Dave Wilson | Dad, I'm Straight / 1982 [TV (SNL) episode]

i am a….heterosexual!

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michael O'Donoghue and Bob Tischler (head writers), Dave Wilson (director) Dad, I’m Straight / 1982 [TV (SNL) episode]

 

Like so many short gay films before it, the September 23, 1982 episode of Saturday Night Live, reversed the standard coming out trope, as the Dad (Howard Hesseman), clearly a gay man who has divorced his previous wife, greets home his college-age student son (Gary Kroeger). To help his son come out to the reality of his life, Dad has even made a date with for his son with a handsome young medical student, Mike.

    The only problem, as it soon becomes apparent, is that his son has returned home with serious news, a problem which he is sure will be difficult for his father to accept: he’s straight.

     The standard outing tropes are used to seemingly new effect here, “Where have I gone wrong,” I should have played with you more when you were younger.” “I never should have left your mother bathe you.”

     It’s all a very smug heterosexual gimmick inverted to suggest perhaps that the standard reactions to a gay son reporting his homosexuality to a bigoted heterosexual father might not be so very different these days from a homosexual father dealing with his son’s heterosexuality.

     The only problem is that we know that the society in which this young boy has grown up would still completely embrace his heterosexuality, and any problems the gay daddy back at home might hint at are merely in jest. The society at large will have already laid its large open hand upon the boy’s back with utter acceptance. This is a total farce.

     Moreover, there’s something disturbingly sleazy about this sketch when Mike calls, the father explaining that the date has fallen through but that he might still come over to watch TV with him.

     This SNL piece simply doesn’t work for anyone truly involved in the LGBTQ community, and its forced laughter of inversion seems more than canned and actually quite offensive. And Hesseman’s prissy straightening up of the couch pillows at the end take us right back to the early days of homosexual stereotyping.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (January 2025).

Garth Maxwell | Beyond Gravity / 1989

the young man all ablaze in the rays from the sun

by Douglas Messerli

 

Garth Adams and Garth Maxwell (screenplay), Garth Maxwell (director) Beyond Gravity / 1989 

 

There’s something about the movies of the late 1980s and early 1990s that still possess my heart, as they travel straight into the most important issues of LGBTQ sexuality and the problems that we were gradually perceiving with regard to AIDS, while also making reference to past then-unidentified gay films. New Zealand director’s Garth Maxwells truly underground masterpiece, Beyond Gravity does all of that while still allowing a sense of style than allied itself with the French New Wave.

     Johnny (Iain Rea), the “possibly” Italian-spirited hero of Maxwell’s transgressive little gem, is everything you might want in gay cinema. A slightly naughty boy, who, like Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell before him, toyed with the public library system, spots the desperately conflicted science nerd Richard (Robert Pollack), and goes crazy as he replaces the science-boy’s overdrawn library card with his own, obviously stolen from a female, who without any difficulty—given his readiness to display his fake “transgender” credentials for the entire library to enjoy—gets away with by offering Richard permission to check out the tall stack of books he is escaping with about the end of the universe.

     If Johnny is a wild thing, willing to lie, cheat, and simply trick his way to get the boy into his bed, Richard is terrified by even living, knowing from his studies of astronomy that eventually it will all come to a tragic end, particularly when the sun turns red and blows up, freezing out our favorite 3rd planet from the Sun.

     With the aplomb of a magic Italian-Kiwi, Johnny, tossing up basketballs and bananas with equal force upon Richard’s high-rise window, where he lives with his sexually distracted sister Billie (Lucy Sheehan) and her dumb-thinking lover and regular bed-member Pete (Alex Van Dam), breaks Richard out of his sheltered horror, takes him to the beach where the two boys madly make love, and spins him off into a world Richard might never have imagined, but is only too happy to participate in—reminding anyone who has seen Nicholas Ray’s 1955 film Rebel without a Cause—in its complete transformation of the nerdy Richard into Sal Mineo playing against Johnny’s own James Dean, sans any insipid Nathalie Wood. These boys go full force into gay sex, allowing the gravitational pull of the sun to rein in the dutiful doubter Richard.

    It’s absolutely joyful to watch the resistant cynical scientist Richard fall into the arms and an accompanying leather jacket provided by Johnny, with Pete finally realizing that his girlfriend’s brother is perhaps just a little queer. Billie proclaims that her Peter should have been a detective.

