Eoghan McQuinn | Staccato / 2016

applause, applause

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eoghan McQuinn (screenwriter and director) Staccato / 2016 [23 minutes]

 

Thomas Cryoden (Craig Grainger) is rehearsing quite endlessly for a concert he is performing at the family manor Falgirth for the major critics of the day in Eoghan Quinn’s costume drama that takes place in late 19th century Ireland.

     Although seemingly all his attention is paid to his practice—except for the series of teas and luncheons with occur with great regularity. But, in fact, most of his focus is actually being directed to the new gardener Sean (Kevin O’Malley) his mother has hired. Indeed, the two are having a sexual affair, with all discretion, of course, which seems to mean that in public Thomas must mock the inept gardener who sends nearly all of wages to his poor, dying mother, while when they are in bed he sacrifices his upper crust disdain and body to simple lust.

      But such worlds, based on class structure, are inherently cruel and mean at heart. Thomas’ sister Elizabeth (Marian Rose) knows perfectly well that Lady Croydon did not hire Sean, but that her brother—at the very moment that his mother, in a fit of religious abstinence, is about to lay off many of the staff—had gone into town to hand pick the new gardener. And she suspects that the new hireling has already found way to her brother’s bed, particularly when at lunch Thomas skips dessert and retreats to his room.

     His mother (Pauline O’Driscoll) pretends to be listening to his music but hears only her son’s diffidence and disrespect for her values, ordering him to make good on his concert, and forcing him to endlessly practice.

     Sean, worried about his mother, sick with pneumonia, escapes for a day to go see how she’s doing, only to discover that the weekly wages he has been sending her to that she might survive have never arrived, Thomas having ordered the maid, Moire (Sophie Merry) to hold all letters with the outside world for fear that Sean might desire to return to it.

     Upon Sean’s return to the manor, he refuses to continue to be Thomas’ whore, and pushes him away as he attempts to kiss him. Finally, the maid steals even the invitation to Thomas’ recital he has sent to Sean. When Elizabeth, who has heard that the gardener’s deathly sick mother has not received any of her son’s wages, fires Moire on the spot, despite the fact that the servant was ordered to do so by Thomas.

       Meanwhile, Thomas is growing nervous and disconcerted, much afraid that we will disappoint his imperious mother once again. The august audience arrives and gathers in the music room. Even Sean makes his appearance. Thomas’ performance appears to go off without a hitch.

       Afterwords—cinematically presented while the concert music is still being performed—we observe Thomas and Sean once more, stripping away one another’s clothes in preparation for sex, but this time Sean takes dominant position, midway through the fuck presenting his lover with a small piece of printed paper, a “notice of death,” before proceeding to stab him with a garden fork.

       The camera returns to the music room for the end of the performance, silence prevailing after the last chord, the audience standing in mute applause.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Dominick R. Domingo | Outpost / 2009

motion and rest

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominick R. Domingo (screenwriter and director) Outpost / 2009 [45 minutes]

 

40-year-old Jake Preston (Kaiwi Lyman) has spent most of his life trying to escape the memories of an early relationship with a farm boy, Farren McGraw (Brandon Stevenson). Both of Jake’s parents died, and he eventually came to work on the McGraw farm as a 17-year-old, working alongside Farren, also 17.

 

   The religious values of this farm family allow hardly any possibilities for the virginal boy, who resists even masturbating and is expected to marry a local girl and settle down on the farm when he comes of age.

      In small sections of the film, we get glimpses of their relationship, as Jake helps the boy to begin dreaming, and finally, after they are trapped in an old mining pit by an avalanche, helps to bring him out sexually. The boys are rescued by a now disgruntled father and others who find it hard to forgive Farren for having walked away from work to show Jake the abandoned mine and a nearby “social tunnel,” where the miners used to meet up with prostitutes.

     For a while after the event, the boys continue their sexual relationship, hiding away in sheds and other remote locations, while knowing that all eyes are on them. In the end, Jake is ordered by the Sherrif to leave town for his corrupt influence on the boy. He tries to convince Farren to join him in Denver, but the boy cannot yet fully break with his religion and family, and Jake is forced to go it alone, while promising to come back for him.

     But realizing that any return might only further confuse Farren, Jake stays away instead of coming to save the boy as he promised. Eventually, Farren, accused his family and the locals of having been possessed by an evil disease, begins to curse his own wife and threatens to leave before finally committing suicide. Most commentaries describe it as a “mysterious death,” but we clearly see Farren has hung himself at the front entrance to his family farm, which, unless the publicists are suggesting someone else carried out the act, hardly hints of anything mysterious. He appears to have simply grown into despair for his lack of any wonderment in his life and his true loss of his companion lover.

