Brad Hammer and John Duff | Give a Fuck / 2020 [music video]

if only

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Duff (composer and performer), Brad Hammer and John Duff (director) Give a Fuck / 2020 [3.33 minutes] [music video]

 

What better way for the Howard County, Maryland native, singer John Duff to represent the necessary solipsism of the Covid pandemic days than to issue a video in which the singer performs, often at the piano and dressed in the manner of Liberace, demanding that “tired of his own touch,” he needs “to give a fuck”:

 

“I'm insistent on not hittin

till consistent commitment.

I give a fuck

But if I didn't

I'd give a fuck to you”

 

     There are no men or women pictured in this video to suggest to whom he’s addressing his desires in this work; but then who needs them when dressed in red rhinestones, in pink pants and vest, and wearing a tight zebra-skin bikini. As the painting of a man (himself of course) over his grand piano reveals, he’s definitely into men as he joyously sings out:

 

“And if I'm anything I'm honest

Yeah and honestly, I'm modest if

I'm not Puritan-born-again, void of sin,

Well, Let's pretend

I give a fuck

Cause if I didn’t

I’d give a fuck to you

When what I want is

My touch, your touch

All over

Your touch, my touch

Our clothes off

Nobody needs to know what goes on

Say 'I don’t give a fuck'

But I wanna

I wanna give a fuck

I wanna give all my fucks to you

I want strings

I want rings

I wanna do bad things to you

So tell me that you give a fuck

So we can get in love

Get rough

Get it up

Can’t get enough

I wanna give a fuck

So if you give a fuck

I’m giving all my fucks to you.”

 

   If “Hookie-Pookie,” made in the same year, was not so secretly all about cunnilingus, “Give a Fuck” is most definitely a gay anthem to what the title advocates—if only he could.

   Duff himself attests to two slightly contradictory desires in this video, first to be as outrageously “out” as the celebrities he parodies. As Out Magazine describes it:

“Duff serves TLC realness in purple silk pajamas on a bed covered in used tissues, and gives his best Liberace in dazzling sequins, feathers and lace. For the video, Duff wanted to play "the man who has everything except for love."

     Duff tells Out that he wanted to channel "queer superstars of yesteryear who never got to be themselves" like Liberace in the video. "I feel it's my duty to be as full out as they would've liked to have been, with all of the glamour and pizzazz of their time," he says, "It's like a missing puzzle piece. I mean just imagine how fabulous some of these men would've been in an era where glamour was real."

 

    But, of course, the pandemic didn’t permit the fulfillment of the song’s desire. And, Duff, himself, moreover, is not as promiscuous as his song portrays him to be:

"I wish I was sexually promiscuous," Duff continues in a statement, "That doesn't jive with my value system. I need some real attachment in order for me to feel comfortable in a physical scenario." He adds, "If I found the right situation, I'd love to give a million fucks. Until then, I'm good just singing. I think the kids call me 'demisexual.'"

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2025).