becoming a man
by Douglas Messerli
Dennis Shinners (screenwriter and director) Area X / 2007 [15 minutes]
The first few frames of this film remind me a bit of
Paul Morrissey’s Forty Deuce, which begins at the location of this work,
the New York City Port Authority Bus Terminal, where one of the characters of
the Morrisey film has taken up quarters in a terminal bathroom where he hooks
up with gay johns.
In Area
X a hustler named Marco (Antony Raymond) is on the phone trying to settle a
deal, whether if be a sexual meet-up, a promise to provide services, or some
other shady matter we can’t tell. But it’s clearly not going well, and he’s run
out of his last quarter, forcing him to enter the bathroom to beg a quarter off
someone on the toilet, who finally drops it, only too late for Marco’s call.
We soon
encounter a young boy, fresh off the train, Paul (Matt Schuneman) who’s somehow
found his way to underground area known by station authorities as Area X, where
a bar serves for hustler meetings with their equally disreputable customers,
most of them old men, such as the figure that appears later in this short film
(Anthony Galluccio).
But now
sitting at the bar is a handsome young boy, who Marco simply can’t resist.
Charming and savvy to the young kid’s likely problems, he listens to Paul’s
truly bizarre story. Still at home, but working a job in construction in order
to pay his way through community college, he discovers that his values and
ideals collide with his father’s, who can’t imagine why he hasn’t yet married.
One day,
his dad inexplicably picked him up from work, again grilling him about his love
life and soon after picking up a female prostitute, who as Paul relates it, didn’t
even know if the old man or the boy is to be her customer. Neither did Paul,
who—in the manner of the central characters in short films such as Gregory
Cooke’s $30 (1999), Cameron Thrower’s Pretty Boy (2015), Taisia
Deevva’s The Cure (2023), and Denis Laikhov’s The White Crows (2023)—quickly
perceives, however, that this is a macho challenge for him to “become a true
man,” the father dropping him and the distraught girl off at a seedy roadside
motel and handing him two hundred dollars, insisting he not return home until
he has become a man.
Paul used
the money to get to New York City, and is now there, ready to pay for a couple
of rounds with his newfound confident.
Marco has already argued that the only the
kid is going to survive in the city is to become a hustler, like him, who when
things go well can make a lot of money; and it’s clear he knows he has a “gay”
pigeon on the hook, soon after luring the cute boy into the john for quick sex.
It takes the boy a full trip back to the bar to clear up the bill for him to
realize that although he has now truly “become a man,” his wallet is missing
with no way to chase after the endless street travelling Marco “Polo.”
And the
next scene finds Paul playing out the very role that Marco has argued that he
should pursue; he has no choice, he believes, but to sell his body to find
enough money to find a place to sleep.
I was
there, in much the same place in 1969, determined to stay in New York without a
dollar in my pocket; but I was clever, offering up my daily services as an
office worker or typist until I lucked my way into a gem of a job at Columbia
University. But most gay boys like Paul don’t have the luck or evidently the
intelligence to get away from the Port Authority Bus Terminal as quickly as
their legs can carry them. And I never visited Area X.
Los Angeles, October 23, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October
2025).
No comments:
Post a Comment