Sean Devaney | Bare / 2012

remembrance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Brandt Miller (screenplay), Sean Devaney (director) Bare / 2012 [8 minutes]

 

Sean Devaney’s 2012 film takes us back briefly with the terrible plague years of US LGBTQ culture. A young man (played by Chris Damon), not of that era, but a more recent HIV-status individual contemplates the situation after having had wonderful sex as a bottom for a man who has not used a condom and, like so many over the decades, is misinformed and mislead about his sexual actions. 

    As a “top” (the one who fucks the other) the character played by Jonathan Hinman presumes he is not prone to infection. His comments send Damon’s character into a not so very pleasant series of memory associations which take him through his early years after moving to “the city” when an open sexual encounter resulted in his infection.

     Although he now just needs to take his medications daily—after all HIV-infected individuals survive these days—as director Devaney attempts to remind us, the “plague” nonetheless is still with us.

     The trouble with this dark Proustian short film is its paucity of images. Obviously shot on a low budget, it keeps taking us back into the same bar, the same downstairs sexual encounter and another pick-up image in a park or woods. And frankly, after a while, despite its good intentions, the film is rendered, accordingly, into a rather boring recital of the past that has led him to the good sex bed of the moment.

      Gay men—and all sexually active human beings—should be reminded again and again that COVID is not the only disease out there that continues to kill off thousands each year, AIDS unlike COVID affecting young men and women more often than the elderly. The subject may seem passé and utterly boring to younger generations; but that it should remain on their minds and not left to be forgotten is clear to all intelligent individuals. All the more reason, however, to present it within the structure of more compelling visual narratives than Devaney has provided in his work.

 

Los Angeles, October 14, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (October 2022).