Douglas Messerli | Not Ready for Prime Time / 2023

not ready for prime time

by Douglas Messerli

 

A young man has come to terms with his sexuality and is ready to explore a same-sex experience. How does he go about it, particularly when he is still high school and lives with parents or is not yet acquainted with the gay scene, and just still uncomfortable about the whole experience? In a world of warehouse size techno-dance clubs that have replaced many of the previous intimate neighborhood gay bars, many of the latter of which have now become equally popular with interested heterosexuals, a bar—which once served as almost private gathering spots for gays and lesbians—is now often not the first option. And increasingly, in a computer-run world wherein the young man or woman has already first encountered gay or lesbian porno, the internet is the first place where the young LGBTQ person might look to make a date.

    But as we have learned from various films I’ve reviewed over the years this is not always a safest place for a young person seeking his or her first sexual contact. One need only remind oneself of what happened to the young boy seeking out sexual contact through internet contact in Venezuelan filmmaker Carlos Alejandro Molina’s Rojo (Red) of 2013, where the young man meets up with the man who by arrangement has been dressed in red, who turns out to be his own father; or, even worse, the catfishing that Diego, the hero of French director Luca Morales’ Rendez-vous avec Diego (Date with Diego) (2021) had to endure, finally meeting up with an older man who he thought was a boy of his own age with whom he had begun to fall in love.

      But even when nothing dire or cruel happens, as in the case of the three films I discuss below, the first love, these young men’s first full sexual experience, leaves much to be desired, unprepared as they are for their companion’s experience and their presumed assumptions about their own experience. In all three films I’ve chosen to demonstrate this newly-developing genre—Australian director Sam Langshaw’s One Night Only (2013), US director Joseph Biggerstaff’s 17 (2022), and Lithuanian moviemaker Lukas Kacinauskas’ As buvau Maksas (I Was Max) also of 2022—their pre-arranged dates were with good looking a basically friendly strangers, but the experience hurtful and even terrorizing in part because of their own inexperience. As I have written previously about other such young people in the process of coming out, an experienced older man might have mentored them more slowly into the process, or if they had been able to meet someone closer to their age with whom they might have clumsily explored the new territory together would have been far better’ but unfortunately in a world in which such encounters are still have furtive and forbidden by often unknowing and unaccepting parents, young people don’t have a great many choices, resulting in an unfortunate first sexual encounter—not so very different, when I think about it, from my own first such experience with an older, heavy-set male who nonetheless showed me that I was finally ready for sex, just not with him.

 

Los Angeles, December 3, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).