Cain Thompson | Coming Out / 2015

different

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cain Thompson (screenwriter and director) Coming Out / 2015 [11 minutes]

 

Since the millennium a new genre has risen to which I have increasing hostility. These films usually begin as pretend gay narratives based on the coming out genre. The most common of these deal with a young man, locked in an all-gay world, in which he is finally determined to come out as straight.

     One can understand the writer’s and director’s good intentions in short films such as Different (2004) and Straight Out (2011), that by reversing the world order regarding sexuality, these creators imagine straight folk, put into the same conditions that LGBTQ people experience every day, presumably might witness the hypocrisy of attempting to demand gender and sexual norms.

     However, since these films are seen primarily in gay film festivals, one has to wonder how many heterosexuals actually get the chance to experience these straight dystopias. Moreover, the presumption in these films is that nearly all is focused on the choice of the other, the desire for gender, which is not at all the full vision of either the heterosexual or the homosexual worlds. Attraction to the same sex is only one small (if highly important) aspect of gay behavior and desire. Accordingly, in their simplistic dystopian fantasies, these “reversal” films are just as stereotypical, in some respects, as heterosexual films have been regarding LGBT behavior.

     Even so, I wasn’t quite prepared for the game-playing involved in Australian director Cain Thompson’s 2015 film Coming Out, which purposely leads its gay audiences astray into totally heterosexual territory, and does not at all belong in the list of LGBTQ films, even if it pretends to do so.

    In this ruse, Thompson presents an absolutely horrific family, who take delight daily evidently—father Keith Agius), mother (Sanda Eldridge), sister and her boyfriend, and even our so-called “hero’s” girlfriend—in homophobic statements and humor.

    The central figure, Blain (Cain Thompson) is a hirsute, handsome construction worker who appears to be spending early after-work hours with another man, arousing the curiosity and even wrath of his girlfriend. Even the man with whom he delightfully meets each afternoon wonders

when Blain is going to tell is family.

     Thompson has readied us, accordingly, for the usual encounter, for which his family even seems prepared. When Blain begins his “serious discussion,” one of them even jokes that he’s going to tell us that he’s gay, as if this homophobic cluster of losers have also been watching the dozens of gay-coming out movies I have suffered through.

    Blain isn’t gay, however, but is a dancer, not a stripper either, not a pop background terpsichorean, but an actual modern ballet-trained dancer—"like Billy Elliot” (referring to the 2000 Stephen Daldry film) one of his family member chimes up, but not gay!

     I can only say that I truly resented this wolf-in-sheep’s clothing kind of movie, which uses the gay community as a come-on for what really is and by film’s end remains a rather homophobic statement. And presumably, now that Blain’s admitted his discretions to his slack-witted family, he can go back to bed with his girlfriend and fuck her into heaven, perhaps even sharing his family’s lame gay jokes.

     The best one can say about this movie is that perhaps Blain has learned something in the process about what it means to be labelled as “different.”

 

Los Angeles, June 23, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).