     Of course, Richard has to get punished, this time by the original leather-jacker owner from whom Johnny’s stolen his beloved coat. Much blood and pain has to be suffered; after all he’s a gay man who can’t simply escape his suddenly open love without some punishment.

     Yet, unlike Ray’s fantasy wherein Mineo must suffer the true wrath of death, Richard is visited in Auckland’s Stardrome Observatory and Planetarium, as a symbolic replacement of Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, by Johnny, who pulls him once again out of his desperate sun- based infatuation back into the “real” Kiwi world.

     Throughout the entire movie, Johnny has been insisting that he needs to travel to Rome to visit the disapproving and unforgiving father who has left him and his mother behind upon Johnny’s own “coming out.” The reformed Richard is now all in tears, and Beyond Gravity seems to be slipping once more into an out-of-control universe, until, in his lime-green Japanese microcar of the late 1980s, Johnny bumbles back to Richard, having (purposely?) missed his flight to Rome.

     As nearly everyone who has visited Maxwell’s little film now recognize, this is a true gem of LGBTQ cinema of the 1980s, which actually appeared in 1989, despite IMDb’s insistence that didn’t get its outing until 1990.

     I believe the Kiwis, whose several gay films have always made a believer.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Francis Papillon | Je m'excuse (I’m Sorry) / 2022

start again

by Douglas Messerli

 

Virginie Nolin (screenplay), Francis Papillon (director) Je m'excuse (I’m Sorry) / 2022 [20 minutes]

 

Louis (Emile Dufour) seems to have everything. He has a handsome businessman lover, Sam (Dany Boudreault) who has just bought him a new suburban house. And he has friends in the Village back on Montreal. He plans to return to a party there hosted by his friend, Nadine (Noé Lira), but when he mentions the invitation to Sam, his boyfriend reminds him that he will just be returning from a trip to Toronto, and he would like to spend the night alone with him.

    Louis agrees. But in Sam’s absence he grows increasingly lonely, separated from the world he left behind and which, evidently, contributed to his being HIV positive. Even a walk through the wealthy suburban streets ends in a negative reaction from Sam. Louis had left his phone back at the house, and Sam became worried when he couldn’t contact him. Oddly enough, this neighborhood still has an old-fashioned pay phone on a nearby street.

     Yet we sense that there is something else about Sam’s concern, his overprotective caring for his lover, and his determination to keep Louis away from all his old friends. And when he comes back from Toronto somewhat early to discover that Louis has not only bought a new car, but is planning to split out that evening for a party at Nadine’s house, he grabs Louis’s cellphone and refuses to return it, as if the 24-year-old were a child. He insists that Louis remain home.

     Their argument leads to Louis pushing Sam away, with him falling to the ground. And soon after, when Louis refuses to stay at home, with Sam slugging Louis.

      This is a film, quite obviously, about domestic violence between gay men. But in this case, we have so little history, so little understanding of either figure, that we can only say that the incidents might be described as exceptional, a result of childish behavior on both their parts. Certainly, we can sympathize with Louis’ feeling of being something like a locked-up trophy wife. But we can also perceive why Sam may wish to ween his friend away from his old gay friends and certainly might be appalled by the sudden purchase of an expensive sports car and Louis’ inability to simply stay in for the night of his lover’s return.

       In short, this film seems to record an incident rather than a history of abuse. And, although the film appears to side with Louis, we can also comprehend much of Sam’s anger. French-Canadian director Francis Papillon’s short work also leaves us with a question of what truly will now happen between the couple, Sam arguing just before he has struck Louis that they “start over,” that perhaps they are simply at a point of misunderstanding.

     But for Louis, it appears, the relationship is over, and that he can no longer trust Sam. We don’t know either man well enough to know whether what has occurred may become a regular pattern and an issue they can perhaps easily settle by setting up some sort of boundaries for both them, Sam granting Louis more independence, and Louis, having perhaps taken into account Sam’s disapproval of his previous life, attempting to find some meaningful activities other than partying at Nadine’s house.

      As this short film stands, it appears to be a warning about domestic abuse without fully considering the issues which led to this perhaps momentary violence. Perhaps Papillon’s work is simply meant to be a warning of violence being employed in any relationship, but someone I don’t get that feeling. I suspect Louis and his attempts to control the other man’s life is meant to show how he is a villain. Maybe, the film simply needed to be longer, to further explore what was behind the unfortunate event.

