Lasse Nielsen | Tim og Fløjtedrengen (Tim and the Fluteboy) / 2018

sending the gay boy off to the closet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lasse Nielsen and Brent Petersen (screenplay), Lasse Nielsen (director) Tim og Fløjtedrengen (Tim and the Fluteboy) / 2018 [16 minutes]

 

It’s somewhat sad to see the same director of the 1970s, who created two major feature films (Leave Us Along and You Are Not Alone), both openly dealing with long-haired boys in love, now directing a rather amateurish-looking production to warn against gay teen suicide. Of course, the raw films of the late 70s, with their adolescent nudity—no matter its innocence—would be unthinkable in today’s sexual climate unless it were wrapped in boy-love anime in a cellophane Asian inscription. Even a picture of the two boys taking in the shower about their bodies got me banned from Google for representing pedophilia, neither my nor the director’s intention; indeed, the older was telling the younger how to keep clean. In Denmark, for example—Nielsen’s home country—the age of consent is 15; in California, where I live, it is 18.

     As I have reflected upon this subject several times throughout the years, however, over the last many decades we have become hysterics when it comes to nudity, a condition I can only see growing worse. Although pornography of many sorts rumbles through our daily lives, the nude male body is still verboten, particularly when it represents a young person under a “magically” numbered age of consent that varies from country to country and in the US even state to state.

     The long-haired beauty of Tim and the Fluteboy, Tim (Justin Geertsen) is rightfully angry from the beginning of this moral tale, as he goes stalking through a woods, banging nature with a large stick after he has been described as a faggot, presented with a rope in his backpack, and told to end his life or be outed to the entire school. He is, sadly, on his way to do just that, to hang himself from a high tree. Fortunately, the branch breaks before he can tighten the noose.

     Or is it really fortune, fate, luck? Tim, so he explains was visited by a beautiful boy playing a flute (Jonathan Lindinger) who, we discover, was Marius Jensen, a once a famous boy model who played a flute in Tivoli park before he committed suicide. He, so the ghost of Marius claims, caused the tree limb to break, since it was in that very woods where he made himself “disappear.”

     Tim, now seeing a psychologist (Mads Korsgaard), shares his fantasy with his doctor, who, upon illegally checking his patient’s cellphone, discovers that this flute-playing fantasy was actually once his own patient, and knows the terrible history of the talented kid.

     Once Tim dares to share with him the problems he’s been having at school, the doctor can finally prescribe a cure: yes, he is probably a homosexual, but he mustn’t let bullies force him away from the house of cards interrelationships that make up each of our lives. In a prescription that I cannot even imagine, this supposedly kind man argues that “To come out of the closet, you first have to enter it.”

     In short, young Tim should enter the closet from which he will soon discover that there are others like him, while eventually coming to the realization that any closet has many exits.

     I suppose that is a way of saying that the obviously “girly” boy with flowing long hair will simply have to “lay low” for a few years (Tim is only 13). But to me it sounds like someone telling a young person to just quiet down and deny his very existence for a time before dancing down the street to proclaim it. It reminds me of the mother, who terrified of offending her relatives during a Thanksgiving celebration, commands her son to “Be gay tomorrow” (the name of the 2022 film directed by Joshua Kellerman), when everyone knows for young teens there is no tomorrow.

    At least this doctor doesn’t pronounce the empty promise of “It will get better,” when we all know that throughout life there will always be a bully just around the corner, and finally you do just have to publicly shame them or utterly ignore his generally meaningless threats.

    In this case, however, since after his young patient has left, the psychologist actually finds a flute on his balcony, the boy’s hallucination may just be real enough to protect him until Timmy finds someone to make music on his own flute.

    As I noted when writing about Nielsen’s 2010 short movie, Lek and the Waterboy, fantasy may often be a good alternative to the world in which in which we currently live.

 

Los Angeles, August 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).