not for sex but to save her from becoming a "pavement princess," a woman of the streets controlled by men such as the pimp Marc (Gérard Buhr). Unlike all the others of his world, he lives in relative comfort, with a daily housekeeper to care for him.

      Yet Bob has a problem: he is an inveterate gambler, who in the first few frames of film, bets away his bankroll and is faced with a wave of bad luck. How can he resist, accordingly, the temptation when a compatriot safe-cracker reports that he has been told that the Casino in Deauville sometimes contains over 800 million francs?

     With cool precision, Bob proceeds in his preparation for the robbery, Melville delighting in the methodical process of planning a successful heist. Finding a backer in McKimmie (Howard Vernon), an inside man in the croupier, Jean (Claude Cerval), and employing the services of Paolo and other thugs, the gambler brilliantly takes us through the rehearsals: an early version of cracking the safe, a later, more sophisticated version of safe-cracking involving earphones and an oscilloscope, a walk-through of the planned robbery in a field where every aspect of the casino is outlined in chalk, even a pep talk. No coach could have better practiced his team.

     But these men, including Bob, are, after all, only humans. And one by one, they crack—not the safe—but psychologically. For in this basically misogynistic film, women are the enemy. And despite his salvation of Anne, it is quite clear that Bob prefers to live without women and work with men.

     Bill Thompson has noted in his commentary on Bill’s Movie Emporium: “The reason the men suffer the fate they do is because they are willing to keep their women in the background, or in one case not include them in their life.” But that fate, in the instance or our hero, at least, is survival, and a life lived as a local king, along with the payoff of cute boys like Paolo looking up to him. If you can’t precisely describe Bob as a homosexual, his titular role as “gentleman” at least aligns him with the old school of the “unmarrying kind,” a man who knew that women and gambling were simply not a good mix. In this case, part of his allure is precisely his abandonment of sex. Bob’s pleasures are primarily the same as his daily activities, the chance-taking games he plays with life.

    As for those who can’t do without their women, they quickly find that sex, with its necessities of social and communicative living, easily does them in. Having fallen in love with Anne, Paolo tells her about Deauville, and she, in turn, spills the beans to the local pimp, Marc, from whom Bob has saved her and who has saved his own neck by promising the police he will give them "information." Then there is the croupier's social-climbing wife, Suzanne. Even the faithful bartender, Yvonne (Simone Paris), sensing something's up, expresses her worries about Bob and his plans. Even after Marc is killed by Paolo, Suzanne and Jean get word to the police. The inevitable collapse of Bob and his cohorts’ world seems about to happen.

     But in Melville's films, just as in Damon Runyon's writings, everyone generally stays true to his type. And once Bob is left alone in the canyons of casino gambling, he simply cannot resist doing what he has done all of his life: gamble. This time, however, he wins, again, again, and again, taking home a fortune almost as big as the one he might have stolen.

     The inevitable does occur. The heist is foiled by the police, Paolo shot and killed—he has, after all, been the only one in the film who has actually used a gun; Bob uses weapons only as symbols, not as tools of destruction. Poker-faced even after holding the dead body of a boy that might be described as his son—and we might add, the being he comes in this film, to expressing his love—Bob cites the mantra of any gambler: "He knew there are always two sides of a coin."

     Bob is arrested along with his cohorts, but his friend, the head of police suggests he will get only four years since he has not actually been on the scene for the robbery itself. Bob, however, has a better wager: with a good lawyer he might get away with no prison time at all. And he now has a fortune to gamble away for the rest of his life.

     Melville's thoroughly loveable villain has been saved simply by being true to himself.

    Although Melville was married from 1952 until his death in 1973, he was observed by friends to prefer the company of men with whom he would sit up late at night discussing cinema. And it surely to no coincidence that in serving in the French Resistance during World War II, he chose the code name Melville after this favorite US author, Herman Melville, a bi-sexual married man. He kept the name as his own for the rest of his life. And like Herman Melville’s works, if Jean-Pierre Melville’s films are not precisely homosexual, they focus on homo-social and often homoerotic situations.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2012

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2012).

David Tjen | It Gets Better / 2014

the floor is hard to forget

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Tjen (screenwriter and director) It Gets Better / 2014 [5 minutes]

 

Indonesia-born US director David Tjen’s short film It Gets Better might almost be seen as a poster for young LGBTQ kids experiencing the bullying of their high school years. With composer Skylar von Joolen’s soaring score, and the quick cuts of the film’s young hero, Pierre (Guilherme Scarabelot) being thrown to the floor by the archetypically homophobic jocks of his school, we hardly get a second to adjust to his momentary eyes-only romance with the closeted school jock, Adam (Jason Berrent) before—in the very midst of what appears to be a stand off a moment prior to an expected gay bashing—the handsome jock locks his lips around Pierre’s in a deep kiss.

     Pierre has just uttered the now standard cliché “It gets better,” although how he might know that in the midst of his school mates’ taunts is never established. Adam is probably just relieved that someone has figured out his sexual desires and is willing to reassure him that it might be fine to express them as long as no one else is around to observe.

     Five years later the two meet up again in a coffee house, Adam now clearly out of the closet and interested in hooking up with his former high school flame. The two lock hands this time instead of lips as the music swells up to a saccharin end. 

     Although Tjen has since become quite famous for his Good Mythical Morning show on YouTube and other projects such as the New York Film Academy’s Games on Twitch, he still remembers the 2014 5-minute piece, so he has noted in an interview with Carin Chea, as one of his favorite moments in his career to date. Certainly, it represents a moment of euphoria in a sea of seemingly endlessly sad coming out fragments.

     Yet, I can’t help but think of the openly gay kid sprawled out on the classroom floor, while the closeted jock, playing at being a heterosexual, seems to have come through it all without even a scratch thanks to his acceptance by his peers.

       I’m happy they’re both so happy by the end of this breathless little hors d'oeuvre, but I can’t quite get over the feeling that’s it’s all just a little puff. Even when you quickly scramble up and walk away from inexplicable hate, you can’t quite get it out of your head any more than a closeted gay boy can ignore his secret longings. And, although Pierre is strong enough to be able to forgive his new lover’s former hypocrisies, turning away from him at the very moment when the outstretched hand might have represented a true link to another human being in the high school daze, not everything in life, alas, “gets better.” And we can only wonder how the former jock will stand up to the adult challenges he will surely face.

 

Los Angeles, February 24, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).