Benjamin Howard | Toast / 2015

what is the consequence of a kiss?

by Douglas Messerli

 

Benjamin Howard (screenwriter and director) Toast / 2015 [9 minutes]

 

Some days while watching the thousands of short, mostly student-made gay films I seek out, I become confused and puzzled, particularly when I see films such as Benjamin Howard’s 9-minute Toast, a work which attempts to take us into some sexual breach where I, as a 78-year-old man, can not imagine there might be anything going on worthy of more than a smile and a pat on the head.

    Jake (Kristian Rodriguez), a hunky straight college-student has been out drinking at what appears to be a fraternity party for most of the night, and his friend Ethan (Nick Eiter), looking after him, tries to help him home safely, since they apparently share the same apartment.

    Jake is so many sheets to the wind that he doesn’t even know what he’s saying, as he praises the fact that Ethan is such good friend who cares for him enough to look after him. As they stumble up the stairs and into the apartment, he begs for his friend to toast him a slice of bread, presumably to help him sober up.

    But in the process, sitting on the floor, Jake continues to slobber out his praises for his friend, who we soon discover is gay through Jake’s ruminations. Jake admits that he wonders…and stops there, incoherently babbling out a further message and finally enacting what it might be that he wonders about by placing a kiss on Ethan’s mouth.

   Ethan, startled by the event, drops the toast that has just popped up onto his drunken friend’s chest, and scurries off to bed as if some terrible occurrence has just taken place.

    By morning, it’s clear that Jake, now sober, so strongly regrets his actions that he feels lit necessary to confess to his girlfriend Julie (Marissa McKinney) what has happened, and makes an appointment to see Ethan, begging him to try to forget and forgive his actions. He’s terrified that the events of the last evening might end their friendship, arguing what he needs, more than anything, is a friend just to whom he can just talk.

     That closing statement which ends the film, hints that perhaps he still does “wonder” about some things: perhaps concerning his sexuality, what it might be like to have sex with a man, or just what it’s like to live as a gay man as his friend does.

     Although the film seems to find Jake’s behavior of the night before a great significance, needing forgiveness, to me and I am sure to others of my generation, all it really needed was a pat on the head, and maybe even a gentle kiss on the cheek—certainly not the toast on the chest and a race off to one’s own bed in apparent confusion, all to suggest that their friendship certainly might be “toast,” their relationship “ruined or defeated.”

     A kiss is just a kiss, and Jake’s was just a drunken kiss, hardly worth any fuss at all in my mind except perhaps for a friendly smile. If it happened to me when I was Ethan’s age (even that phrase now dates me), I’d simply have helped my friend stand, deposited him on the couch, and tucked the covers around the sleeping hunk of flesh, maybe even awarded him a goodnight kiss on the forehead so gently placed that he wouldn’t even remember it in the morning.

      What I’m wondering is…what is all this fuss about? Why the guilt, the fear, the act of rejection, or even the hint of further problems down the road? What on earth has Jake done to warrant such an apology, a fear that he might lose his best friend, or even more seriously, as the film’s information liner puts it, the necessity that the “boys [need] struggle to deal with the unintended consequences of the incident?” What consequence might there possibly be? What happened that one might even describe it as an “incident?”

     Having encountered such melodramatic reactions now in several of these student films, I fear that youth today have become a mass of simpering prudes, fearful lest the slightest gesture towards sexual behavior might cause an earthquake. It is one thing if Jake had fondled his friend’s dick or Julie’s breasts without their consent—but even then, I might argue, it depends upon the circumstances. But what is the consequence of a kiss? A kiss isn’t sex. It’s just a sign of affection, particularly in this instance. Have we older folk grandfathered in an entire generation so afraid to even come near sexual intimations that guilt immediately descends from the skies in the form of a morning-after strike of lightning? Some times a cigar is just a cigar, a squeeze of the shoulder nothing more than a friendly gesture expressed through touch, and not at all an act that calls for apology, analysis, and forgiveness.

    For god’s sake, what might have happened if Jake had really wanted to explore gay sex? Would his best gay friend reject him as aggressive and unfit? At that age, I’d have invited Jake into my bed in a minute, and we’d both awakened with a lingering smile, and maybe a wink. Today, it appears that it all leads to consequences serious enough to be the subject of a totally insubstantial little movie like this one.

 

Los Angeles, September 18, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).