Douglas Messerli | Grand Deceptions

grand deceptions

by Douglas Messerli

 

Over the years there have been numerous short films in which fathers or other family members, discovering that their young son or relative is gay, who have delusionally attempted to rectify the situation by taking the boy to a whorehouse and sending him off into the arms of female whore. In most of these cases the young boys have been able, with the help of the prostitutes, to delude their fathers or other relatives quite nicely, proceeding on their way to become gay boys by learning their sad lesson not to share their sexuality with family members.

    In some respects, of course, this small genre is related to other films in which family members have responded to their daughter’s and son’s expression of gay sexuality by sending him or her off to conversion centers or programs. Perhaps the most notable of the latter is Jamie Babbitt’s comic But I’m a Cheerleader, which I also discuss in this volume. Saturday Night Live similarly satirized this terrible act in their September 20, 2013 episode titled New Beginnings Summer Camp starring Ben Affleck. In Michael Guillod’s Pastel of 2020, even the conversion therapist blames the mother.

    A far more serious version of the terrorizing conversion therapies, however, is revealed in Joel Edgerton’s 2018 film, Boy Erased. Even worse, moreover, are the horrific family interventions of films such as Rodrigo Bellott’s Unicornio (Unicorn) of 2014 or the homophobic but racist personal brotherly conversion process recounted in Chadlee Skrikker’s Beyond Repair, also of 2018.

    In the films I have gathered here, however, the “conversion” therapy is relatively mild, particularly, as I have suggested, when the “solution” plays along with the suffering gay boy in providing the superficial “cure.”

     The first two, both US products, basically involve nothing more than a father arranging for his son to meet up in a motel room with a hooker, presuming that one time in the sack with a female will most certainly convince his erring son of the natural order of things. In Gregory Cooke’s $30 (1999) and Cameron Thrower’s Pretty Boy (2015), the fathers put their money on the line to prove to their boys that men were born to fuck women, not to play around with their own gender. The proof is in the pudding, so goes the idiomatic version of the proverb that "the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” It’s simply a matter of developing the taste for heterosexual sex.

     Strangely the latter two films, both made by Russian émigrés, basically argue for the same thing. The furious father of Taisia Deevva’s The Cure (2023), who has found some suspicious material in his son’s room, grabs the boy by the arm and pulls him off to the local whore house. In Denis Liakhov’s Les corneilles blanches (The White Crows) also of 2023, the hero’s brother does not know that his sibling is gay, but he is certain that it’s time for him to prove his masculinity by ridding himself of his virginity. In both of these last two cases, failure means violence or even possibly murder. We don’t know how the US fathers might react if their sons didn’t engage in sex with the women they’ve paid for, but their boys are just as terrorized as the Russian youths, all finding wonderful collaborators in the women involved.

 

Los Angeles, October 2, 2025 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2025).