Sam Liddell | Orange Cheesecake / 2025

no resolution

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sam Liddell (screenwriter and director) Orange Cheesecake / 2025 [15 minutes]

 

After years of silence from his father, the gay college boy Joe (Harry Jenkins) is invited back home to have dinner with his estranged father, George (Adrian Yearsley). It has been his father’s girlfriend’s idea, who George orders about like the cruel misogynist he basically is, to invite Joe and thought it might help mend whatever problems to the had between one another.

   Even though Joe has brought an orange cheesecake, made by him in memories of the ones he and his father made during his childhood, nearly everything goes wrong. Phoebe serves up a wonderful-looking dinner of salmon, but either his father has forgotten or never cared to pay attention to the fact that Joe is and has always been allergic to all seafood. Phoebe offers to get him a sandwich, but George refuses to let her prepare it, and the boy goes hungry.

      The father’s real problem is that he remains a violent homophobe, unable, as it puts it, to accept his son’s “life style.” Evidently, Joe has failed to inform him or he refuses to believe that one’s queer sexuality is not a choice, but is simply part of who one is.

      In any event, George cannot accept any part of his son. And when Phoebe begins to try to link him up with a girl during dessert, Joe finally explains that he is with someone he loves, except she is a he.    

     His father grows even more furious in his son’s attempts to explain the problem to the more open-minded Phoebe (although she too seems to have rather stereotypical concepts about gay man, associating them immediate with drag), George demanding that his son stop the conversation which he describes as attention-seeking. But this time, Joe stands his ground pointing out to his father that it is he who is eaten by hatred, he one who cannot come to terms with reality, explaining that for much of his childhood he hated himself, and yet was loved by the family; but the moment he discovered his identity and begin realizing and coming to terms with himself, his family, particularly his father, turned on him.

     He leaves the “false” get-together, calling his friend back in the university to have a pizza ready for him, while waiting for the bus, eating a piece of his delicious orange cheesecake with delight.

      British director Liddell’s short film is certainly not original; we have gone over this territory of the unforgiving parent in almost endless queer films. Yet this short from 2025 reveals that despite all the growing openness and awareness that has been made in the general community, young gay men must often face years of rejection from those they most need and once loved. It is the disappointed homophobes at home, however, who unknowing suffer most, unable to wrap their minds around the notion of simple sexual difference.

 

Los Angeles, June 9, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2025).