Glenn Gaylord | Boychick / 2001

master debater

by Douglas Messerli

 

Glenn Gaylord (screenwriter and director) Boychick / 2001 [12 minutes]

 

The Yiddish expression of affection for a young boy, boytshik, anglicized as boychick is something parents or grandparents used to call their sons and grandsons. But in this basically TV-like sketch a contemporary mother (Andrea La Bella) can’t stop using the term in calling into her son’s room where, when she doesn’t hear a sound, she imagines her son is “pulling his pud.” Not that she has any problem with that. Being a “hip” mother, she shouts after him, as he leaves the house for school, “It’s okay to masturbate in your room.” The neighbors aren’t amused. 

     What her son (Ben Lang) is really doing in his room, however, is far more pernicious. His favorite singer and dancer, Ashley Hart (Linsey Girardot, a kind of cartoon version of the living cartoon Britney Spears) has come down from her wall poster and is attempting to teach him to get into the rhythm of things so that he might impress the boy of his dreams, captain of the Debate Club (Greg Siff).

      In class, Boychick does everything he can to find a reason to bend down just to get a better view of Debate Boy’s butt. Not that his gay teacher (Nic Arnzen), discussing gay Hollywood stars and their “beards,” minds in the least. But Debate Boy himself is completely oblivious.

      In the hall, Boychick imagines an encounter with Debate Boy in which finally gets up his nerve to put what Ashley Hart has taught him to a test, and yes, Debate Boy strips off his shirt and joins him in a raucous recreation of something that might possibly be found in movies such as the movie Staying Alive (1983), but stays in his head only as he discovers, waking from his trance, that Debate is still chatting with two chicks by his locker.

 

      Boychick tries to put all his fears behind him, walking in back of the Debate Boy, casually running his hands across his ass; but the busy straight guy is oblivious. Poor Boychick returns home, occasionally taking a sniff of his hand, but once more all alone with only Ashley Hart for a friend.

      At the end, this silly little sketch tells us what we might have expected:

 

      “Debate Boy married his high school sweetheart and runs a successful motivational speaker seminar. He has been known to experiment with homosexuality…which he adamantly denies.”

       “Boychick went to college, but comes home to visit his mother quite often. He is currently living with his life partner and is a big faigelah.”

 

 Faigelah is the Yiddish word for a gay person, although it’s far closer in meaning to the word “fag.”

     The corny title I selected for this short essay characterizes the substance of this film.

 

Los Angeles, April 18, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2023).