J. J. Sedelmaier | The Ambiguously Gay Duo Don We Now...or Never / 1996 [TV animation]

holiday rewards

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Smigel and Stephen Cobert (screenplay), J. J. Sedelmaier (director) The Ambiguously Gay Duo: Don We Now…or Never / 1996 [TV animation]

 

In this December 14, 1996 episode of The Ambiguously Gay Duo the definition of Christmas itself, Santa Claus, is kidnapped by the beetles of the planet Zolaro, the Commissioner putting it a call to the duo for help, while apologizing to their wives for the holiday intrusion. When Ace reports that they are not married, his police chief collects on the bet he has made about their sexuality, while the Commissioner, still clinging to any heterosexual possibility claims, “Well, they could have girlfriends.”

     The beetles are assured that Ace and Gary will never be able to pass through the magma waves. Although one beetle underling cannot help but add, “Unless they intercept one another first,” the head beetle pondering the fact that he is suggesting that the duo may be gay. Santa doesn’t have a clue of what they’re talking about, which leads the head beetle to suggest he needs to get out more often, later suggesting that since he has all those elves that we ought to know what they’re talking about.

 

     Meanwhile, as the Duocar rushes to its destination, Ace tells Gary Christmas without Santa “will leave a huge a hole. We’ve got to fill that hole.

     Escaping the magma waves through the protection of their car which neutralizes the waves, Ace and Gary arrive just on time to save Chris Kringel, only be to be attacked on masse by the beetle army. After the usual open pat on the butt for Gary, the duo shift into “role mode,” moving into positions that might only be represented previously in the Kamasutra.

 

    Of course, they win the day, with Santa declaring them as heroes and declaring they might have any present they might desire for saving the day.

     Without hesitation, both Ace and Gay quickly move into Santa’s sleigh, reaping, one presumes, they just awards.

Los Angeles, June 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cienma blog (June 2024).

 

 

 

John G. Young | Parallel Sons / 1995

an american tragedy

by Douglas Messerli

 

John G. Young (screenwriter and director) Parallel Sons / 1995

 

If you can endure the incredible coincidence of a young man living in an upstate New York Adirondack village in the 1990s—whose father is a gun dealer and whose girlfriend’s father is the town sheriff, who himself feels so terribly alienated from his world that he has come to totally identify with American blacks, painting images of black political events, listening primarily to black music, particularly rap, and even corn-rolling his blonde locks, but who, in fact, has never even met a black person in his young life—in the early scenes of this film is held up in the local café by a black man just escaped from the local young men’s reformatory school, then you will probably be moved, as I was, by this emotionally compelling, poetic film by John G. Young.

 

    Put realism behind you as Young explores two beautiful boys, Seth Carlson (Gabriel Mann) and Knowledge Johnson (Laurence Mason) who come from opposite trajectories to meet up in rural US only to discover not only that they have a great deal in common, but that their fates are inextricably entwined. 

      Knowledge robs the café with the hope that he can get enough money to escape from the town to nearby Canada. But he’s been terribly hurt in the process of going on the run. Seth seems almost fearless as he hands over the money, only a moment or two later, bending to the floor to help his assailant who has collapsed. Almost calmly and with a kind of peaceful assuredness, he picks up the other man and takes him to a cabin in the woods outside the house, a ways from town, where he lives with his father and sister, the mother having recently died of cancer.

      Although the father, Peter Carlson (Graham Alex Johnson) cannot comprehend why his son behaves in the strange manner he does, he accepts him as a basically good boy, and gives him leeway to explore his current obsessions without totally standing in his way. But while Seth hopes to escape to an art school in New York City, his father insists the local community college is where his son will be best educated. And that battle alone, along with Seth’s total alienation from his Adirondack town puts them at a near stand-off.

      Seth feels equally put-off by his supposed girlfriend Kristen Mott (Heather Gottlieb) who truly believes that they will marry and does everything she can to get Seth to carry through his heavy kissing and petting into an actual sex. When she gets him drunk and tries to crawl into bed with him, he grows furious, sending her off in such confusion and fear that she has her own kind of breakdown, escaping from home and hiding out for a few days without telling anyone where she has gone.