     I may also be asking these questions to some degree because of my memory that when my husband Howard and I first met in 1970, at about the same age as this couple, we were also involved in incidents of violence, both of us still immature and needing to learn in a world that doesn’t teach gay men about relationships that, being both very different people in some respects, we would eventually have to give up certain behaviors which we felt defined our own sense of being. Yet we survived, and lived together for 55 years, our anniversary coming up five days from the date I wrote this piece.

     I think that it might have been more interesting for such a film as I’m Sorry to explore the fact that men in many societies are unfortunately taught, through competitive sports and patriarchal attitudes defining gender, to be violent. And both Howard and I, moreover, had encountered some childhood bullying, being told by our parents that we needed to learn how to “fight back,” to stand up for our own rights. Violence is never acceptable in a relationship or marriage, but it also might be expected. And to immediately turn tail with horror would end so many ultimately positive gay male relationships. This couple, it appears, doesn’t necessarily need to “start over,” but to “start again,” with both men realizing the dangers of attempting to resolve differences with fists.

 

Los Angeles, January 31, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

 

 

Victoria Warmerdam | Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019

the lovely gnome

by Douglas Messerli

 

Victoria Warmerdam (screenwriter and director) Korte Kuitspier (Short Calf Muscle) / 2019 [13 minutes]

Dutch director Victoria Warmerdam seems to offer up a wonderful absurdist-like comedy. Anders (Henry van Loon), a rather tall gay man, is visiting the doctor (Lucretia van der Vloot) because of a pain he has in his calf muscle. She reports that there is nothing wrong with his leg, although they see this problem quite often, she reports, in “his kind.”

     What possibly might she mean, he wonders. Has she somehow sensed he was a gay man? Even she suggests that she doesn’t mean to discriminate.

     He next visits a baker (Beppie Melissen), asking for a whole wholegrain loaf, sliced. She challenges him saying, “Are you sure you don’t what half, my small friend.”

     Has she run out of full loafs? No. Well, then he’d like a whole loaf please. She suggests we might prefer “a bag of cut mini currant buns?” No, just the whole loaf.

     She stares at him endlessly, with a smile pasted to her face.

     Eating lunch with his colleagues, one asks him how his physio therapist when, Anders commenting that it went fine. He received a small injury while running, he reports. He has a short calf muscle.

      That must be common his “his kind” another colleague responds. Anders is confused, announcing that his doctor also responded in that manner. Surely “The fact that I’m gay doesn’t relate to my physique, does it?”

      After a rather uncomfortable pause, one of his colleagues finally speaks up: “I think he was referring to the fact that you’re a gnome.

      Anders, just as any sane man might, laughs. But they don’t join him, the manager finally adding “Of course it doesn’t matter. We don’t mind at all.” Besides he’s a good worker and they get extra subsidies by having him on their team, just as they get for including Fatima (evidently of Middle Eastern birth) on their staff.

      Yet one of the colleagues even wants to carry the discussion further, now that they’ve brought up the subject. “I was wondering what it was really like to become invisible? Or is it a myth?”

      Anders pretends to go along with the joke, even pondering the issue of invisibility. But they want to know is it done consciously or is it metaphysical. And would he do it for them?

      Anders finally can only answer that he is not a gnome. When they persist, he mutters that he really doesn’t find their game-playing funny. “Short legs, short fuse,” one of his fellow workers comments.

     Back home, he confides with his lover Paul (Loes Schnepper) that it went on like that all day. “I can’t laugh about it anymore.” It just went on and on. “You should know when to stop.”

      But Paul wonders that he can’t take teasing anymore. But, this makes utterly so sense, Anders argues.

      Since when was this a problem with you, Paul seems astonished. But what can Paul possibly mean, answers the confused Anders. “Your figure, darling.”

      “I’ve never made a problem with the fact that you’re one of them, have I?”

      This time, Anders is clearly fed up. Must even his lover now carry on the ridiculous joke?

      Paul would have thought by this time his lover would simply have accepted the fact. That’s what made him attractive. Paul proclaims.

      “I’m not a mythical creature.”

      “No. You’re a lovely gnome.”

      If you thought it couldn’t get worse for Anders, his own parents confirm that he was adopted and that they knew this day would finally come, surprised, in fact, that it didn’t arise a lot sooner.

      But the film, once we realize the nature of this perverted absurdity, has nowhere else to go. Anders is flabbergasted and confused and simply can’t come to terms with the reality the others presume, reminding us not only of the ridiculousness of the prejudices imposed upon others including the LGBTQ community, but the strange beliefs of many MAGA supporters who have created absurdly fantastical lives for their political rivals.

