Andrii Zhuravskyi | King of Spades / 2022

cuddling

by Douglas Messerli

 

Andrii Zhuravskyi (screenwriter and director) King of Spades / 2022 [13 minutes]

 

A couple, Ace (Andrew Haughton) and Gus (Callum Lloyd), have been hanging out together for several days now, jerking off in the back of the car, heavily kissing, and getting to know one another, at least that is what Gus imagines.

     As this short film begins, they have now joined up in Ace’s bedroom for what the viewers and Gus might imagine will be a full night of sex, since Gus has expressed his desire to stay over.

     But something’s wrong, particularly when Ace removes the handsome Gus’ hand from his knee and scurries off to the kitchen to make them some ginger tea.

     There he meets up with apparently his housemate, Emma (Katarina Håkansson) who queries Ace if he’s told him yet.

      For first time viewers of such a situation, the question must stymie their imagination. But those of us who have fully engaged ourselves in the LGBTQ+ world recognize almost immediately, even in the characters, name, that Ace is the rainbow abbreviation for asexual, one of the newer additions to the endless list of sex and gender spectrums not folded into the LGBTQ+ community.

      As Ace asks Gus when he returns back with the tea to find Gus now half-undressed, can we just cuddle? Gus, a bit confused, agrees, but hasn’t yet caught on, and soon turns over to kiss and feel for his friend’s unaroused penis.

      When he questions his would-be lover about what’s happening, Ace finally speaks the truth: “Sex just doesn’t do anything for me.”

      That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t “love” Gus, or that he doesn’t want to be with him. It simply means, if this can be described as simple, that he simply isn’t wired for sex.

      Gus quickly pulls his sweater back on and decides to catch the night train out, explaining that he feels he’s been lied to and that he has to think things over.

        We doubt whether he’ll be back, even though Ace has offered him free rein, if they were to become a couple as he hopes, to have sex outside of the relationship, something in which Gus is not at all interested.

       Frankly, I too would have gotten up out of that bed and taken off as quickly as possible. I surely feel sorry for asexual individuals, and I think I can imagine why they might want find a home in which they too were accepted, as the LGBTQ+ flag has seemed to offer them. Certainly, they too are among the sexual queers of the universe.

       But for me, as I’ve written many times in this volume, the LGBTQ community has always been primarily about sex, until issues of gender were further brought into it, transforming the transexual designation generally applied to “drag queens” into one of transgender, even if not all transgender individuals are at all comfortable with their same-sex couples. Once they have found their new gender, many who have finally found the body in which they are comfortable desire what they describe as a normative heterosexual relationship. One need only see Patrick Lang’s 2005 film, One Man’s Treasure, to be reminded that some transgender individuals go out of their way to make it clear that they are not gay, even to one another. See, for example, Alicya Eyo and Sophy Holland’s 2015 short film, Brace.

      But where else might the transgender community find a home? And I understood that even back in the pre-Hitler Berlin days of Magnus Hirschfeld that he had already made room for them in his Sexual Institute. And I am totally sympathetic with any community that must face such sexual shunning and humiliation.

      Yet having no interest in sex seems somehow out of the umbrella, a bit like purposely sitting outside the cover of the umbrella in the rain, or demanding of those involved in a football game that they join him or her in collecting shells or going hunting. I recognize the loneliness they must feel, particularly when they seek out same-sex relationships. And they certainly must have felt as isolated as young boys and girls as gays and lesbians felt in the high school locker rooms. But I doubt that most of them were bullied for simply bowing out of sex. They simply stood outside of the picture, loners surely, but necessarily a threat to the heterosexual jock and his jockeys.

     For me homosexuality is nearly all about the sex, the desire and joy of kissing, sucking, and fucking another man. Living with another man, one realizes, as in any relationship, there are certainly far more central issues if the couple is going to survive; yet sex is always there, just as it is for most heterosexual couples, and when that ceases it either means you’ve turned into an old couple or both gays and straights need to look elsewhere for their fulfillment of their bodies, which is at least half of the body and soul balance we humans are said to represent.

     The asexual being perhaps can only find fulfillment in the arms of another asexual being, or perhaps in a relationship like the one the Ace character in this short film proposes, where his partner comes home from work each day to be with a companion, but seeks some of the greatest pleasures and thrills in life elsewhere, which generally results in a great deal of instability as well as resentment surely on the part of the ace, if not the same feeling of loneliness many a night.

     After watching the character of Tobie Donovan in the TV-series Heartstopper, who spends most of the first two seasons with his head stuck in a book, I did grow even more sympathetic; but I still remain unconvinced. The Aces have seemingly bowed out of looking for the rainbow before the storm has even let up.

     I must admit, however, that Ukrainian-born director Andrii Zhuravskyi, who now lives in London, has presented one of the most sympathetic portraits of the phenomenon I’ve yet encountered.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2025).