Joshua Hernandez | Pretty Boy Josh / 2020

coming through

by Douglas Messerli

 

Joshua Hernandez (screenwriter and director) Pretty Boy Josh / 2020 [9 minutes]

 

Pretty Boy Josh is a film featuring its author and director, Joshua Hernandez, that belongs to a new genre that might be described as personal confessions of “coming out” or the “things get better” movies. Most of these short films and clips are meant to be inspirational for younger LGBTQ individuals who are currently having a difficult time in their lives, and this work lives up to that purpose.    

     Yet Hernandez’s work does something more than most of these works in its expression—particularly in the early frames of this film—of how the LGBTQ community itself can sometimes be off-putting to young individuals attempting to come out. Pretty Boy Josh begins with a litany of supposedly admiring phrases that themselves seem alienating, as if the handsome man we see on the screen were not an individual filled with contradictions but a single “thing”: “hey handsome,” “hey cutie,” “you’re so tall,” “you’re so skinny,” “you’re a vegan?” “you’re Latino?” “oh, you’re gay,” “you’re a bottom, right?” “you’re a twink.” “you’re just so pretty.”

     These may all be true, but they’re as dislocating in their good intentions as were the phrases such as “girlie,” “sissy,” “homo,” and “faggot” that he heard as a young, self-expressive boy who “hung-out with the girls.” Hernandez admits that growing up those words truly hurt him, but perceives in looking back, “if someone were to call me those names today I’d probably look him in the face, laugh, and say thank you.” Clearly he has, as D. H. Lawrence expressed it, “come through.”

      But the rest of his history he recounts is not so immediately transformative.

     When he had his first male-on-male kiss at age 19, he was both excited and terrified, but also kept wondering what his parents might think, particularly coming as he does from a family in which his mother was Puerto Rican / Dominican and his father is Cuban / Bahamian. Those cultural links with their macho / patriarchal values along with his Roman Catholic upbringing meant that it was frightening to even imagine that a son might be homosexual. He admits that he was surrounded by “toxic masculinity” and “a narrow definition of what a man should be.”

      What happened to Hernandez is what occurs to so many young men, women, and others, the feeling of internalized homophobia begins to make the young person dislike him or herself. So that first kiss, that first sexual experience at age 19 made him feel as if doors opened up inside him and, as he puts it, “I got a taste of what a queer life could look like.” Most such narratives might end here, with perhaps the closure of the central figure sharing his new identity with others, the normal “coming out” process.

     But for Josh Hernandez things suddenly became even more difficult, the “shitstorm that was to come.” When he was 20 he was diagnosed with an inflammatory bowel disease, ulcerative colitis. He lost 20 pounds, he bled uncontrollably, woke up sweating many nights, he defecated himself and “I felt like I was choking under the expectations of people who had no idea of how much tape I needed to hold myself together.”

      When he turned 21 he realized he had remained and wasn’t going to drown. But “I was still sick and in the closet.” At 22 he began to go on dates and traveled but he was still sick—and in the closet. At 23 he continued to have “no idea where my life was heading,” and he was still sick and in the closet. He finally told his parents. Evidently their reaction was that of many parents, anger and accusations, but gradually understanding, love, and eventually support. “My relationship with my parents blossomed.” His health improved and he started liking himself again. He ends: “I’m 25 now and I’m proud of the man I’ve become.”

      This moving and sweet portrait of a singular gay experience but with enough general similarities that it resonates with all young LGBTQ people, was supported by the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs. There should be more works of this quality produced across the US, but I am fearful that in our reactionary times such voices may go unheard.

 

Los Angeles, October 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2022).