      This tale, however, is buried in the large story of Jake arriving at another such dead-end town, where he goes to work for a cook for a small restaurant owner, Mabel Robbins (Nancy Berggren) whose husband has become both paralyzed and mute. While working there, Jake encounters the handsome delivery boy, David Gagnel (Lance Shigematsu), who for a small-town product seems quite experienced and is immediately attracted to the newcomer.

      One afternoon, the two have what can only be described as hot sex; but after that event, Jake attempts to move away from the younger boy, worried perhaps about the effects his attentions may have on the boy while still nursing his own sorrow which has been salved only by mindless wandering.

 

      David, however, attempts to convince him not only of his love but of the fact that Jake has not been able to forgive himself, and accordingly is no longer able to accept his need for love.

        When Mabel’s husband finally dies, she suffers and shares with Jake her own guilt for purposely allowing her inert husband to choke to death. And through her admission, Jake realizes, once again, how precious time is and permits David back into his life, finally ready to remain still and permit himself the love he has longed for.

        With its themes of a western drifter unable to settle down and a character’s inability to accept his own gay desire, this 45-minute film echoes works like Brokeback Mountain and, particularly, the more recent Pedro Almadóvar film Strange Way of Life (Extraña forma de vida) of 2023. Outpost, by US director and screenwriter Dominick R. Domingo, might almost appear as a response to the Brokeback’s cowboys, Jake refusing to make the same mistake the sheep herders did by settling down when love finally appears; but overall, it is closer in spirit to Almadóvar’s work of 14 year later.

       Of course, this isn’t a “cowboy” movie. Jake is simply an itinerant worker on the run, a kind of gay “on the road” figure who finds his match, strangely, is a smart hometown delivery boy, who while staying at home, has a worldly viewpoint that the poor indoctrinated Farren never had and perhaps could never have embraced.

       If the acting is a bit amateur in this movie, the script, under the right directorial guidance might have become a truly memorable work given its mix of outsider sexual love, remorse, and nostalgia, and its structural opposition between motion and inertia. The true question this film asks is whether or not, through the imagination, there can be a resolve between the two. Lance Shigematsu, perhaps the best actor in this work, seems to represent that possibility, a young man who know very well that his town is dead, but still uses every moment to liven it up. And it is people with his kind of energy that turn dead outposts in lively towns and even cities, or as Jake once argued for, who turn dreams into a fabulous reality. What ultimately we perceive that even the emptiest outpost can still contain men and women who live out imaginatively exciting lives.

 

Los Angeles, September 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).

Rachel Mason | Circus of Books / 2020 [documentary]

where the sun don’t shine

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rachel Mason (director) Circus of Books / 2020 [documentary]

 

When we first moved to Los Angeles, my husband Howard and I, independently, discovered the gay bookstore, Circus of Books, which we visited separately several times. Even married gay men still enjoy gay porn, just like the heterosexual men who subscribed to Playboy and Larry Flynt’s publications.

 

    The store in West Hollywood which Howard and I visited (there was another store in Silverlake) had nearly every popular gay magazine, along with noted photography books by artists of gay men, as well as other interesting works on mostly spiritual issues in the large open and airy first room; and another “back” room, for which you needed to provide an age identification, had hundreds of current gay porno tapes—in those days mostly on VHS—for sale.

     One could also perceive that, in some cases, this also served as a kind of cruising spot, although I never knew, thank heaven, that there was also an attic retreat.

     Of course, as we aged, and gay porn was available on the internet, we stopped visiting that store, and recently, both of its venues closed.    

     It was with some degree of startlement, accordingly, that the recent Netflix film, Circus of Books, revealed that these meccas for gay people and dens of sin for the more conservative of our city’s citizens were owned and actively run by a gentle, faithfully religious Jewish couple, Barry and Karen Mason.

      Barry, the less religious of the two, is a friendly and mild-tempered man, who seems more likely to have been able to serve and tolerate his clientele. After all, he worked with Hollywood directors in his optical printing work he created for 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek, and had used his technological abilities to create a protection from air in the dialysis system to help his father during a kidney transplant.

      Barry admits that as AIDS grew, he regularly visited hospitals were dying men had been left to die without any support from their families.

      In his daughter Rachel’s documentary, he comes off as so genial that you simply, in a day before COVID-19, might wish to simply hug him for helping to create a place in which gay men might wish to congregate without embarrassment—although I do recall Howard’s admonishment to be careful when I visited the store, since there was an important art gallery across the street. Yet there was something comforting about the place. Here was a store devoted to an audience that many businesses, except gay bars, had long shunned. And as the AIDS epidemic spread, Circus of Books, appeared more and more like a kind of home one could return to without feeling shamed.

