Luke Day and Nathan Fagan (Luna) | Skin to Skin / 2021

after sex confessions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nathan Fagan and O (screenplay), Luke Daly and Nathan Fagan (as Luna) (directors) Skin to Skin / 2021 [10 minutes]

 

This film by Irish directors Luke Daly and Nathan Fagan (working under the name of Luna), relate the sexual encounters of a O, a man primarily involved in the LGBTQ world of quick, overnight hookups. Yet, he finds them sometimes far more fulfilling that longer-based relationships, since, he argues, in that moment after sex, these men and one woman reveal and confess some of their most intimate experiences and “shameful” thoughts knowing they will probably never see their sexual partner ever again.

     Centering on Yasmin De Barra, the film, in startlingly lit images recounts four of his such experiences, which he describes as a world of private codes and expressions. The first one they revisit has died, just before Christmas. He was sick for a while with emphysema. It was like watching someone die by drowning. Actually, as he got sicker, so the narrator declares, he became more dependent, replacing the awkwardness between them with a closer feeling of relationship. It was pretty difficult, but there was something really nice about it too. “It’s fucked up to say, but you keep hoping that it will be over quicker. And then when it’s over it doesn’t feel real.”

    The second man, who was going on Grindr three or four times a week was discovering a strange mélange of individual, young, old, married. Some who declared to no kissing, no cuddling. There were some weirdos obviously. Some are creepy, others aggressive. When his friends ask him if he’s attracted to them, he responds, “No,” but they are apparently attracted to him, and that’s what turns him on.

      A third young man from Brazil reveals that as a child, sleeping in bed with his mother, his father set the house on fire, killing his mother in the process. My mom was gone and I had to mourn here, and then my Dad was gone to. I had to mourn both of them.

       A woman describes her father as looking like a mountain ranger. But his attentions to her began at age 13, and she began to cut herself, feeling that if she created the pain perhaps she was still in control. I couldn’t control it when others hurt me, but I was in control of my own pain (she shows the markings of her cuts). I used to hate them, but I sort of like them. They’re like a map of journey, or where I came from.

       If they are just faces, names, and bodies, there is something “much more,” and deeper declares the narrator involved in serial sex hookups.

     When I was living in New York City, a good-looking young man of 22-years-of-age, in a time before Grindr and internet hookups, I too took various men to bed almost every night, most certainly in the first half-year of my New York stay. And I too didn’t at mind the anonymity, the transitory nature of the individuals I met. I don’t remember long after-sex conversations; perhaps I was too young to actually perceive the significance of their quick statements before they dressed and closed the door behind them or I did the same. But, yes, in those few moments, I did feel that I had gotten to know them in a way that you might not get to know a good friend for months or years.

      This hybrid documentary is a moving testimony to a world that is seldom fully discussed, but obviously very much of contemporary LGBTQ experience.

    

Los Angeles, December 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

Dennis Shinners | Barrio Boy / 2014

making love with scissors

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dennis Shinners (screenwriter and director) Barrio Boy / 2014 [8 minutes]

 

Into a Brooklyn barrio barber shop run by Quique (Garcia Dennis Garcia) and his cousin (Peter Olivera), and watched over with the mean eyes of Rafa (Andrew Flores), evidently a hanger on of the establishment who won’t let the Hispanic relatives alone, strolls a lovely looking Irish boy, Kevin (Dan Leonard), who the moment Quique sees him becomes his dream lifetime lover.

     Quique convinces the young Adonis to let him wash his hair, and as he cuts it, comments, in an inner dialogue how he would love to seduce him, take him into his bed, and live with him forever—all immediately and in the present.

     Rafa evidently senses something is up, although on the surface Quique behaves with all due propriety, since the moody disapproving onlooker decides to take a stroll outside. Inside the shop, Quique is in heaven.

     But too suddenly, the cut is finished; the boy pays, is given a strong hug, and leaves, Quique’s dream totally unsatisfied. But Cuz observes, he’s left his hat behind, Quique rushing out to see which direction the beauty might have gone. No one is in sight. But at least with the hat in hand, Quique can hope that the boy might possibly return, come back another time and make the magic happen.

       Dennis Shinners’ Barrio Boy is about the dreams gay men have daily, drooling over cute young boys, straight or possibly gay, without results. Dreaming is one of the greatest activities of a closeted gay man living with a community inhospitable to homosexuality.

        This film would be the perfect companion in a showing of Mexican director Roberto Fiesco’s excellent short film Trémulo (Trembling) (2015), which also takes place in a barber shop, where gay desire is truly realized.

 

Los Angeles, December 22, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).