Dave Sarrafian | I Quit / 2009

what’s sex got to do with it?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dave Sarrafian (screenwriter and director) I Quit / 2009 [20 minutes]

 

I Quit is the second Sarrafian film I’ve seen, and both share a sense of gay community and a devoted love of Philadelphia, the city near to where the young director grew up. I once taught at the university he attended, Temple, so I share some sentimental emotions in watching his movies. Yet there is also something clumsy and over-plotted about his films, wherein he creates situations that I find simply hard to believe.

    In this film the idea that a cute young 20-year-old, Finn Page (Aaron Michael Davies) would abandon any other gay relationship simply because his first love affair—of only 3 weeks—failed is hard to imagine. If nothing else, the simple biological call to sex would draw him back into the sexual fold. But perhaps already in 2009 (in today’s queer films it has become a standard pattern of behavior), this serious-minded young man is seeking only a permanent relationship that allows no room for one-night stands.

    His friends, Stevie Perkins (Gabrielle Barnett) and barrista Truman Blake (Nick May) might certainly agree with me, encouraging their friend get back into the swing of dating and refusing to believe his threat to “quit” the gay life.

     But a few weeks later, with their friend still not having hooked up with anyone new, they throw a party and pay a straight guy, evidently, to plant a deep kiss on Finn’s lips. Finn is somewhat pleasantly taken back, but it doesn’t work, particularly when he accidentally overhears the guy demanding more money from Truman for having had to kiss “the faggot.”

     Finn rushes off, Truman behind him, finally cornering him and attempting to tell his friend that he’s behaving childishly in cutting himself off of all possibilities on account of one bad experience. It does not end well, with Finn finally slugging Truman in the eye.

    An apology is made and accepted before the end of the film, and in the last frame Finn has even come across someone to whom he might be attracted, the beginning of a new sexual conquest.

      But with the determination to turn every meet-up into a permanent relationship, I doubt this young man will easily find happiness. It seems to have become a sort of fetish now for some young gay men that every sexual encounter has to be seeded with the desire to make it into a life-time commitment, monogamy required.

      In his later film, Queerboy Begins a young man has even killed his unfaithful companion’s Grindr dates and strung up his lover in his basement. Does this represent the new gay imitation of heterosexual behavior? In my day sex was enjoyable, pleasurable, fun, not a route necessarily into marriage or even a relationship that lasts more than a week. When sex actually leads to something more complex than a series of pleasant physical sensations, it is usually the result of a far more complex mix of mind and heart, of shared or perhaps intriguingly different personalities, behavior patterns, activities, and values.

     But then, what do I know? I’m an old man who long ago stumbled into a very long-term relationship at an early age despite my negative attitudes toward monogamy and marriage. And I agree with John Waters’ observation: “I don’t trust anybody my age who says, ‘Oh, we had more fun when we were younger.’ No we didn’t. That just means you’re an old fart and don’t know what’s going on.” And John Waters is only a year older than I am.

     Yet we did have fun, at least I did. And sex without any strings attached was very much a part of that pleasure. And I never looked over a heterosexual coupling as a model which I wanted to imitate, as does Finn.

 

Los Angeles, August 10, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).