Kristine Stolakis | The Typist / 2015

this could be me

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kristine Stolakis (screenwriter and director) The Typist / 2015 [8 minutes]

 

Based on a 1994 interview for “queer Smithsonian,” archived apparently by San Francisco’s GLBT Historical Society, The Typist, apparently reshot as a film by Kristine Stolakis in 2015 seems to promise a great deal. Afterall, the man being interviewed, Otto Bremerman (played in the film by Monterey Morrissey as an older man) was a gay Korean War veteran who worked as  a typist in the official headquarters of The Pearl Harbor Naval Base in 1952, charged with the tasks of writing up discharges for sailors accused of homosexuality.

     One might imagine a juicy piece of war history, particularly given the fact that Bremerman himself was gay. What might his feelings have been now and, more interestingly, at the time he was charged with such a terrible task. He begins by saying to the interviewer (Dana Edwards) that he knew if he were to let his guard down in any respect to his sexual preferences he too would be kicked out. And he reports that generally the files included a confession and that the offices required of those charged to name names, those individuals also being sought and discharged.

      If you were discharged, there no pensions, no loans for school, no GI Bill, no military benefits, perhaps no jobs when the soldiers returned back to the US. They could not serve in any other branch of the military, although after such an event one wonders they might have sought to.

      It’s fascinating that their approach was similar to those of Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee seeing out Communists as well as gay men and women, but if you’re seeking deeper insights this is not the movie. Stolakis’ work quickly meanders into a clip from Boys Beware, presumably to represent the US attitude to homosexuality at the time. The camera moves down the halls of what is presumably the Naval Base offices, but quickly focuses in on a clacking Royal typewriter with an actor portraying the supposedly “younger Otto.”

       It seems that the homosexual actions that were most dangerous was on the base itself. And later, in describing his own sexuality—which actually takes up most of the film’s short 8-minutes—we learn that there were active gay bars off base where you could regularly meet young ensigns and share rooms with them in the local YMCA (a wonderfully zany notion of an early manifestation of The Village People’s song).

       Growing up in the Midwest, Bremerman describes his own childhood confusion where no one spoke of sex, heterosexual and particularly homosexual. He presumed he would find a woman and marry, and on his first leave from base sought out places “all along the piers” where he might meet women. But by chance he wandered in a gay bar, was picked up by and ensign and shared his room for the night, realizing almost immediately that he liked boys better than girls. And from then on, he admits, he had many a wild night “on the town,” so to speak. As Bremerman puts it: “I got very active, very aggressive in having sexual liaisons most any night you could see the light in front of my door. I took a lot of chances.”

      While reporting what the piers were like, Stolakis relies on old movie reels of soldiers disembarking from ships and truly embarrassingly cutesy cartoon-like images of the soldier’s insignia with guns going off. 

     Only in the last moments of the film does the interviewer actually pose what might have been the major question to be asked from the start. “Were you worried about getting caught?”  His answer is vague of coy, “Yeah, I just couldn’t get dishonorably discharged.” But even here, the interviewer fails to ask him the most important moral questions, shifting instead into the sadly regressive questions of the 80s and 90s, “Are you glad you’re gay?” our WWII veteran answering wisely that he’s not sure since he’s never been any other way. But even here, the regrets pour out, the wishes that he might have left a child on the planet, and his observation that if he had it all to do over again he might have adopted an older gay boy to help protect him as he grows up, a somewhat questionable shift into slightly pedophilic complications.

       It is not until 7 minutes into this film that the narrator asks the important question of whether Bremerman ever asked, in typing up these reports, that “This could be me.” Bremerman’s answer, “Yeah, yeah, and this could be me.”

       The film ends, reporting: “Bremerman completed his term of service in 1954 without being discovered.” Even more devastating with regard to what appears to be the man’s empty conscience is the last of the film’s reportage: “That same year, the Navy discharged 1,353 sailors.”

       There have been many excellent films made about the military and homosexuality, but this surely is not one of them.

 

Los Angeles, December 8, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2023).