      Yet, it was Karen, the more religious of the two, who truly ran the business, buying up perhaps the largest collection of gay porno, dildos, and other devices than any other store in the US. Why she did this, despite her intense family life and commitment to traditional Judaism remains a bit inexplicable in Rachel’s film. How could this slightly straight-laced mother order up tapes such as “Cum on Guys,” “Where the Shine Don’t Shine,” and “The Taste of Ass”? Howard bought these, not I.

      But there are clues. After all, as film critic Matt Fagerholm reminds us:

 

Easily the most widely known of Rachel’s interview subjects is Larry Flynt, whose need for secondary distributors of his controversial Blueboy magazine caused him to place an ad in the Los Angeles Times, which was answered by Barry and Karen. Having been forced to sell the rights to Barry’s aforementioned invention due to the outrageous cost of insurance, they were looking for a quick way to earn money, and their remarkable business sense led them to take over West Hollywood’s Book Circus, flipping the title and turning the property—along with their second location in Silverlake—into an essential sanctuary for gay men. Without modern online communal spaces such as KillerAndASweetThang.com that liberate repressed souls by normalizing their sexuality, Circus of Books was one of the sole places where the stigma routinely attributed to homosexual orientations was obliterated.

    

     Karen had also marched with Martin Luther King and worked as a journalist covering raids by the police of homosexual bars.

     Yet her children were told, when others asked what their parents did, to simply say they owned a bookstore. And when they were finally allowed to visit their parents at their place of employment, they were warned to keep their eyes facing to the floor.

      When her son Josh flew home from college to tell his mother and father that he was gay, he admits that he had bought a round-trip ticket just in case he might immediately been sent “packing.”

      It clearly was not easy for Karen to accept the facts, giving that her religious views were in deep conflict with her son’s recognition of his sexuality. Clearly, having witnessed directly the deaths of so many of her customers she was terrified about his survival. Unfortunately, the director does not completely explain why her mother was far more accepting of her own identity with the LGBTQ community.

      Perhaps some things are simply too private.

    Yet this is a brave movie, portraying a world which I was part of, but knew so little about. Sometimes the people you might least suspect to be the supporters of your lifestyle are the most stolid as they helped in the struggle.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2020).

 

Hugo Bouillaud | une parenthèse (A Parenthesis) / 2020

the wolf inside every man

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hugo Bouillaud (screenwriter and director) une parenthèse (A Parenthesis) / 2020 [19 minutes]

 

The French film A Parenthesis, directed by Hugo Bouillaud, is an experimental work that describes itself as a fantasy. But its fantastical elements seem more to me like images conjured up in a psychiatrist’s office by a young straight man who, attending one the numerous apartment parties he apparently does, suddenly discovers himself talking to a young man of his age whose pretty floral shirt he suddenly feels compelled to unbutton.

     Returning home, he’s confused—perhaps by the poetry of his own pen which begins “Dreaming about the engraved men / Strewn on the ground of your cave / Feels like coming home.” And it is these lines that haunt his dreams wherein he suddenly sees a large scratch on his arm (which for anyone of my generation, brings up the fears we all had of discovering spots on our bodies in dread of AIDS), and is himself suddenly forced to scratch his own face, engraving marks on one of his cheeks as well before he moves down to attack his own chest.

     These presumably are the horrible feelings he describes of the wild self, the wolf of vampirism suggested throughout the film, that he discovers now within his own being, aspects of himself he has never before imagined to be there. Obviously, this beautiful young man (Alban Pellet) associates his suddenly revealed homosexual desires with some wild beast who isn’t satisfied simply by kissing the girls through a spin-the-bottle game in which strangely these 20-some-year-old partygoers still engage.

     Watching this film, I wanted to scream out, “Honey don’t hurt that pretty face anymore. You’re not a wild beast! You just found out you may have some homosexual feelings, the most normal thing in the world. Calm down, go back to sleep, and call up that young boy whose lovely shirt you were trying to remove in the morning and tell him you’d like to see him. And let things happen as they naturally might.”

     But Bouillaud stood in the way, as the handsome young man continued to suffer in agony with the realization that he may be growing tired of the opposite sex.

     The movie puts some objects under the covers to suggest that he is “the master of the puppets” which have come to haunt him, which if he’d only face them, put his pillow there, and just let go…might relieve his suffering. But unfortunately, our young hero needs first to go through the “horror theatre” to discover how wild the emotions are within him before he can come to any acceptance of his bisexuality.

