John Lochland | Sweat / 2008

all sweat up

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Lochland (screenwriter and director) Sweat / 2008 [15 minutes]

 

Simon (David Paisley) has recently broken up with his lover who had accused him of not being sexually experimental enough, code presumably for not seeking out others outside of their relationship. To correct that “problem,” he visits London’s Vauxhall Chariots Sauna, a bit like the old backroom of porn shops, most of them closed with the onslaught of AIDS.

     But this world of naked, wet bodies—wet with sweat, water, and cum—the showers, saunas, rooms for private sex, and the halls where some even perform their sexual acts, all seem to be colored in garish reds and greens, like a perverted Christmas nightmare of Dante’s Hell. There are peek portals to check out the saunas, and rubber slatted hangings to serve as easy-access doors. Shower sex is also ripe for voyeurism as are the saunas themselves if shared with more than the couples or threesomes engaged in sex.           

      Simon first meets up with a seeming friendly man, Tim (Tom Frederic) in the locker room, where even before he’s entered beyond the doors of “no return” Simon’s clearly nervous. Within, Tim tries to approach him, but Simon runs, suggesting it’s too hot, which as Tim points out is really point of it all, getting hot both in temperature and sexual craving.

      At another point, Tiger (Tom Swash), a “seventeenish” (his own term, suggesting he’s probably 16 or even younger) rent boy, having run away from the older man who’s hired him, also approaches him for sex, but Simon insists that he’d rather just talk.

       In the showers one of a couple in the midst of sex, turns his attentions to Simon, provoking a negative reaction from his partner. And at another point while Simon is simply cruising the place, a bearded S&M-seeming figure approaches from the back. It is the only moment that Simon seems to react with some sexual interest, grabbing the man’s head to bring it closer to his own in a gesture close to lust. But even here he quickly pulls away.

      This is not his world, and as he tells Tim on his way out, he really doesn’t know why he came the place.

      Obviously, he’s lonely and seeking sex, but this voyeur’s paradise is clearly not the right place for a shy man who obviously has wanted a more committed relationship. At least Tim leaves him a note, providing his number in case Simon is seeking out a safer and private sexual experience.

      Most active gay man involved in the scene in the 1970s and 80s knows the eerie worlds of backroom sex dens, the baths, and such saunas. Those who have seen British filmmaker Ron Peck’s revelatory Nighthawks of 1978 will certainly recognize something of the backroom bar and club sex world, and those who earlier caught David Buckley’s Saturday Night at the Baths of 1975 will have some sense of the odd pleasures of the baths. Frank Ripploh’s 1981 Taxi to the Toilets, moreover, showed us some aspects of the gay toilet sex that this world shares. Similarly, Lochland’s film is fascinating for its representation of early 21st century reincarnation of openly public sex havens, many of them having been closed throughout the late 1980s and 1990s due to AIDS.

     To the outsider, surely, these must appear to be hells, worlds unimagined to most heterosexual men and women. But gay men discovered early on, in the days before computer hook-ups, the best way to meet other men for sex was to go somewhere that provided both safe haven and a spot to participate in sex itself. Rented rooms or apartments were often watched by landlords and neighbors. And suburban homes sometimes also contained a wife and children. Gay sex was public in a way that their everyday lives were closeted. And there was an immense excitement in that fact, a kind of freedom that broke out of the friendly dinner parties and home-bound sex gatherings. This was a world where you accepted the thrill of not knowing both what might happen and who it happened with.

      Our young handsome hero, Simon, is obviously a person who wants to know where he’s going and with whom he’s taking the trip, without getting all sweat up.

 

Los Angeles, June 19, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2023)