      Seth is now caring for the stranger in the cabin, mostly nursing him through the night before Knowledge’s fever finally breaks. But the two do not immediately hit it off, Knowledge understandably resentful that the strange kid believes somehow that listening to rap and imitating a black hairstyle will in any way to bring him closer to truly understanding what it is to be a black man in the society from which he comes. Knowledge might prefer to settle down in the American paradise he sees in the beautiful wilderness in which Seth lives. The boy, he attempts to explain, has no understanding of how mean and difficult it is to survive the New York City borough where he lived, Brooklyn. Seth, on the other hands, suggests Knowledge doesn’t comprehend the racism and open hostility towards any kind of difference that exists in his world.

      Slowly, as Knowledge heals and the boy brings him food he steals from his family cupboards and the two share their innate and learned interests, the boy’s bond, Seth finally inviting the black into the house on his father’s night out, while demanding his sister, whose care falls mostly to her brother, keep their visitor’s presence a secret, even though she, as smart as she is, has already guessed who he is and from where he has come.

     After sharing some pot, liquor, and a beautiful jazz record, Seth invites Knowledge into his own personal shrine to black culture and, finally, to stay the night in his own bed, the two discovering that they have something beyond black culture in common, that they both are gay and are falling in love with one another. Afraid of the consequences of their feelings, they touch and hug but apparently don’t engage in sex.

      We recognize, of course, that it was only a matter of time before Knowledge’s whereabouts would be discovered, particularly given the racism of one of Seth’s fellow café employees and the fact that in search of Seth, Kristen has come across the black man in the forest cabin. As the Sherriff arrives at their doorstep, Seth refuses to give him entry, pulling out the gun he has taken from Knowledge earlier. As the Sherriff, who has known the boy since he was a baby, moves forward with the knowledge that he is incapable of carrying through with what he threatens, Seth does the unthinkable, pulling the trigger and killing him—suddenly putting the basically “innocent” Knowledge into serious jeopardy.

      The two have no choice but go on the run, borrowing the café owner’s car. But we know already that their escape is doomed. Unable to believe his own son has committed the murder, the father himself pulls out his rifle and tracks the two escapees at the same moment that state police check out every standard route of escape.

      Seth’s knowledge of the backland gives them some hope, but when they run out of gas, there seems to be little possibility, although the local boy is still convinced that they can make it on foot in a couple of days’ time. But when Seth falls from a final rock, breaking his leg, they are doomed.

       In another forest cabin they finally engage in sexual release, Knowledge explaining how he ended up in reform school, recounting the horrible experience of how his young, six-year-old son found a revolver in a drawer, pulled it out and accidentally shot himself to death, the system sending him, the boy’s father, as the responsible adult, to the youthful offenders’ facility from where he has escaped.

       The boys might still have made it over the border, however, were not for the confluence of forces, the state police and Seth’s own father, the latter convinced that the Sherrif has been killed by Knowledge and his own son kidnapped. But when upon confronting them, Seth tells him the truth before both again run off, he puts the rifle into position, focuses, and despite the state police demands he put down the gun, fires. That he kills his own son, not Knowledge, makes it clear that he has, in fact, believed Seth, and by killing him has made certain the truth will never be spoken again.

       Knowledge is now recaptured, and we are almost certain that this time the charge against him will be first-degree murder. It is as if the horror of the past has caught up with him to bring him down again without relent. Everyone he loves, it appears, is destroyed by the very fact that he survives. And yet another man, in this terrible complex of tragedies, must suffer for having been responsible for the death of his own son. 

 

Los Angeles, April 3, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).  