      Fortunately, he eventually comes to the vision of his sexuality totality, with Verdi’s “Va, pensiero” from his opera Nabucco, the piece better known as “The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves,” playing in the background, as both his women and male friends come streaming to him with loving hugs. For a moment, he’s in ecstasy.

      Finally, he recognizes that his feelings for the boy with the pretty shirt was just a parenthesis, hence the film’s title, but that even a parenthesis can be engraved on the memory for a very long time.

     Too bad he didn’t just make the telephone call, meet up with the boy, and hop in the sack. He wouldn’t have even have had to suffer through the film’s imaginary beasts, and he certainly could have laid to rest the old wives’ tale that “there’s a wolf inside every man.” Often, it’s just the image of pretty boy which he can’t get out of his head.

     This may be one of the first bisexual “coming out” movies that uses the tropes of experimental cinema to express its meaning, although you might certainly trace some of these fears, if not  precisely the same images, back to the nightmares of Curtis Harrington, Kenneth Anger, and Gregory Markopoulos’ gay coming-out films of the 1940s and 1950s.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2023

Reprinted in World Cinema Review (April 2023).

William Stead | All the Young Dudes / 2020

showering with sequins

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Stead (screenwriter and director) All the Young Dudes / 2020 [9 minutes]

 

William Stead takes us back to conservative Georgia in 1973, when short-shorts were in, and the homophobic punks controlled everything, including the school shower room. Into this world walks Billy (Blake Lafita), dressed in full glam rock costume, long haired with glitter shoes and flowing black and dark turquoise flowered blouses and silk pants.    

     It’s only been a year, as he later tells his square-boy admirer Jacob, a wonderful but terrifying year in which he turned from someone exactly like Jacob into a glam-rock devotee. It’s hard even find the records in their Georgia town—Jacob has only a David Bowie single—but somehow Billy has obtained even the rarest of albums demonstrating the British revolution in music about which their bullying peers know absolutely nothing.

     When he’s bullied, Billy brings his guitar to the locker room, hooking it into his vox speaker and pounding the ear-drums of the mean local yokels, an act that brings Jacob to follow him home like a puppy who’s suddenly found his new master.

      In his bedroom in the company of the neophyte Jacob, Billy can finally admit how this music “helped him a lot, it helped me,” obliquely referring to his cross-dressing tendencies and his feeling as a gay boy of being utterly isolated from the world in which he lives. But just before putting on the record for Jacob, Billy catches a look of himself in the mirror which reveals the trail of tears through his eye makeup. Despite his wonderful ability to bluff, he clearly is still terrorized by the brutes around him.

      Jacob appears in the mirror behind him, and in any other film the implicit bond between them would have resulted in a kiss; but as IMDb commentator scottymena emotionally responds:

 

“…My favorite part of the film is when Billy and Jacob have this moment where they realize the other's pain. But instead of consoling each other by a kiss (which many queer films always do to answer someone's frustration), Billy puts makeup on Jacob. It feels like a more intimate moment between the two characters rarely seen on film. You felt the sincerity of both boys trying to find meaning in their lives and in each other.”

 

     As Billy moves toward Jacob, makeup kit in hand, Jacob quotes: “People stared at the makeup on his face,” Billy continuing, “and laughed at his long black hair, his animal grace.” He paints Jacob’s face and just as suddenly Stead’s film transports the boys, now both electric guitars, having taken over the late-night football field—symbolically having reclaimed heterosexual reality—as they sing, at least in their imaginations, David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes”:

 

Television man is crazy

Saying we're juvenile delinquent wrecks

Oh, man, I need TV when I got T-Rex

Oh, brother, you've guessed, I'm a dude, dad

 

All the young dudes (hey, dudes!)

Carry the news (where are you?)

Boogaloo dudes (stand up, come on!)

Carry the news

      Certainly not a profound short film, Stead’s work is nonetheless effective in demonstrating how gay youths often find alternative worlds in order to survive the heteronormative societies in which they find themselves trapped.

      This short film would be a natural to accompany a screening of Todd Hayes’ Velvet Goldmine of 1998.

 

Los Angeles, October 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2023).

 

Adam Tyree | Green Light / 2020

removing the curse

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jesse James Rice (screenplay), Adam Tyree (director) Green Light / 2020 [8.45 minutes]

 

A male escort named Hunter (Jesse James Rice) is waiting, phone in hand, for his appointment to show up. The music is ominous, and we suspect the worst, particularly when, after texting a couple of times to “the mystery man,” Hunter finally receives a message: “black Mercedes to UR right.” He looks in the car’s direction and moves forward, his face reflecting the various green and red lights of the street’s neon signs, in tempo to the sonorously dark rhythms of composer Jongic Bontemps toward the car, whose window is slowly rolled down. “Hi.” Stepping back, “No I don’t lean on windows.”

