Julián Hernández | Muchacho en la barra se masturba con rabia y osadía (Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve) / 2015

the dance of sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Emiliano Arenales Osorio and Julián Hernández (screenplay), Julián Hernández (director) Muchacho en la barra se masturba con rabia y osadía (Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve) / 2015 [19 minutes]

 

After reviewing Julián Hernández’s 2020 film, The Day Began Yesterday, I wondered why, although I have evidence that I had seen his 2015 movie Young Man at the Bar Masturbating with Rage and Nerve, I had yet gotten around to commenting on it; meanwhile I’d forgotten most of what I’d seen. Watching it once again this morning, I realized why I, metaphorically speaking, had pushed the pause button. Obviously, I needed to assimilate this strange biopic, in which this seemingly totally sexually honest narrator begins the film under his rent-boy name of Jonathan, reporting that he charges 1,500 pesos per hour (about $75 US dollars) before describing his own body and his very few don’ts of any sexual meeting.   

    Yet only a few moments later begins to describe his own life from his childhood on. The actor Cristhian Rodríguez, who performed also in Hernández’s 2007 gay adult sexual fantasy Bramadero describing here, presumably, his own life which begins in a small town near Mazatlán where he was such an effeminate child that everyone knew he was gay, several older straight men taking advantage of that fact, returning to fuck him several times, and leading him to believe that gays were like women but with whom no true relationship with a man was possible.

      But even here we begin to question the complete veracity of his stories. The distance between biography and fiction increasingly becomes something to be questioned. Rodríguez does not at all appear that effeminate except when he imitates effeminacy. And his totally fluid and fascinatingly complex narrative makes you realize that this is a written text (by the director and Emiliano Arenales Osorio) that he is speaking.

      Nonetheless, we quickly are convinced of its authenticity when the narrator describes his move to the city of Mazatlán where he discovered that men, sometimes both macho men, openly kissed and even effeminate gays grabbed male butts and encouraged sexual activity—in short, that relationships between queers was not only possible but a given outside of his small pueblo—but perhaps even more importantly that he not only loved to dance but was perceived as others to be gifted dancer.

      A scene where Rodríguez is teaching popular dancing to a group that appears preparing for a gay drag number certainly suggests his terpsichorean skills. But when he describes joining a famous dance company and moving to Mexico City to study modern dance, we have little evidence except a small dance segment and a splendid work-out on gymnastic rings that he was actually invited to join the famed Mexico City dance company La Cebra Danza Gay. Although Rodríguez mentions the founder José Rivera Moya, there is no record that I could find that he was actually among the six-male dancers which constitute the main company.

      And almost the moment the narrator begins to describe his love of dance and his need to discover dance technique, his discussion of the body quickly turns to his even greater commitment to sex, which he claims he was forced to use as a source for outside income because of the low pay he made as a dancer. Teaching popular dance is truly believable, but given the strictures of a dancer’s career I doubt that staying up most nights as a rent-boy or escort might serve as a source of income that most dancers might choose.

      Moreover, it quickly becomes apparent that Jonathan / Rodríguez or whoever else’s story we are being told is far more addicted to sex than he is interested in studying dance. But even here we quickly perceive that as attractive as Rodríguez is, that he is not a high-end escort but a small-time prostitute who basically engages in role-playing with his young clients, at one point entering the room as if he were a birthday gift for a client, perhaps a shy boy just in town, not so very different from the “cowboy” figure brought to the birthday party of The Boys in the Band. And in another instance, he role-plays a wheel-chair bound victim who his client quickly tosses upon the bedsprings and fucks.

     Suggesting that he is also well known as a renowned bar performer, we see him atop a small bar performing lame versions of what Montreal’s Stock Bar muscle-bound performers alike what in London, Berlin, or Mexico City’s Divina stage dancers do every night (although Marrakech, where he performs is a well-known Mexico City gay bar). 

      Our narrator boldly declares that although he engages in such sex to supplement his income, he is far happier in his lifestyle than he would be working at Starbucks or any other such job, again restating his complete addiction to sex.

       Yet soon after, he declares that by age 40 he hopes to be able to own a laundromat, which is almost comic—despite its My Favorite Laundromat associations—given its low-paying dividends and the hard work one needs to involve oneself for its upkeep. If you want to talk about menial jobs, we can begin with that of a laundromat assistant, although perhaps he sees himself only as the owner, not the operator of the place. What is also interesting is that this narrator, despite his totally open sexuality, has almost a compulsion for cleanliness, telling his first potential client that he will suck any appendage as long as it’s clean, as the frame switches to a large block of pristine white showers where we see our narrator among others enjoying their refreshment; there is no sex among these visitors to purity.

        But, of course, the issue of age also brings up the most important issue of this almost manic and truly comic flow of verbal babble: both the worlds of sexual escorts and dancers, being all about the body, are notoriously short-lived given the demands of bodily movement and beauty; as cute as Rodríguez is, he is clearly already over the prime of most dancers and male prostitutes. At one point the narrator suggests, upon his move to Mexico City, that he has little time left because he is turning 22; but my guess, particularly given the dates of earlier films starring Rodríguez, that he is closer to 30 or beyond, nearing the end of such careers.

       It hardly matters, however, since the actor is so very compelling and believable in his role. And we get another glimpse in this film of director Julián Hernández’s righteous claim that sex is very much at the heart of the gay experience, despite the continued attempts to wash it over with heterosexual domesticity in contemporary film and narrative of 21st century LGBTQ life.

      But the story he tells does very much matter since it has been that of many another young man come to the city from the provinces in search of love and success. We gather that Rodríguez’s character has never found nor will never find either, and we realize that the not-so-longer very young man sitting at the end of the bar has suddenly only himself to entertain with rage and, yes, a great deal of nerve, which is what makes him so very watchable.

 

Los Angeles, August 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).