      Yet, in the film gays seem to be easily accepted and assimilated. Being gay is not the problem, but looking different, in this case being “a legendary dwarfish creature supposed to guard the earth's treasures underground.” Even his parents confirm that their son is now a “double minority.”

      But it’s at this point when the film seems to truly fall apart. Comparing Anders’ second role as a minority figure having to do with his appearance takes the short movie down a very different avenue that is not at all the same as being sexually different.

       When the police finally take him down as a radicalized gnome, Warmerdam’s work strikes up the Staple Singers’ version of a song about black children facing discrimination, “Why (Am I Treated So Bad),” taking it down a truly illogical path.

       Like it or not, most gay people are able to live lives, if they so desire, without being perceived as being sexually different. That’s precisely why for so many years gays stayed, so to speak, in the closet, hid out, amongst themselves, invisible to the world at large.

      But being someone of color, unless of very light skin and with a desire to “pass” as a white, is not something a black man or woman, most Asian individuals, and many Hispanics can imagine. Despite Ralph Ellison’s social and cultural metaphor of “the invisible man,” people of color are hated by bigots precisely because of what they look like, not primarily for how they behave, even if their culture and traditions are occasionally different from caucasians. Being a gnome, if such beings were to exist, is not truly comparable with being a gay man. As one commentator observed, such a comparison is “boneheaded and insulting.” Yes, the discrimination, even if not mean or openly spoken, is absurd, something of which no truly intelligent human being should be capable. But when your skin color or size is “different” there is very little possibility of pretense or simply having failed to notice.

     It is why the biggest difficulty for most gay and bisexual individuals in “coming out,” expressing their differentness openly to others. One of the reasons that we LGBTQ+ individuals gather for Pride Days and other such occasions is to remind ourselves and others that we do still exist, that we are different even if we don’t look it. People of color don’t have that problem. The hatred heaped upon them is justified simply by their appearance, something of which they are reminded of every day of their lives.

     We can comprehend that Warmerdam’s film was well-intentioned; but unfortunately, it was not well thought out. This film really has no meaning for gay men and women, or, for that matter, black individuals, Native Americans, Asians, or many of those of American-Hispanic descent. It might mean something only to mythical gnomes, putti, or cupids.

 

Los Angeles, January 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

 

 

Wrik Mead | Hoolboom / 1999

we are the geography of all we know

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wrik Mead and Mike Hoolboom (screenwriters), Wrik Mead (director) Hoolboom / 1999

 

In 1999 Arts Toronto commissioned local filmmaker Wrik Mead to make a short film about his fellow gay filmmaker Michael Hoolboom, which Mead did working at points with the subject of his film.

    Hoolboom, born in 1959 just three years before Mead, is also a Toronto filmmaker and like Mead gay. He had made a substantial number of films by 1999, beginning in 1980. He first gained national attention for his filmmaking in 1986 with White Museum, but it wasn’t until Frank’s Cock in 1993 and Letter to Home in 1996 that he began to produce openly gay films. He freely admits, however, that his diagnosis of being HIV-positive in 1988 or ’89 gave what he describes as “new urgency” to his works, and his productions increased significantly after that period, all among with his now large body of work.

     By the time Mead worked with him on Hoolboom, the director had just released one of his major queer works, Panic Bodies (1998), which I discuss elsewhere in this volume.

      Mead’s film is not so a film about his friend as it muses on impressions of Hoolboom in relationship to issues of the body, self-awareness, and the art of filmmaking itself.

     The film begins with an almost ritualistic like act, a young naked man with a knife cutting open what appears to be a mummy. When he finishes cutting to open the other young man, covered with flowing blood—seemingly a mirror image of the boy—he sits up and hugs his savior whose body also begins the profusely bleed through what appear to be cuts and gashes.

      A man, dressed in protective gear, spray paints the word “responsibility” on the side of a wall.

    A narrator asks, “What if the revolution, you know the one that is going to be televised, the one that everyone’s been waiting for doesn’t involve the grip of communists at all, or the poor, the disenfranchised, the bearers of racial, sexual, and linguistic difference? What if the revolution begins closer to home? With our own limbs?” The voice wonders what if one day the hands were granted independence and decided they’d had enough of taking orders from nerve command central and decided to leave? He suggests that each of us might become our own Lincoln, granting emancipation to our various parts, letting them settle back into the world of independence. “We are, after all, the geography of all we know. Imperfect is our paradise.”

