Bob Mizer | My Brother, the Sister / 1970

permission

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) My Brother, the Sister / 1970

 

The year after Why the Wooden Indian Wouldn’t, Mizer recognized there was no turning back. And in his color short, My Sister, My Brother Mizer clearly recognized that the posing strap was a thing of the past to be replaced by the on-screen male-on-male sex, which he had helped to effectuate, was here to stay.

     Almost as if to prove himself up to the task Mizer let loose a grand array of gay sexual tropes. The short begins with Jim Lee entering dressed vaguely in drag, wearing a white blouse with an outline of a bra and breasts and chartreuse pants, being advised that according to the fraternity initiation rules he has to remain on the park bench open to public view for a full half-hour, perhaps even encountering people whom he may know in his drag get-up. Accordingly, Mizer has begun his film, as he did his 1963 work Military School Initiation as part of the trope of sexual control over the new would-be members of it freshmen pledges, while at the same time hinting of cross-dressing themes.

      Almost before the fraternity senior has left, a man arrives wanting to pick-up the female before his eyes, an offer which Jim immediately and emphatically rejects. Soon after a woman appears from the same off-stage “glen” of the park to ask if she might hook him up with other men, willing to serve, evidently, as a kind of female pimp who Jim also sends packing, commenting on how he had never before realized how weird were the folk in his town.

      Finally, a handsome sailor (John Lee) appears, sits down next to him, and—no matter how much Jim attempts to indicate that he doesn’t have what the sailor’s seeking and he’s not at all interested in what the sailor might offer—refuses to leave, insisting that he give him a try, Mizer in the process introducing yet another homosexual favorite, a man in tight white bell-bottomed pants on shore leave.

     When eventually the half-hour has expired, Jim gets up, and since the sailor insists on staying, walks off.

      The sailor, however, follows him home and enters his apartment, looking it over and approving, begging him, even though he apparently recognizes that Jim (still inexplicably in drag) is really a guy, to give sex with him a try. 

       Unable to rid himself of the insistent predator, Jim gives in and finds the whole sexual event, including the fuck the sailor finally accepts as payment for his permission for the sailor to stay on, to be quite pleasurable, the sailor enjoying the new sexual sensation so much that he decides to stay for the two further days he has left of his leave.

       When the credits are shown and the two Lees hold up signs stating their names, a voice asks if they’re related, but the apparent brothers refuse to deny or confirm their relationship, suggesting that Mizer has also tossed in a bit of sexual incest into his sexual stewpot.

        It appears that the boys are simply simulating their anal sex, but they do verbally agree to cum simultaneously, and one even sports, for a few on-screen moments, a full erection. Yet, as I began this piece, the Lees’ acting is so awful, the plot so ludicrous, and sex so unstimulating that we look back with almost sexual longing for films like 42nd Street Hood and Tijuana Bandit.*

 

*I find it absolutely fascinating that after all those years of Bob Mizer’s having basically been able to escape censorship by the US and local governments and seeing in a new era of cinematic male sexual representation, I was censored on Facebook, banned from its pages for a full month, because their visual recognition machine interpreted by picture of two men, wearing posing straps, wrestling on the streets of New York from 42nd Street Hood as representing men engaged in nude sexual copulation. It appears we’ve gone backwards in the notion of what the media is permitted to say or visually present to the public. Oddly enough, when I attempted to post one of Mizer’s film on the internet Facebook, the machine saw the posing straps as nudity and punished me by a month in Facebook hell, which meant I could no longer communicate with my friends.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2021).