Mark Christopher | The Dead Boy’s Club / 1992

dancing into the past

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Christopher (screenwriter and director) The Dead Boy’s Club / 1992

 

Iowa-born Mark Christopher is best known today for his 1998 film 54 about New York City’s renowned Studio 54, a movie starring Ryan Phillippe, Salma Hayek, Mike Myers, Neve Campbell, and numerous others which he later remade in a German-produced director’s cut in for the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival, restoring 45 minutes cut from the original. It was acclaimed as a modern classic as opposed the mostly negative reviews received for the earlier version.

     Before and since 54, however, Christopher directed three very well-received short films, most recently Heartland (2007), and earlier Alkali, Iowa (1995) and his first film, The Dead Boys’ Club (1992) which have all been popular on the LGBTQ film circuit.

     In his first film, a young man, Toby (Nat DeWolf), recently graduated from a college in Wisconsin, is visiting his older cousin Packard (Erik Van Der Wilden) in New York City.

     Packard is a gay man who has just lost his lover, John R., to AIDS, while his young cousin, although also gay, is shy and taken aback by the open sexuality of the New York City streets. Although he is clearly attracted to the men he encounters, he cannot seem to carry through with their invitations, tossing away, for example, a scrap of paper a cute man on the street, Dick (Matt Decker) has just handed him with his telephone number, hinting of a sexual tryst.

     Packard and his campy friend are busy packing up John’s possessions, a painful process for the older cousin as he is forced to face the remnants of their evidently fabulous relationship. In the pre-AIDS in which they lived, apparently John was a bar favorite, a sexually popular man who attracted nearly everyone he encountered.

     We know this, however, mostly through the presence of a kind of ghost of the dead man located, queerly enough, in his party shoes, which Packard presents as a gift to his young cousin. The minute Toby puts on the shoes, reminding one a little of Dorothy’s ruby slippers or the red shoes which refuse to leave Victoria Page’s feet in The Red Shoes, he is suddenly transported to another time and place, a bar filled with beautiful, half-naked men who dance and greet one another with sexual aplomb, all of them definitely exuding a kind of animal magnetism.

      Moreover, as Toby soon discovers, the minute he wears John’s shoes into public spaces, he too is suddenly transformed into a sexual being to whom nearly everyone he encounters is automatically attracted. The slightly plain-looking country boy immediately becomes a sexual object who others must possess and they, in turn, become themselves beautiful beings.

      Toby first discovers this phenomenon when he visits a gym locker room where the man dressing next to him (Erik Estrada) suddenly becomes a bronzed stud who is immediately entranced by the country boy and is ready to rush him naked into the shower until Toby unlaces and pulls off the shows, when his visions vanish, although the now lesser attractive gym-goer is still willing to follow through the sexual encounter. Toby, however, stunned by the transformations he has just witnessed feels almost “haunted” by the magic shoes, leaving them purposely behind in the locker.

      Soon after, however, they are delivered back to him, and Packard, about to take him out to his favorite bar, insists he wear them on the town. The minute Toby enters the bar, he is once more returned to the haunted world of beautiful men and is quickly grabbed up by Dick, the man he had encountered previously in the street, and taken off to his apartment. The boy wakes up in bed with the man lying naked next to him, still asleep after what has clearly been a night of intense love-making.

      He quickly dresses, suddenly discovering that in his pocket he still has his unopened packet containing a prophylactic. Horrified by the fact, he puts on the other man’s shoes and scurries off, his lover of the previous night turning over to reveal a couple of opened packets, making it clear to the audience that they had actually practiced safe sex, even while Toby remains ignorant of the fact.

      But Toby is now seriously troubled, particularly when Dick shows up with the shoes and demanding his own be returned. Scared by what the shoes do to him, he tosses them out the window where they immediately are scooped up by a street vendor who places them among the books and records for sale.

      After the funeral ceremony for Packard’s lover, Toby approaches his cousin to ask whether he believes that things can be possessed, like people, houses—shoes. Packard only laughs at the strange question, but admits that it is a difficult time for everyone.

      What we realize, obviously, is that John’s shoes reveal a past before AIDS when, as those who lived in the open sexual world of the 1970s and early 80s have mythologized it, everyone was young and dazzling, ready to tear off their clothes with a single glance. I was there; and it’s true, I assure you!

      Soon after, we see Toby purveying the street vendor’s albums, while covertly eyeing the magic shoes sitting nearby for sale. Although he has a record album in his hand, he quickly puts it back with the intention of buying back the shoes. But as he reaches for them another boy grabs them, another young man who soon may also be transported momentarily to a place from which those who might confirm its existence have mostly disappeared.

 

Los Angeles, March 19, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).