      That last two lines seem to hint at the way the rest of his 5-minute film will progress. Suddenly the young man we saw in the first scene, appears with a camera madly spinning in various directions, alternating with a paintbrush in hand.

      A face suddenly looms up much as in a talking head documentary, the image of Hoolboom himself floating atop a picture we can only assume to be Hoolboom’s the group portrait from his elementary school days. “Quite by accident,” the head begins, “he uncovers the secret joy of disappearance.” He describes the figure of whom he is speaking almost like Woody Allen’s character Zelig, moving into rooms so that no one notices, wearing a wardrobe that blends in with everything around him. “Everywhere he goes no one takes notice.” He describes the hundreds of animals in the wild that in fear of alerting their prey, move without moving. “He’s like them, storing memories like others store rations in case of nuclear collapse.” “…It was not the end of the world, he figured, but its beginning.”

       Clearly the spoken metaphors of this quite different kind of testimony are about Hoolboom’s cinematic methods, his willingness to let his hands, his entire body take him where they might go in order to embrace thoroughly other beings and places in his films. No Hoolboom film presents his view, but assimilates in a remarkable chameleon-like manner the other about who and with whom he collaborating in his film presentation. There is less a Hoolboom “style” or even a particular “subject”—only a hand full of his numerous films are about LGBTQ life, although many feature gay men—than a cinematic assimilation of scene and person in an attempt to present the constantly shifting others of his oeuvre.

      Like the figure in the first image of the film, Hoolboom becomes the other and takes on his or her personal pains, sufferings, and even diseases. Hacking into subjects thought to be dead, he brings the “other” alive in a way that few filmmakers are able to. Time and again, his works are titled by the interviewee’s name, the subject his film explores, or the geographical location. Abstract words that seem to indicate one thing are transformed through his filmic searches to mean something different. Instead of forcing the figures to come to him, he moves ever so gradually toward them, imitating their manner so that his work becomes the subject, the other.

      This film, not so coincidentally is not like any other Mead film, but more like a film which Hoolboom himself, who co-wrote the script with Mead, might make. At our best, we are not beings in statis, but individuals defined by the territories we have explored, the “geography of all we know.”

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2022).

Andrew Abrahams | Casualty / 1999

making waves

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrew Abrahams (director) Casualty / 1999

 

Dance and LGBTQ filmmaking often go hand-in-hand. From the transformation of military exercises into dance in Claire Denis’ masterful Beau travail (1999), to representations of eager young gay dancers in works such as A Chorus Line (1985) and Billy Eliot (2000), biographical works of major dancer’s lives like Herbert Ross’ Nijinksy (1980), Ralph Fiennes’ The White Crow [on Nureyev] (2018) and Levin Aiken’s And Then We Danced [on the Georgian dancer Merab] (2019), movies about dance such as Alan Brown’s Five Dances (2013) to, finally, queer group dance celebrations such as those in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Macho Dancer (1988), and Deadman Walking (2017) dance and the queer experience have quite often shared the stage. But never until a few moments ago had I have ever seen a gay short film, only 5 minutes in this case, represent a gay dance under water!

      But that is precisely what director Andrew Abrahams presents to us in his 1999 work, Casualty.

   Featuring two underwater figures, Eric Newton and Hogan Vando, the movie shows first one approaching from stage left, reaching for a rose that suddenly appears to float before him; above we can see the reflection of a row of erect Cypress trees. He smells the rose as another male approaches from the right. The first embraces the other around the neck. Or is he chocking him? As the second pulls away, the first grabs his wrist, as he reciprocates. Or is he now grabbing the wrist of the first in order to pull away?

     The second swimmer now has the rose in hand, lifting it to his nose as if to smell it. But in the very next instant, we see the rose floating in the water alone, the swimmers both having gone their separate ways. As the accompanying description of this short asks on the Open Eye Pictures site, where it can be seen for free, “Comfort or conflict? A gift or deception? ...This mythic and dreamlike piece highlights the unraveling of an intimate relationship.”

      This water dance reminds me a great deal of the dance in artist Robert Longo’s performance piece, Empire, in which one cannot tell whether the two male dancers are engaged in a series of loving embraces or are wrestling in mortal combat.

      Abrahams’ work was an official selection of the Planet Out Short Movie Awards, the Breck Film Festival that occurs annually in Breckinridge, Colorado, and the Queens Museum of Art Film Series.

       The film was later included with nine other gay dance works in Courts mais Gay: Tome 3, released in France in May 2002.

 

Los Angeles, December 28, 2020

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