Simon Schultz von Dratzig | Frank / 2013

a picnic on the way to prison

by Douglas Messerli

 

Simon Schultz von Dratzig (screenwriter and director) Frank / 2013 [14 minutes]

 

German director Simon Schultz von Dratzig’s short film Frank is a melodrama with the films central figure, Dominik (Robert Zimmermann) heading off for jail for offenses not explained in the film. Nonetheless when Dominik’s calls his lover, Frank (Max Schaufuss), to ask him if he’ll accompany him on the bus to prison, Frank quickly agrees and begins packing up a large bag of the kind of silly mementoes, toy animals, shells, books, and other shared talismans that couples accumulate.

    He even brings along a bottle of beer, a substance which both men have been evidently consuming in significant amounts in the past few days. Dominik scoffs at Frank’s offering of a drink, explaining that he cannot show up to prison drunk, but soon cannot resist imbibing, eventually relaxing enough to lay his head of his lover’s lap.

     At one point, however, the bus stops to pick up a large number of children, young boys and girls evidently on their way to the beach, the lovers sitting up again as the bus driver gives a sour glower in their direction. And suddenly Frank determines that they too should stop off at whatever lake seems to be attracting the young bus riders.

     Putting out a large piece of cloth Frank has packed up, he seems almost to present the event as a kind of joyful picnic, although Dominik can do little else but scoff at the event. The couple jump into the waters naked, swim around for a short while, and retire to their picnic “blanket,” but when Dominik, in search of a cigarette, encounters the vast number of trinkets his friend has gathered up as a memory of their relationship, he becomes angry, spilling many of them onto the ground and stopping on them.

      Even though Frank promises to visit him regularly and has attempted to gather the mementoes as evidence of their past, Dominik realizes nothing will ever be the same again. When they finally reach their goal, he hugs his lover and turns to leave him, the younger Frank left behind with the huge bag of memories which no longer have any meaning.

      Perhaps it doesn’t truly matter what Dominik’s “crime” has consisted of, but it would help us to know if it had been some small act, perhaps even related to his sexuality, or something involving far serious criminal behavior in order to comprehend Frank’s continued love for him. 

      As it is, we find it difficult without knowing whether or not to sympathize with the situation and, in particular, Dominck’s somewhat understandable bitterness toward it all. Most of our sympathy goes to Frank, who for whatever reasons must now live alone in a house with all those trivial reminders of what their relationship once meant, perhaps knowing that even when Dominik is freed it will never again be the same. If nothing else, we must admire Frank’s spontaneity: who else might ever have imagined having a picnic on their way to prison.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).

Mark Christopher | Alkali, Iowa / 1995

treasure hunt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Christopher (screenwriter and director) Alkali, Iowa / 1995

 

Mark Christopher’s short film of 1995, Alkali, Iowa begins in a field of corn with the central character, Jack Gudmanson (J. D. Cerna) digging something up. It is, in fact, a remnant of the past, from the old house in which previous generations of his family once lived, and which the young man’s grandfather (Ed Seamon) inexplicably burned down in the 1960s.

     Evidently, Jack has been long searching on this part of the field when his autocratic grandfather is not watching. Jack even offers some of his finds, mostly the ones of gold or silver (i.e. metal containers, etc.) to his younger sister Carol (Ellen Latzen). It’s clear that what he is seeking is not objects of financial value but of personal significance.

      Why, he later asks his mother June (Mary Beth Hurt) did his grandfather burn down the empty house where the family once lived? Her suggestion is that it evidently attracted local young lovers and others who used it for hideaways. He wonders whether she and his now deceased father had hung out there at times, but doesn’t receive an answer.

      Meanwhile, the continual appearance of a strange man who almost daily drives up to the edge of their property and lays out a picnic lunch for himself, seemingly toasting his champagne in the direction of the working farmers almost as if he were taunting them, clearly angers the older man. He calls the picnicking Roger, “Blondie” because of his platinum-dyed hair.

     The grandfather interrogates his grandson as to whether or not he has ever spoken to the intruder, to which Jack replies, rather defensively, that he has no reason to talk to him. It’s clear that the grandfather sees the stranger as a dangerous figure, worthy of bringing out his shotgun to scare him off, action he takes the second time “Blondie” appears during the course of the film.

