Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Trevor Anderson | The Island / 2008, 2010 USA

faggot island

by Douglas Messerli

 

Trevor Anderson (screenwriter and director) The Island / 2008, 2010 USA [6 minutes]

 

The independent filmmaker from northern Alberta, Canada, Trevor Anderson, might as well be on an island as he treks through the snow to tell his comic anecdote and share his animated response.


     Anderson, believe it or not, sometimes gets fan mail. But the most interesting letter he received was actually an email from someone in the US, reading:

 

“You fucking faggots! You’re a disgrace to society. You should all be put on an island so that you can give each other AIDS.”

 

      The rest of Anderson’s short film consists of his contemplating, “Why not?” as he imagines a “homo utopia” on the tropical island of his imagination, a gay Israel, a kind of “ass-munching diaspora.” He recognizes that the idea of an “island” for gays is not exactly something new. He grew up with it, he contemplates, being part of the “rhetorical landscape of his small-town prairie childhood.” The sentence, “They should send them all to an island,” being a common expression of gay dissatisfaction in the local bars.

      But this new island, where gays are supposed to all give one another AIDS, he argues, is “a way better idea.” The very idea of “humping” all day long intrigues him. “It would be like the ‘70s all over again,” he argues, “but better because it’s on an island”—an animated scene from the film displaying a warm, tropical space, filled with coconuts and bananas. Finally, gays could make up all the rules.     

     When people do get infected, their status would be immediately raised instead of finding themselves as outcasts, becoming celebrities in the society. They could be given the “coolest tree-huts,” provided with ape-masseurs. We could secure free universal access to life-prolonging retrovirus cocktails served in coconuts with little umbrellas—with rum!


     He even imagines, should someone not survive, the pleasures the island might still provide him, gathering around him at twilight, covering him with moonflower blossoms and decorating his skin with “rub-on sailor tattoos.” And as the pounding tide sounds in the background, to sing him a last song and jettison him into the mouth of the volcano “to worship him as a god.”

      Those who suffer from AIDS and the millions of us who lived through the AIDS epidemic might not be so very amused by Anderson’s somewhat cynical satire. And even Anderson admits that despite the charms of such a “faggot island” it seems, well—as he continues to tromp through the vast open space of snow alone—"kind of lonely.” Presumably, he, like most of us, needs the heterosexual world as well as they need us to define the complexities of the human race.

 

Los Angeles, April 25, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).

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