Bill Mullan | Disclosure / 2012

revelations

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bill Mullan (screenwriter and director) Disclosure / 2012 [22 minutes]

 

An attractive gay couple, Tyler (Bryan Fox) and Ryan (Derek Viveiros) have been together for two years now, and are considering adopting a child. Indeed, as the film begins with Tyler looking somewhat distracted, Ryan arrives home with several packages, including a new stuffed toy for their impending child.

     But Tyler seems moody, wondering aloud “What if they don’t think I’ll make a good dad?” Ryan reassures him that they’ll love him, and he’ll be the perfect father. Tyler continues to cook the meal. But after eating admits that he has something to share with his lover.

     The shock, accordingly comes early in this 22-minute film, as Tyler reveals that he is not only HIV-positive but that he has known about it for five years.

      Bill Mullan’s film Disclosure (2012) doesn’t try to sidestep the situation, immediately displaying Ryan’s anger, his disbelief that his companion has been so cowardly that he has not found it possible to tell him before, as well as his terror for having endangered his own life.

       Tyler assures him that he has made sure that Ryan has been safe, meaning presumably that he has always worn condoms when fucking his partner. And he explains, when Ryan asks who else he has told, that everyone who has told has left him, and he didn’t want to chance that happening again being so very much in love.

       Tyler’s parents, moreover, apparently won’t speak to him, and when he attempts to call home soon after to tell them the situation, his mother refuses to even have a substantial conversation.

       So too is he given the cold shoulder by his lover, who immediately schedules an appointment with his doctor to be tested for AIDS. Ryan also suggests that it is Tyler who must move out. Obviously, his hurt is deep and justified, and there is no easy resolve for the years of Tyler’s silence.

      Yet, once he has seemingly severed himself from his companion, things subtly shift in this intelligent film. At his long-time family doctor’s office, when he explains he would like an AIDS test, Dr. Radlciff (Bobby Reed) immediately replies that could get such a test in any local clinic. But when Ryan explains he wants it immediately at his doctor’s office, the elderly gentlemen curtly arranges for the test but suggests that his schedule has now gotten so very filled that he plans to arrange for Ryan in the future to see another colleague.

       With his doctor’s refusal to be further involved with anything to do with AIDS or homosexuals, Ryan has encountered his first major sign of rejection, perhaps in his life.

       Depressed, he stops by a local gay bar, starring into space while moodily drinking. Another young man buys him a drink, moving in to talk by using the obvious come-on that Ryan looks like he could use another drink and it appears he needs someone to talk to.

       Although Ryan recognizes the ploy, he obviously is in need of company, perhaps seeing the opportunity to have sex with another man as the beginning of his punishment to his lying lover. In the car, however, as the stranger (Brian Lloyd) begin to kiss Ryan, the latter reluctantly moving forward with the foreplay before backing off, explains that he can’t go through with it.

     When the stranger demands to know why, Ryan admits that he’s HIV-positive—which we must recognize is a kind of lie that stands as a mirror-image of Tyler’s lie to him—his would be partner quickly pulling away before suddenly turning on the driver and severely beating him before exiting the auto.

       Ryan returns to the apartment to observe Tyler laid out on the bed in deep despair, asking only, upon witnessing his face, what happened to him. Again Ryan lies with an odd half-truth: “I got into a fight.”

       But as he sees his lover devastated by his having also abandoned him, he lies down beside him, demanding further explanation of how he acquired the condition that leads to AIDS.

        It appears that after a night a heavy drinking with friends, he almost blacked-out, his friends allowing him to leave with an utter stranger, only to wake up in a strange hotel room alone in bed.

     A few months later, he began to get sick, discovering that he had HIV. When he told his current lover, he immediately left. And now, after finding someone he truly loves, Tyler was terrified that such events would be repeated.

       This “explanation” is perhaps the film’s one major flaw. In attempting to ameliorate the situation the script has turned Tyler into a kind of innocent, someone who was abused instead of simply an ordinary gay man who become HIV-positive for having open sex. Had Tyler not been totally drunken, would Ryan’s empathetic reaction to the situation been any different? Or, more importantly, should it be?  He has, after all, in just a few hours come to realize what happens to those who have contracted the dread disease, often shunned and beaten by those they might have previously trusted.

        Unfortunately, but more understandably, the script has Ryan receiving a call from the doctors soon after reporting that he is HIV-negative. At least there will be someone there to nurse Tyler if he becomes ill again. For Ryan has found a way to forgive his companion as the two fall to sleep in one another’s arms. Tyler’s admission of the facts is far more than a mere “disclosure,” but a startling revelation of how many men and women, homosexual and heterosexual, were and still are treated after acquiring the immunodeficiency virus.

     When he wakes up, Ryan finds Tyler missing. But soon encounters him in the next room with the nephew who, as the dialogue has told us earlier in the work, would be visiting for the day. Watching his lover entertaining his young nephew, Ryan realizes that indeed Tyler would make a good father.

    The film, alas, does not explore the future consequences that both must face, the fact, for instance, that perhaps it would be best, given Tyler’s possible early death, that they give up their dream of adopting a child. Nor does it explain that Ryan’s love in the future will be sorely tried if he will be forced to watch the man he loves slowly die.

     By 2012, however, there drugs that were making significant differences in that future, and we hope for the best. One can only appreciate that Mullan’s film was still considering these issues at such a late date,* and attended to them with such honesty and compassion.

 

*In 2011, the year Mullan was perhaps writing this script, the World Health Organization estimated that 1.7 million people had died of AIDS-related causes, with a total of 34.2 million people infected.

 

Los Angeles, April 22, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).