       Moreover, these Iowa farmers, young and older, seem to hide other secrets similar to the years-ago destruction of their old homestead. Jack seems to be collecting photographs of the past in an unknown attempt to piece together a time about which he is told extraordinarily little.

       More importantly, we observe Jack get into his car and drive a few miles away to a grove, lined with some picnic tables. Suddenly, we recognize that the spot is a hide-out for local gay men, farmers mostly. In the woods around and in a local bathroom they appear to meet up for sex. Surely Jack is a handsome regular to this bunch of rugged men, desperate for a little companionship.

       I have to say that this scene had great significance for me. Having grown up in a more urban Iowa, I never bothered to wonder if there might be gay farmers, and if there were, that they might have their own secret meeting places. Christopher’s short film, accordingly, takes us into a world we might never have imagined.

       The day after these events, Jack, in the presence of his sister, digs up something near the same spot of far more significance, a metal box. Since it’s silver, Carol claims it, but Jack, once he has peaked inside to see the contents, will not give it up. And that afternoon, while his grandfather is working in a far field, he enters the older man’s bedroom to discover a strange Hawaiian record which seems totally out of place in his grandfather’s restrictive world.

       On the back of one of the photographs he also has discovered in the metal container which looks somewhat like a silver lunch box, is the written name “Jacko.” a pet name, apparently, for his father, he has never heard his mother express. The record has been signed, as a gift, to the same nickname.

       Clearly the Hawaiian record harks back to another time perhaps when his father was in the navy, and several of the photographs show his father dressed in military attire. We have to assume that his father may have died in the war, or at least kept up with his navy friends after.

       In this sense, Christopher’s short film is not a trove of answers to the riddles with which the movie presents us, but is, rather, a series of unanswered clues to what we obliquely observe: his grandfather’s bitterness and violence against “Blondie,” his mother’s vagueness about her and her husband’s relationship. The two children, whose father has apparently died early in their childhoods, are quite literally on a treasure hunt, Carol for shiny objects, Jack for untold stories and, we gradually perceive, “evidence.”

     Evidence of what he is seeking, we are not quite certain until he returns to the country male pic-up spot, where “Blondie,” in fear of further attack, attempts to race off in his car the moment he sees the young man. Jack, however, simply apologies about his grandfather’s actions. “You knew my father?” he gently asks. The man shakes his head yes. “Was he, was he like us?” Jack almost stutters out the question the bits of information have led him to. “Yes,” says “Blondie” before getting into his car to drive off.

     To my knowledge there is no Alkali, Iowa. And it is still difficult for me to comprehend that some few of my large family of Iowa farmers might have been gay and found such isolated spots as portrayed in this film, to satisfy their desires. In a sense, Alkali, Iowa is related to movies such as Monte Patterson’s 2010 movie “Caught,” wherein a small Ohio town gay men gather in a bathroom facility in a rural public park nearby, tracked by police on hidden cameras. Both films take us to territories we might never have expected in our close-minded attitudes toward to LGBTQ activity.

     This film demonstrates, in a sense, the truth of a litmus test: alkali is a chemical compound that neutralizes or effervesces with acids, turning litmus paper blue. Forgetting any political associations, it is interesting to recall that gays were often described in some societies, and still are in Russia, as “blues.” Here, their actions truly counteract or even animate the narrow homophobic anger of those, like Jack’s grandfather, who live amongst them.

      If Jack’s life may be forever closeted on the farm he works, he is, perhaps like his father, open to others in the local community to more ebullient forms of love.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2020

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (November 2020).  

