David Ottenhouse | Late Summer / 2001

moments before dying: the photograph

by Douglas Messerli

 

David Ottenhouse (screenwriter and director) Late Summer / 2001 [25.33 minutes]

 

I begin with one of the mildest and perhaps least confusing of these pictures. In 2001, director David Ottenhouse, who had already released two excellent short gay films, Close To (1997) and Memory Denied It (1996) shot his third film, Late Summer.

      This tale begins with a photographer (Augustus Kelly) about to open a show in a New York art gallery. A few early visitors are already looking over his new work, and one man in particular asks about a beautiful photograph of a beautiful young man with raised hands each with fingers extended that along with his smile spells out the beauty and exuberance of youth. The gentleman would like to buy it, but Adam tells him that it is the only work in the show not for sale.

      From that lead-in we spun into Adam’s childhood memories. After the death of his father, the very young Adam (Erol Zeybekoglu, a truly remarkable child actor) is sent away for a while to live his aunt, uncle, and somewhat older high school-age cousin, Josh (Chris Nee).

      Ottenhouse quickly shows the young Adam, under the wing of his loving cousin, adapts to new new life, as his cousin shows him, one by one, experiences that help him to move toward adulthood.

       He first takes him to his secret place, a hidden spot in a nearby cemetery where Josh goes to ponder things or just to think out the dilemmas in his young life. It is a safe place that all small town boys need to escape family life and to re-imagine their own existence, and the fact that he shares it with his much younger cousin, demanding he never reveal the secret spot, not only links him closer to his cousin but begins to make him realize that others also live private lives, having their own difficulties with the world, and needing to solve the intricacies of survival. In that special place, outside the mausoleum which marks his spot he also teaches his young pupil the joys of marijuana, educating him on the fact that “pills screw you up,” but that weed can do you no real harm.

     Josh also involves his with his friends and allows the younger boy to join him in sports. By gently wrestling and roughing him a bit, he learns not to be afraid of male bodily contact. At one point during a basketball game, he falls lying on the cement for a few moments looking up at his cousin in silent wonderment. Josh brings him back to the reality of the heterosexual world by gently scolding him, “Don’t keep looking at my balls.”

      In another instance while simply out walking, Adam spots from a distance his cousin hovering over a girl, obviously engaged in coitus. He watches with wide eyes as his cousin, spotting him, winks at the very moment of ejaculation. It is the small boy’s introduction to sex, immediately solving the age old problem of how to explain the mysteries of sex to the young.

     Soon after, Josh takes him, in great secrecy and at especial invitation that makes it even more wondrous, to a local swimming hole, where he insists his young cousin strip naked and go out for a swim. The self-conscious, bodily embarrassed kid learns through the experience not to be ashamed for his body and discovers, after he asks his cousin, that sex feels wonderful.

       Loaning him his own camera, Josh provides his new friend with his first real hobby, showing him how to use the difference lenses to take a proper photograph, obviously a pleasure that later becomes central to his life.

      In another scene, he carefully begins to teach Adam how to skateboard, which the boy quickly is able to manage, perhaps his first major athletic achievement. He returns the board to Josh, and turns to take a photograph of his cousin who now, looking toward him, has begun to skate off.

      In that very instant a car strikes Josh, and he falls, dead.

    The photograph, of course, is the one that he snapped an instant before his cousin’s death, and obviously for all his love and pleasure of living with him like an older brother, he cannot part with such an important image, which calls up all the joy and, clearly, yet another death of a father figure in his young life.

      We can imagine, also, that Adam felt a great deal of love for his cousin. Who wouldn’t for someone who treated a younger relative with so much love and respect? But there is no reason to imagine that that love has necessarily anything to do with gay sexuality, despite the fact that we know Ottenhouse is a gay filmmaker and that many of the film’s images are homoerotic. It appears likely, moreover, that the younger cousin may be gay, yet we do not even know if the adult Adam is homosexual. The actor who portrays gives no real evidence of his sexuality.

   And although we might imagine, given his loss of all males figures in his life, he might psychologically always be seeking a new “father image,” if Freud was right, that isn’t at all what the story is about.

     The kind of sexual bonding between the two boys represents the traditional heterosexual lessons that have been passed down for centuries between brothers, cousins, and fathers, and sons. Adam has learned something about women, about natural male bonding, sports, and even the early lessons about his male body through his elder cousin. The fact that he feels comfortable in his cousins arms during the rainstorm where they hide out at Josh’s secret spot or that he is curious about the size and nature of his older cousin’s penis and scrotum are what every straight boy feels about older boys or young parents if he has the opportunity to have natural contact with them. Josh has very nicely served that educational function.

      In short, there is very little here to suggest that Ottenhouse’s Late Summer has anything at all to do with LGBTQ cinema. While it nicely reveals a lovely kinship between two males, the males show no signs of homosexual behavior—indeed quite the opposite—and point to utterly no variance from heteronormative values.

     Adam shows no inner desires to sleep with his cousin, and his cousin as we have observed is busy fucking the girls. Whether or not the adult Adam is gay, is irrelevant and outside of the film.

     Why, then, is this film included with three other films in Boys Life 5, in which two of the other films, by Eytan Fox and Adam Salky, are clearly gay films, and the third by Michael Burke is quite explicitly about the first love a budding gay child? And why is it listed on several internet sites under “gay shorts and movies,” including the vast treasure of short “gay themed movies” of the Letterboxd site?

      I very much enjoyed this film, and I think any sensitive LGBTQ individual might equally enjoy it. But generally speaking, it is not a gay movie. And yet, I felt I needed to mention it, along with the others following, in my volumes devoted to Queer Cinema.

 

Los Angeles, April 15, 2022

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (April 2022).