how to attract another guy
by Douglas Messerli
Lasse Nielsen (screenwriter and director) Lek and the Waterboy / 2010 [8
minutes]
Yet another of Lasse Nielsen’s films that focus on
young gay teen love, except that in this film instead of the long-haired Danish
boys, Nielsen focuses on the Thai boy Lek (Thanet Putthasorn) who works at a
small convenience store for his sister every day after school.
The 14-year-old
boy is clearly a hard worker, unlike his companion player who mostly flirts
with a girl who also hangs out in the store. Yet Lek is clearly not into girls,
but is exploring his sexuality, trying out lipstick in the shower, eyeing his
game-playing companion, and imagining how he might win the interest of other
boys.
The next
day when he arrives his checker-playing companion has obviously made a move, as
Lek discovers he and the girl are now involved in a checker match. This time as
he looks into the
On another day he watches a man and his son jokingly sparring over the chips they are purchasing; he gently removes an older drunk from the shop; and and lusts over the waterboy who briefly stops on his delivery route, pouring a small bottle of water over his own beautifully thin chest to cool off.
By the
fourth day represented in this film, Lek arrives by bike to find the checker-board
table empty, the friend and his girlfriend evidently having escaped into their
own world, apart from the narrow duties that Lek fulfills. The small shop seems
totally empty, even his sister having disappeared.
Lek
imagines opening the bathroom door to discover the beautiful water boy
showering, inviting him into the room with him.
At that
moment, the waterboy of reality arrives, handing him a heavy jug of water to carry
into the store as he follows with others, the film ending with the boy’s everyday
tasks, Lek’s fantasies still unfulfilled.
Long gone,
it appears, are the halcyon days of Nielsen’s films of the 1970s when boys of
Lek’s age and even younger gloriously bedded down with other boys to enjoy an
innocent world of pure adolescent lust.
Nielsen,
who made several films about boy-love—almost all of which appear in the pages
of My Queer Cinema—a couple of which might be banned today for their pre-pubescent
nudity and themes of child love, even while his works spawned the safer and
sentimental Asian versions of cinema, cartoons, and animation. Nielsen died at
the age of 74 in 2024.
Los Angeles, September 23, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog
(September 2025).
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