     The window is slowly rolled up and Hunter steps into the car. The mystery man, clearly drinking what appears to be a beer, offers a sip to his pick-up. We can see little, as presumably Hunter also remains a bit in the dark before, finally learning forward declaring “Holy shit. You’re sexy as hell,” just as we finally get a quick glimpse of a well-chiseled black man.

      So begins director Adam Tyree’s pretense of a suspense flick, which, we quickly observe has turned into something else that we might never have expected. At first it appears that the film will be a sort of series of questions and answers, the kind one might suspect of a stream-lined noir of less than nine minutes. As the car drives off and finally parks, Hunter poses the first question, “So let me get this straight...why does a man like you...pay for...?”

      The driver, Derek (Narvaris Darson) fires back: “I have a few questions.”

      After a short pause, Hunter responds: “Okay. You can have three.”

      So begins a series of apparent intrusions into the private life of the young escort: Where did you grow up? What brought you here? both of which Hunter answers straight-forwardly but seemingly without any special significance. He grew up in a small town outside of Columbus, Ohio and he moved to his current location because it “was better than Ohio.” And yes, he admits, in what seems to be a kind of bonus question, he is happy where he now is.

        All this time the young man attempts to instigate sex, moving up and toward the handsome sexy being for which he has supposedly been hired to give pleasure. But finally, Derek pulls away with the oldest word in the sexually disinterested dictionary, “Sorry.”

         But it is the “last question,” which he has been holding back that finally helps us to comprehend the significance of this would-be sexual encounter. “How did you lose your virginity?”

         At last we comprehend this as a kind of odd method of identifying (and reminding) the sexual worker with whom he sits. And just as suddenly, as anyone who has ever attempted to return to the past knows, the man asking the questions is obviously involved with the person to whom he addresses them.

       If this were a more comic work we might even imagine that the interviewer is playing some game about the past a bit like the dreadful “telephone game” in which you’re asked to call up the first person with whom you fell in love and tell them, torturing yourself and the other in the act that Michael requires his “friends” to suffer in The Boys in the Band.

     In this case, when Hunter begins to recall an incident from boarding school when he was fucked by a lacrosse player at the age of 16, Derek cuts in with a blast of the car horn: “You promised me you’d be honest!” Just as suddenly Hunter knows he has gotten something terribly wrong. “The first time changes you. You would remember your first time” insists his interlocutor.

     Now, finally, Hunter, searching his mind deeply to call up the past, remembers there being a new boy in the neighborhood at the age of 7, a really nice kid with whom he played. For Derek their innocent sexual touching of one another evidently resulted in what he now describes as molestation. “Do you think the things we do as kids curses us for life?”

      Obviously, the game Derek is playing is the game of guilt, his own, which he must have carried with him all these long years. Hunter refuses to “go there,” attempting to explain that the incident did not affect him in the least—“I really liked you”—and reassures him that he is truly happy as a gay man—simple but honest words.

      Can’t we go to my place and have a drink and talk this over, he pleads. But Derek is now presumably married—the attentive viewer having earlier spotted a wedding ring on his finger—and insists he must return home, as he hands Hunter the previously agreed upon payment. Again, Hunter invites him to talk whenever he might desire, restating that he has his number and he knows his name, his real name.

      Leaving the car, he once again attempts to console the man, who now in tears, seems somewhat freed by the encounter but not yet entirely ready to release his feelings of wrongdoing. Yet, Derek’s final words, “Thank you,” suggest he has finally begun to come to terms with his misconception of what truly occurred.

      Hunter exits the car but almost immediately turns back, tapping at the window, and despite his previous insistence that he does not lean on windows, speaks once more to his childhood friend: “If what we did when we were kids somehow miraculously made me gay...then I owe you,” he concludes, handing back the wad of bills he has just been given.

      Clearly, he has been able to provide this troubled heterosexual a “green light” to move ahead with his life. That light is also the green light at the end of Daisy’s East Egg dock in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby which represents Gatsby’s own often confused dreams and desires that themselves symbolize the best of the ideals for his own generation.

     Both actors in this small gem of a film are excellent, but Rice, who also wrote the screenplay—working with Tyree as writer and actor in the director’s film, Open Mic, of a year earlier—is particularly excellent.

     Tyree is a regular contributor to the now vast repertoire of gay shorts, having released at least six films to date, some of which are also reviewed in this volume.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2020

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