Austin Bunn | Campfire / 2023

the lost boys of peter pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Austin Bunn (screenwriter and director) Campfire / 2023 [17 minutes]

 

One of the many benefits of visually and mentally traveling, as I have done, through so very many thousands of LGBTQ movies, particularly the short cinema works, is that despite the fact that a great number of them were cooked in the living rooms, bedrooms, and dorms of highly imaginative MFA and MA students, they often took me to places where I might never have imagined ever existed, let alone have ever traveled to see in person.

    This defines precisely what Austin Bunn’s film Campfire accomplished, a film which began as imagined documentary of one of the oldest gay campgrounds in the US, the Hillside Campgrounds of New Millford, Pennsylvania, which became gradually a fictional journey to the site by an older married man, Carl (Mark Rowe) who has clearly arrived at a point of some sort of late crisis, and in quiet desperation seeks out a farmhand, Marty, with whom, 30 years earlier, he had a love affair, perhaps even after he married or before he sank bank into the closeted heterosexual world where so many of his kind retreat given the lessons of their upbringing and the rural, sexually unforgiving and forbidding worlds which they inhabit.

    This film, using the actual Millford site as its backdrop, shows us what is now a world of aging trucker, S&M devotees, and ancient hippies—one couple have haunted the place now for years going about daily in the nude. This is not a political film, but one might imagine these elderly, beefy “bears” as being a kind of secret gay world who might have possibly have voted for someone like Donald Trump, a fact difficult for the LGBTQ community to digest.

     But, in fact, it’s hard to explain or even characterize this lost queer world, off the map of almost any but those in the know. These men are sociable and kind, willing to embrace nearly anyone who enters their dark green gate, as long as they close it behind them, for it is a sacred world even more apart from the heteronormative limits than someplace like Fire Island. If you are the kind of person to want to share and enjoy this community, you have suddenly found home. And we can only try to imagine what it might have meant, in its halcyon days, to a young farmhand like Carl’s Marty, who kept trying to get his then lover Carl, 30 years before, to visit it with him.

     Carl, a “good ole boy,” American flag posted on the window of his SUV, lies to his daughter that he’s in Roscoe helping a buddy doing engine work. But clearly he’s on an adventure where no one, including his wife, might have imagined that he’s moved on/back to a world that doesn’t at all include them.

      As he checks in, he asks the question that will become the key to his Romantic adventure: “I’m looking for a friend. He used to come here a lot. His name is Marty Cardona.” The desk clerk can obviously not reveal such information, but another of the campers, who has overheard his question, says that everyone knows Marty, and that he’s hosting a party that very night.

      “How will I know where to go?” Carl asks.

      “Oh,” proclaims his new neighbor, “You’ll know.”

 

      The party is clearly the event of the week. And Carl, attempting to fit in, visits the local S&M country boutique, buying himself a leather harness just for the event.

       He moves into his tent, stokes up the heat, and is ready for party night, which everyone seems to be attending. Carl eats a grilled steak, dresses up in the costume he’s purchased and attends Master Marty’s party.

      In between these fictional events, Bunn has posited other true testimonials of people who regularly inhabit the campsite, many of them couples who have been together now for many years, others who give credence to the fact that this was and still is a world which is not only off the map to the normative heterosexual world, but has long been an paradise to men at a time when being gay in the general US world, particularly given their rather straight, masculine seeming identities, was nearly impossible. This camp, they all equally claim was their salvation. Most of them were once married, and have grown children, but found their new lives in this isolated Pennsylvania spot.

    At the party, dressed in his leather halter with a plaid shirt, Carl makes his way through a crowd of dressed up drag queens and S&M performers as he attempts to seek his way back to the boy he knew so long ago. We get glimpses of the beauty every now and then, a stunning Hispanic man who we can well comprehend night have caught the eye of lean farmer, the two developing what Carl describes as a “special relationship.”

     A local, George (George Hoxworth) guides him into the Danteseque landscape to meet his ex-love, Marty, now Master Marty, as they cross through various spaces, all in variations of hot neon-lit colors. Finally reaching the inner sanctum, he meets a graying old man in a jock strap, clearly not the Marty he remembers of even imagined. Neither of them recognizes the other—and obviously this is not Carl’s “Marty.”

     Reeling away from the sight, Carl screams out his horror, letting all the others know just how deluded they are as well. He suddenly realizes he has returned to a world which might have been wonderous years before, but is now an old-aged home for losers, like himself, who haven’t found a proper way out from their closeted lives.

     By the next morning Carl is ready to leave; yet the residents realize that he has misunderstood their world and his own presumptions. Jerry (Brian Keane) is called upon to guide him to the real Marty, a man to whom he, himself, was married. But Marty, the real Marty Cardona, died in a motorcycle accident years ago, and is now memorialized in a small Hillside park where all those who died of old age, AIDs, and other mishaps are celebrated with small stone places, relics, and symbolic gravesites.

     Carl slowly takes in the loving care in which these now lost beings have been offered in this strange camping ground. And, finally, his missing love, he realizes has found a home which he could not offer him. Carl unpacks his bag and much of his emotional baggage along with it, to stay on a little bit longer before returning to the closed-off world he has chosen for himself.

     This is a difficult film of fictional memory and actual gay liberation, issues which come together in a way most of us might have not expected. But once more, as in the numerous stories about farm boys and farm hands such as represented in films such as Clay Farmers (A. P. Gonzalez, 1988), Alkali, Iowa (Mark Christoper, 1995), Fishbelly White (Michael Burke, 1998), God’s Country (Francis Lee, 2017), as well as Far West (Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2003), Silver Road (Bill Taylor, 2006), Heartland (Mark Christopher, 2007), Between Us (Daithí Ó. Cinnéide, 2016), It’s Still Your Bed (Tyler Reeve, 2019), Farm Boy (Kahil Haddad, 2019), Magnetic Harvest (Marine Levéel, 2019), Fire at the Lake (Pierre Menahem, 2022), Lie with Me (Olivier Peyon, 2022) and Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, 2023) to name just a few, we are made to realize that the so-called Rainbow Community shines on regions of culture which we never might have imagined.

     Urban living is not necessarily the only center of the gay experience. The world’s farmlands are also filled with young and older gay men and women desperate to discover their loves in a queer identity that is often difficult to express in their more isolated neighborhoods of the world, but fully exists nonetheless.

     In this unassuming film issues of ageism and cultural isolation come together to make it clear that you can’t count out anyone from the larger gay community as they struggle to make their love known and remembered. Perhaps our current gay leaders might turn their heads away from their endless struggles to put broader social issues as their major concern and look instead to those individuals which exist behind the screen of political objectives. This film and so many others helped me to perceive that my womb of urban gay protection was not the only or necessary lens in which I might best view the issues of LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).