Peggy Rajski | Trevor / 1994

straight boys teaching a peer how to be queer

by Douglas Messerli

 

Celeste Lecesne (screenplay), Peggy Rajski (director) Trevor / 1994

 

An interesting trivia question: what was the first short gay film to win an Oscar?  The answer: Ray’s Male Heterosexual Dance Hall in 1988! The film I’m about to discuss, Trevor, shared that award with Peter Capaldis’ Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life for best short film in 1995. I should remind the reader that the first Academy Award for Best Picture was awarded to the gay-coded William A. Wellman’s Wings in 1929.

     Even if those facts have been forgotten, Trevor has lived on as a major statement by The Trevor Project about gay children’s suicide, which the sad young 13-year-old boy of this film, played by the astonishingly charming Brett Barsky, does attempt when he discovers that all his classmates have recognized that he’s gay before even he has, and he is mocked for his adoration of Diana Ross and for his boyhood crush on the school sports hero Pinky Faraday (Jonah Rooney).

      Things actually begin well in this empathic comedy. Diana Ross has just belted out her Do You Know Where You’re Going To? and Pinky Faraday has miraculously become his friend, walking with him half-way home after school. Trevor might even dress up as Diana Ross for Halloween.

      True, his bland 1950s-style retrograde parents (Judy Kain and John Lizzi) don’t seem aware of his existence, even when, like another earlier film, a distressed young man, Harold Parker Chasen (Bud Cort) of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude (1971), he stabs himself to death with a knife and lays his dead body down on the grass in the path of his father’s lawnmower, and performs a reenactment of  Jacques-Louis David’s painting of The Death of Marat, in which Trevor sits in the bathtub stabbed by his Charlotte Corday impersonation. His father merely mows around his son’s body, while his mother retrieves her kitchen knife; in the bathroom Trevor’s mother simply mops up his dripping blood.

      But according to his diary, Pinky the next day even walked his new friend further, almost all the way home. He and his schoolmate Walter Stiltman (Allen Dorane) talk about masturbation, but Walt warns him not to get it on his hands. Pinky, on the other hand, is even cool with Trevor’s decision to go into theater. So excited is our young hero about the good series of events that he can’t resist telling Walter about Pinky Faraday, who suggests he needs to be careful because he’s heard stories about boys doing it with boys, and “it’s totally gross. And you could end up a pervert…or worse.”

      So word quickly spreads, even before Trevor can get back to class, about Trevor’s infatuation, two girls reporting that the guys are talking about him behind his back about how he walks like a girl. In response to his note to Pinky, the boy writes back calling him “a fairy, a weak person, and not even deserving to live.” “I’m not sure,” ponders the startled Trevor, “but I think this means that we’re…not friends anymore?” Trevor decides that he’s definitely not going as Diana Ross to the Halloween party.

     Accompanied by Ross’ Ain’t No Mountain High Enough Trevor attempts to escape to San Francisco, but his parents board the bus in time find him, soon after arranging a meeting with Father Jon (Stephen Tobolwsky) who tells him all about the birds and bees and attempts to get a confession from him that he’s been having imagining sexual actions with someone like, for example, Pinky Faraday. His parents, so he discovers, have read his diary. If Trevor is sure of anything now, it is that he’s changing religions.

      Suddenly “everybody at school is saying I’m gay. It must be showing. But when I look in the mirror I don’t see any difference.”

      Trevor decides to commit suicide, slowly downing the pills with a glass of water; while listening to Diana Ross’ and Lionel Richie’s My Endless Love he pauses to sing along with Diana, in the midst of facing death, demonstrating his very ecstasy of living. It’s an extremely sad yet wryly humorous moment, where love and death as in the great operas like Richard Wagner’s  Tristan und Isolde are intertwined in an unhappy 13-year-old boy’s mind. Inappropriate some argue, but thoroughly necessary to project the way our younger selves exaggerate our rejections, fears, and disappointments into the realm of universal tragedy.

     Fortunately, as Trevor discovers, you can’t die from taking too many aspirins, although you may prevent yourself from getting a headache for several years. And in the hospital he meets a young male candy-striper who not only befriends his young patient but presents him with a special gift, so Trevor later discovers, a ticket to a Diana Ross concert.

     This loving, tear-producing, and absolutely funny short film blends all the tumult that young gay boys must face in Coming Out, the song Diana Ross sings at film’s end.

      But even sadder, it seems to me, is that after performing in this work which began shooting when he was only twelve, the heterosexual actor Brett Barsky, the grown father of two daughters, recounts in a 2010 interview in The Advocate that he was labelled as gay in his own school, losing most of his best friends. Reality is far more awful than even the movies can project. Maybe the proverbial “they” ought to make a movie about that. Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis have made a successful musical from the original film that premiered Off-Broadway in 2021.

     Writing this short piece today, I realized that despite some far-right parent’s concerns that gay boys will teach their children how to become gay, that far more likely what usually happens is that straight boys often teach their peers who are little bit different from themselves how to be and what it means to be a queer.

 

Los Angeles, October 4, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).