John Greyson and Jack Lewis | Proteus / 2003

claiming gay identity

 

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Greyson and Jack Lewis (screenplay, based on a story by Jack Lewis, and directors) Proteus / 2003

 

Canadian director John Greyson is among the notables of queer cinema, and anything he directs is worthy of our attention. His 2003 film with South African gay activist Jack Lewis, however, received highly mixed reviews, perhaps because so many of his other transgressive and postmodern gay political statements before this 2003 film were so beautifully clothed, as Variety review Dennis Harvey put it, in “lush aesthetics and impassioned complexity,” while the brown-toned Proteus, in the critic's estimation, failed.

     Partially due to the filming limitations of an 18-day shoot on the South African prison camp of Robben Island, to where Nelson Mandela was also sentenced for 18 years of his 27-year imprisonment, and because of the historical limitations of the central story, based on an actual criminal case of 1735, Greyson and his South African compatriot were not given as open of a postmodern perspective in this case. There is no dancing, no singing mix of gay representatives of different periods, no hot-house perspectives of gay sex in this truly profound film. Moreover, how Greyson and Lewis even interpreted events was open to question.

    One commentor on Letterboxd, with the handle of Lesego, complained that he was disappointed with the portrayal of the Khoi people, represented in this film by Claas Blank (Rouxnet Brown), as “harboring homophobic attitudes when historical evidence shows us they were positive.”

     Since the court records of this particular case, however, wherein Blank, a man accused and exonerated for stealing back cattle whites had already stolen from his tribe, but was still imprisoned for 10 years’ hard labor to the penal colony off of Cape Town, facts are sketchy. The crime which killed him was sodomy, which in this case he practiced with a white South African Rijkhaart Jacobz (Neil Sandilands), who had already been labeled a “faggot,” and was shunned accordingly by the rest of the prison community.

 

     It is the native black man, Blank, who in the strange nightmare community, is the “object of desire,” a man in this highly racist world of torture and violent punishment who offers something special to the man officially assigned to the prison world by the Dutch officials as an English botanist in order to develop exportable flower strains. The irony is already apparent, and one that seems almost inevitable for Greyson’s aesthetics.     

      What Blank represents to the conventionally married British botanist Virgil Niven (Shaun Smyth), since he was previously employed as a servant, is his ability to speak English, Dutch, and his tribal language with its inherent knowledge of the local flora and fauna. In Niven's categorization of all plant life and people, and for whom even Blank might be described as an inferior “Hottentot,” the prisoner Claas Blank, nonetheless, is the perfect conduit between his imperceptible and unacceptable desires: to create a  taxonomical listing of Robben Bay—which later the noted Swedish Carl Linnaeus claimed as being his own work—and fulfill Niven's closeted gay desires.

      Given his societal position and conventional role in this prison world, Niven is allowed to fulfill his voyeuristic needs—becoming far more sexually active when his returns to Amsterdam—while also being forgiven for carrying in his entourage a highly effeminate “poof” as his close assistant. Niven, accordingly, is quite willing to allow the highly attractive black man to become his guide into the native knowledge of floral category of Protea Cynarides, named after the shapeshifting figure of Greek mythology, while observing for something like 10 to 17 years (the official records being somewhat ambiguous) both Blank and Rijkharrt, as they travel back and forth to the water tank in order to maintain his flower garden and escape into anal sexual paradise.

 

     I think it is only logical that Blank, given his culture’s total indifference to all categorizations, sexual definitions, and hierarchies, at first resists the “faggot’s” embrace. But love is love, and the two soon after can no longer contain their sexual desires for one another, as the immoral voyeur Niven gradually threads his life to them in order to gratify his unfulfilled private desires.

    Only his presence, however, protects them, and his return to Amsterdam for a brief period of two years to publish his book, allows the vicious local authorities and fellow prisoners to finally reveal the couple’s “criminal” behavior, both as sexual outcasts and racial misfits.

  Critic Michael D. Klemm, writing in CinemaQueer quite nicely summarizes the gay couple’s situation:

 

“Unlike the European invaders who sought control and dominance by the assigning of new names, our befuddled heroes don't have, and refuse to accept, a name for what they are. This is hardly a case of love at first sight or meeting cute. Games of alpha dog dominance transform slowly into genuine affection over the course of a decade. At first there is only antagonism. It culminates in Claas taking Jacobz from behind and it's a scene straight out of Genet. Is this rape or is this something more? Claas vainly clings to a more traditional gender role and asserts his masculinity by speaking of a woman "with big titties" waiting for him back at the village. Jacobz, bearded and butch, has embraced his queer self and often gazes with longing at his sometimes indifferent friend.”

 

     Today’s commentators, for the most part don’t like sexual ambiguity, even if it has existed throughout history. Yet Greyson and Lewis reveal their character’s true relationship when, after both are threatened with drowning, Rijkharrt—the seemingly “out” faggot, admits to his guilt, while Blank refuses to give himself over to the would-be sexual definers. Once his friend is sentenced, however, Blank is the one who finally speaks out, talking in two languages, as the director/writer Greyson reiterates:

 

“This is what drove us — in the court record, the [sodomy] crimes were mutually perpetrated. The only way he [Blank] could claim his dignity was in confessing. He says it in two languages and the translators [performed in an anachronistic matter by bee-hived haired 1950s typists] translated it in three. This is how we wanted our narrative to resolve the moment of claiming identity for the first time it condemns him to death.”

     Niven, involved in his own gay criminal activities back in Amsterdam, when it was historically recorded that 70 Dutch men were arrested and punished for their gay sexual activities—evidently Niven’s assistant among them—can only again play the role of voyeur as he watches his two lovelies drowned.

     This film, what the prolific Greyson imagines as being his last full feature film, is a tragedy of the highest proportions. Although he once again stuffs it with anachronisms in order to pull it into our own times, it is ultimately a crime of major historical dimension which we have to comprehend as part of the endless terror of our gay history rather than a mere reiteration of our own cultures continued hate of gay beings. This is an event of our horrible LBGTQ+ history, not just a contemporary injustice.

 

Los Angeles, February 2, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (February 2025).