Richard Turner | Violet's Visit / 1995

inevitable confusions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Creagh and Barry Lowe (screenplay, based on a story by Richard Turner), Richard Turner (director) Violet’s Visit / 1995

           

From the paucity of reviews on the internet, I presume Australian director Richard Turner’s Violet’s Visit (1995) was basically ignored by the critics and perhaps audiences upon its release. Which is too bad, really, because it’s a fairly honest and forthright view of gay life in the 1990s Sydney in the laid back manner of the 1994 film The Sum of Us while utterly at odds with the over-the-top vision of gay life presented by Priscilla, Queen of The Desert, also of 1994. You might say that Alec (Graham Harvey) and his lover long-term lover Pete (David Franklin), both highly assimilated gay men living in an active gay community stand somewhere between the more sexually hesitant plumber Jeff and his working class connections at whose edges still stand a quite homophobic society in The Sum of Us, and the outrageous drag-queen road tripping queens, on their way from Sydney to Alice Springs in the Northern Territory who meet up with both surprised acceptance and virulent homophobia in the Australian Outback.

      Alec and Pete represent the more typical, to my way of thinking, gay couple, despite the fact that in their late 30s and early 40s they seem to be just a little more buff and well-to-do than many a person I knew at the time. But then San Francisco and Los Angeles did indeed have thousands and Alecs and Petes in their midst. Unfortunately, we never get a chance to know much about their personal lives.

 

     Pete seems to be a lawyer, but what Alec does is never quite explained or perhaps I simply missed his job description in one of the heavily Aussie accented scenes I couldn’t quite grasp without a closed caption setting. And I must say I did wonder why they had so very many copies of soft gay porn mags lying about given the fact that these two bronzed beauties seem pretty much in love and up and ready for sex; but we later do find out that they’re having some relationship issues, which temporarily pulls them apart and may explain the need for such a mountain of whacking material. And then, it appears, some of their friends may appear as models in their pages, which makes sense now that I know Alec owns a local gym.

     Otherwise, it appears that Turner, his set designers, and even his actors has got the scene down pretty honestly, certainly without the hysteria of Priscilla and the curiosity-shop mentality of so very many movies portraying gay couples of the 1980 and 1990s. If they stay shirtless more than one might normally expect, what better way to show off their well-developed abs. And at least they never don a turban, a Chinese housecoat, or an ensemble purchased just to stir their friends’ macaronic envy. These blokes are good-looking gay guys hanging out in a neighborhood of equally good-looking gay guys who, when they meet up on the streets, they hug and kiss, sit down with and gossip, and once in a while share a stray serious thought.

     It so happens, as expected, that one of their cutest well muscled friends has a crush on Alec, but Alec doesn’t get flustered by his advances and doesn’t “give in” as you might expect in any gay film devoted just to the lives of these two men. The problems they have with one another have to do with the difficulties any couple, gay or straight, have with temperament and expression of love not with extra-marital affairs. But then this film isn’t truly about a gay couple, but about the interloper who in the very first scenes of the movie shows up at their door.

     And no, it isn’t some long lost lover showing up to claim his due or a boy one of them long ago picked up in a train station, but a plain faced, straight, 15-year-old daughter who’s obviously more sexually conservative than her mother who almost monthly changes boyfriends or—what she couldn’t have expected since she’s never previously laid eyes on him—her “fag” of a father. After all, Violet, who has renamed herself Scooter (Rebecca Smart), has been told the father she’s never seen now has a new wife, so that when she knocks on their door, says a few magic words about relatives back in Kemble Bay, and falls into Pete’s arms saying Dad, what’s a good companion to do but put on his shirt, hide the Mandate, Torso, Numbers, and Men mags strewn about the living room, take down the nude male painting, and explain that her “daddy” is temporarily out of the house shopping for dinner. 

      When Alec does return, she recognizes him as the guy a few minutes earlier she had run into on the street and derogated from being and “old man,” and he is faced with a fact that he apparently never quite digested, that before leaving the town in which he could no longer survive, he’d gotten drunk and evidently fucked the woman, Sharon (May Lloyd) who is now the town slut.

      The girl he produced with Sharon is not only plain-looking but totally unimaginative, and without any vision of what she might like to do in life except design various objects of kitschy delight. She’s surly and more street smart than she should be at her age, and Alec wants no part of her, particularly after she refuses to even touch the Indonesian dinner he whips up for her and Pete.

