Cam Archer | Bobbycrush / 2003

dreams of a 13-year old gay boy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Cam Archer (screenwriter and director) Bobbycrush / 2003 [10 minutes]

 

Yet another very young boy, in this case only 13, desperately in love with his best straight friend. But this was is somehow different, if nothing else just in its intensity and, as Letterboxd commentator Chucho E. Quintero describes this 2003 work:

 

“It is, however, intoxicatingly sincere. There’s no filter between the emotions and the resulting images. Every frame (and every line of narration) is ripped from the pages of every gay kid’s secret journal. But most importantly, it was made by a 22-year-old film student in 2003, which means I can enjoy it as an unadulterated, nostalgic relic of the past, made with impressive naiveté.”

     Yet there is a great deal of fun in this work as well, as in the telling the movie crew itself helps Bobby (Jasper Bel) to put on his lip stick before he dances on his way to walk his friend Dylan (Cassidy Field) to school. Before we even meet Dylan, a rather drab shrimp of a blond boy, we see Bobby dancing down the street with cheerleaders accompanying him, an entire crew at his disposal to add a little rouge to his cheeks and fluff up his reddish mane.

     In the night, Bobby calls up Dylan—existing in a neverland half way between fantasy and reality—and in childlike imitation of a sex phone fiend tells his imaginary lover over and over, just how much he wants him and what he might do to him, including at one point both boys mouthing the clichés of the trade: “What are you wearing right now?” “Nothing,” “This gun’s for hire,” “O Jesus,” “Jesus Christ,” “O God.”

     Both boys dream of being Hollywood stars. But while Bobby is just happy to be near Dylan signing autographs, aware that everyone loves them, the other boy dreams of directing a naked woman.

      The female narrator (Brooke Lober) tells us that Bobby wanted to tell Dylan of his dreams, and that maybe they should start taking acting classes since he wanted them to be famous.

       But what Bobby didn’t know and what Dylan didn’t tell him is that Dylan had met a girl, Amy Brown. “She was a year older than him. They were inseparable.”

       That night, we are told, Bobby dreamt that he was in the woods, tied up. He had never dreamed this way before.

        “Bobby wrote about his dream and Dylan. He wanted Dylan to know how perfect they were together, and that maybe they should run away.”

        This time when Bobby calls Dylan and suggests he wants to “get off,” however, Dylan angrily replies that he doesn’t like boys, insisting that he’s not some stupid fag, demanding to know from Bobbie, “What’s your problem anyway?”

       “But I think about you, always.”

       “Don’t, don’t think about me. Ever.”

       And so it was over, reports the female narrator. “Bobby couldn’t have Dylan.”

       There was nothing left. Just the fantasy. The dream. It was all fading.

       “Bobby thought about suicide,” our narrator tells us. “He wondered whether Dylan would even notice. …He decided to live as long as he could… to dream. He still had his love for Dylan. He knew it would really never go away. He knew that Dylan wouldn’t understand. That Dylan didn’t know about things like love.”

       Bobby we are told dreamed a lot of things, of being loved, of being like the other boys, of being the other boys. But more than anything Bobby “wishes he could back in time, to the way things were and how he thought they would always be.”

       The narration and the language is just that of a 13-year old, his imagination limited to how things in his fantasies were and might have been. Yet it ends on a somewhat more profound note, linking us to Bobby, to most of our desires: “That’s all he wanted. To never be alone.”

        It is that simple. There is nothing more to say.

 

Los Angeles, November 16, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).