the ones who are left behind
by Douglas Messerli
There are many such tales in these volumes as
the two I include here, Bonzo Villegas and Carlos Vilaró Nadal’s En
el mismo Equipo (On the Same Team) (2014) and Fabíen Cavacas and
Camille Melvill’s Passer les Champs (Beyond the Fields) (2015), wherein
brothers must leave behind their beloved other brother, sisters, their best
friends, and local gay lovers in order to truly find and define themselves.
In most
cases it is simply a necessity; the only way for these young men to realize their
potential and to come into their own identity is by leaving their siblings and even
loving friends behind. That doesn’t mean that some such as the character in
Miguel Lafuente’s My Brother (2015) who has left his 15-year-old
brother in the hands of his abusive parents, who when they discover he is gay
basically torture him into suicide don’t suffer for their decision. In many
other cases, it results in terrorizing returns home for visits and exploring
their pasts and former lovers such as the character in Lie with Me (2022).
If you can’t go home again, many gay men and women try, often with disastrous, or
at least painful results as in Back Again (2015), or even the Syd
Stone series which I discuss in this same volume. One of the best examples
of this is when a young gay man returns to apologize for his behavior to a
young gay boy he bullied in high school, The Only Gay on the Estate? (2011).
And
those left behind as in the both the films I mention above also suffer for
their loss. In so very many gay films there is the youthful lover who knows he
cannot leave the provincial world in which he grew up, but nonetheless
encourages his more gregarious friend to plunge into the society at large. One
might almost suggest there is an entire sub-genre devoted to this subject in
films such as Davy and Stu (2006), Lie with Me, mentioned above,
or Beyond the Fields which I discuss in my following essay.
I
have my own personal experience with just such a situation. When I was a
freshman, the captain of the football team, one of the beautiful persons I have
ever seen, invited me to let him drive me home. I knew what that meant, and I
was almost drooling with the possibilities. But I was also an obedient son and
probably far too innocent to truly undergo what I desired, and I fled the car
before anything could happen. On my several trips home to see my parents I ran
into him again a couple of times, this time as a young gay man, who might have
easily invited him for a drink. He was so communicative, engaging, clearly
willing to interact. But each time I fearfully spoke only a few words without
truly engaging him. I regretted it the rest of my life, particularly after
attending my 10th class reunion when I asked his cousin what had ever become of
the truly beautiful football captain left in the small town in which I grew up.
Oh, you haven’t heard, he quietly leaned in to tell me. “You know, how
carefully he liked to take care of his body. Well, as he grew older, and little
flabby from liquor, he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger.”
I
left the party almost immediately after and have never been able to return to
another class reunion to face so many of those colleagues of mine who stayed
behind. How I regret I’d never shared a bed or just a drink with that beautiful
man who I left behind.
Los Angeles, March 11, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(March 2025).
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