      Pete plays the go-between, convincing Alec that he can’t simply send her to the streets or even back to Kemble Bay where her only future career, as Scooter admits, would be as a hairdresser. We’ve seen that world before in P. J. Hogan’s portrayal of another dead-end beach town, Porpoise Spit in Muriel’s Wedding, another movie of 1994, this about a determined straight girl, even if she’s also a queer outsider.

      Alec gives Scooter a chance, without even promising to love her, and quickly finds out that he’s been long looking for someone to take care of—which may be part of the problem he has with the intelligent and independent-minded Pete—and before long they’re taking in the sites, visiting the local cinema, with him introducing her to their friends. He even offers to send her to art school, she refusing because she wants to stay outside of any “popular trends.”

     She may be a bit confused about her dad and step-dad’s sexual goings on, but she quickly finds models who she likes enough to clip out of their magazines and paste on her bedroom wall in place of Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves. She cuts out penises and pastes them on other Hollywood hotties. And even more perversely develops a teenage crush on their beautiful body-builder friend, Wayne (Caleb Packham), the one who’s desperate to get Alec into bed. Wayne, who has a mind of a 15-year-old teenager invites Scooter to drop by his place any time she likes and befriends her in a way that she confuses with love, despite Alec and Pete’s warnings that he’s only into boys.

      Like most teenagers, however, she perceives their misgivings only as further evidence that her feelings are right, only to be even more confused when she furtively observes her imaginary “boyfriend” pick up another boy for the night, an act that so upsets her that she insists she wants to return to her mother in Pembroke Bay, where at least she knows the territory.

 

    By this time her father has so grown to love his daughter that he attempts to dissuade her, while she’s, as she puts it, as stubborn as he is, and insists he call Sharon, whose telephonic histrionics concerning what she imagines to be Pete and Alec’s orgiastic behavior around her daughter represents the only vision of Australian homophobia in this film. When she arrives with a new boyfriend in the front seat, Scooter scoots back into her father’s house, unable to stand being introduced yet again to a new man in his mother’s always busy life. But in returning “home,” she suddenly discovers that Pete has left Alec, apparently over her presence.

     In fact, we and she later realize, it is not that Pete will not remain if Scooter stays on, but that he has no way to argue out their problems in her presence. But as all not clear-thinking youth tend to do, she blames herself and disappears for a few days, while Alec searches the city in terror of what might have happened, finally reporting her absence to the police.

     When Pete finally hears of the situation, he too returns to participate in the search; even if he and Alec have not yet found a way to solve their problems, it’s clear they both are desperate to find and resolve the misunderstandings of their young charge.

     Wayne finally finds her by the bay, after she has spent a few nights with several homeless crazies, and lures her back to McDonald’s—which provides us a clue of where Violet-now-Scooter’s imagination and stomach will take her in the future—as Alec and Pete rush to bring her back into their lives. Alec agrees he’s “pushy” and promises to make time to talk out the problems with Pete; and Scooter evidently will happily return to her gay booty shrine in their house where she hopefully can sort out the difference between beautiful looking men and handsome straight boys to whom she might be attracted—a distinction which this film doesn’t dare to explore. Perhaps Alec may finally convince her to sign up for art school. But I still feel there’s something wrong with this picture.

      I have to admit I’m not convinced of the well-being that composer Paul Anthony Smith’s music attempts to evoke at film’s end. What is the beef between Pete and Alec really about? We certainly don’t have evidence of their ability to resolve a problem about which we’ve never truly been told. And what about the unthinking girl in their attic? What’s to become of her? One can hardly imagine her surviving in the insular gay world in which her new fathers exist. We have to presume that Alec and Pete once upon a time celebrated with tacky gay parties and took trips to Phuket, Thailand, Sanibel, or Key West once in a while. Somehow I can’t imagine the two boys returning to Kemble Bay for an Aussie Christmas. Sacrifices might surely be made, but can we truly expect them to sacrifice their very existence?  I get an uneasy feeling, sad to say, about this feel-good movie.

 

Los Angeles, November 1, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2021).