West Los Angeles LGBT Center | Boys Beware / 2015 (?)

playing with strangers

by Douglas Messerli

 

West Los Angeles LGBT Center (creator/producer) Boys Beware / 2015? [4.30 minutes]

 

Sometime around 2015 the West Los Angeles LGBT Center with the cooperation of The West Hollywood Men who have sex with Men Cooperative and the WeHo Twinks Council, produced a version of the 1955 film Boys Beware which was both successfully satiric and quite serious in its message.

      Lt. Williams, the narrator of the first three versions of the early film, is this time is a security officer attached to the Twink Division of the West Hollywood MSM Cooperative on his way to West Hollywood to talk to a group of Queens. And in the manner of the earlier “Boys Beware” movies he tells the story of a young innocent twink, Jimmy Barnes who has been playing baseball all afternoon and didn’t feel like going home alone. So, Jimmy decides to “thumb a ride.”

     The friendly stranger asks Jimmy if he’s interested in PNP—also known as chemsex or wired play, referring to the practice of consuming drugs to enhance sexual activity; this sexual subculture involves recreational drug users engaging in high-risk sexual behaviors under the influence of drugs, often within specific sub-groups. But Jimmy, not up-to-speed about the newest terminology, thinks it means “Party and Play,” imagining that it has to do with soda pop and balloons and joins the man in his car.

      But, of course, the driver was talking about a different kind of party involving Crystal Meth and sex so the narrator tells us. Yet the stranger seemed like a really nice guy and in what seemed like minutes they pull up to Jimmy’s House. The stranger asked if next time they could BB (engage in bareback sex, meaning without a condom), Jimmy imagining the nice man is talking about BB guns.

    As in the original films, when Jimmy gets out, the stranger gives Jimmy a friendly pat, but in this version it is fully on the rump with all sexual insinuations intended.

     The driver drools in anticipation of seeing the twink again soon.

    And sure enough, when Jimmy is finished playing ball the next day, the man was there waiting, so the narrator reports.

     By the next Saturday they go fishing and Ralph insists they use first names. Eating a banana, Jimmy, so we are told, hadn’t enjoyed himself so much for a long time. Repeating the early lines of the same scene as in the 1955 version, the narrator reports: “What Jimmy didn’t know is that Ralph had a sickness that was not visible like smallpox but no less contagious. You see Ralph had syphilis and chlamydia but he didn’t have any symptoms.” Because a lot of people were on prep these days and having condomless sex he thought that he was done worrying about it, not needing to be tested, so our narrator reports.

      Ralph then announces to Jimmy that he had something to show the bouncing boy in the bushes, and the eager beaver Jimmy follows. What Ralph now reveals is his “trouser snake,” and because he was allegoric to latex, he tells Jimmy that he will have to do it without a condom.      

   But here, finally Jimmy’s convictions kick in. He refuses to play without a condom. Jimmy knows that you could have STD (sexually transmitted diseases) and not have any symptoms. That’s why, Jimmy argues, you should always get tested. Jimmy even agrees to go with Ralph to get tested. And the happy couple walks down the street on their way to the doctors, Ralph regularly squeezing Jimmy’s butt as the Jimmy skips along.

       The narrator reminds us, “Play with strangers, but don’t be a stranger to the facts.

      Such educational films, as this short work reveals, can still be useful when the writer and director are aware of the facts and create a movie with a modicum of humor. Too bad the film doesn’t list the writer, director, or the date of production.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2023).