Bob Mizer | Revolt of the Android / 1969

to thine own kind be true

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bob Mizer (screenwriter and director) Revolt of the Android / 1969

 

Bob Mizer’s 1969 short Revolt of the Android is one of of his shorts that betrays a good sense of humor combined with a slight narrative that establishes the film as fully sexually male-oriented, and not just a film pretending to be for sexually disinterested admirers of the male form.

       In this work, model Larry Contrell determines that he needs a male helper, ordering up the newest catalogue model, which comes shipped covered in plastic and with two bottles of liquid controls: “Go” and “Stop.”

       Unpacking the handsome Bob Johnson, Contrell carefully administers some of the “Go” liquid and immediately finds the new housekeeper perfect for the job as he lays down on his stomach and asks the android to massage his back, which the robot immediately proceeds to do.

       Meanwhile, reading through the local news he spots an ad for a meet up with a female, which when the servant hears goes against all that he has been pre-programmed to accept. He quickly goes “crazy,” wrestling his owner to the floor, picking him up and properly spanking him before his “controller,” now sitting him down upon the bed with a very sore ass, watches his robot abscond with the offending newspaper and handing him a copy of Male Physique to read instead.

       Unlike the many male butlers of the 1930s who grew nervous and even peevish over their master’s encounters with the opposite sex, this Android stopped such leanings toward heterosexual behavior immediately before it got out of hand.

        This work, strangely, is less about the beauty of its models—although they do make a lovely pair—or their chaste homoerotic interactions, but serves, in a variation of Shakespeare, almost as an open statement to its male viewers, “boy, to thine own kind be true,” strongly suggesting for the first time what the “kind” sexually consisted of homosexual bonding.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2021).