conversations in the garden of delights
by Douglas Messerli
Floppy Peng (screenwriter and director) 中文 (ไทย) The Secret Garden / 2022 [10 minutes]
The film I discuss here is neither the 2020 Marc Munden movie based
on the beloved children’s fantasy by Frances Hodgson Burnett, nor Agnieszka Holland’s
1993 film version, a far better film adaptation. This strange little, very
obscure work by the Taiwan director with the outrageous name of Floppy Peng is
set in a not so secret park in Taiwan where gay men gather in the night to have
public sex. On this particular evening a young gay activist arrives in the park
with his visiting friend from Thailand in order to set up a table and chairs from
which he encourages gay men to get tested for HIV, as well as to provide advice
on sexual safety.
In short, it’s as if the local gay version
of The Salvation Army were daring to enter the lion’s den, only this support
group isn’t trying to convert their constituents to any cause nor save them
from anything—except perhaps from an unnecessary death. Here active gay men,
fresh from the bushes, can come and share their fears, get tested, and discuss
the myths surrounding HIV-transmission and AIDS.
Meanwhile,
the young Taiwanese boy encourages his Thai guest to take advantage of the
gardens (which I have to presume is Peace Memorial Park) and explore its
treasures. As he explains to his rather naïve friend, “this is a place for gays
to have fun.” His friend is quite skeptical, obviously never before having
participated in public park sex.
As a young
gay man prepares to visit the little ad-hoc center, the unseen sex expert
encourages his friend to get lost, so to speak, in the joys of what the park
has to offer.
Our
innocent twink first encounters two men engaged in kissing, closely watching before
attempting to join them, when he is angrily pushed off.
He then wanders away, encountering a young
man sitting alone, drinking out of a bottle. Our innocent joins him and before
you can even blush for his fearless behavior he is engaged in fellatio, providing
great joy to the formerly unhappy and lonely individual. Even when he has
finished swallowing the stranger’s cum and the man walks away, our friend trails
behind, asking how often he visits the park.
When the
man doesn’t answer, he asks him where he lives, the man reluctantly replying “Keelung,”
without the young newcomer having any idea where that might be. The major
Taiwan port city which is part of the metropolitan Taipei area, but a long
trip, nonetheless, to this presumably Taipei city garden. When asked where
Keelung is, the man vaguely answers: “So far away.”
But, of
course, not as far away as the friend’s homeland, information which he shares
to the other’s surprise. The Keelung man suggests that he wouldn’t have guessed,
as if the accent he noticed and the look of the boy doesn’t fit his stereotype
of a Thai.
Our
blunderingly fearless friend goes on to ask about the ring the man is wearing
around his neck, the stranger again vaguely responding, “Some one gave it to
me.” Actually, he explains, it’s because he wears another ring on his finger,
adding, “By this time my wife and daughter may already be asleep.”
In almost
moral indignation the young Thai boy demands to know why he has gay sex. Does
his wife know? How will his daughter feel about it when she grows up?
The older
and far wiser man responds, with years of resentment in his voice, “You don’t
know anything. How can you understand? That’s what my parents wanted; I didn’t
want to do it.” He gets up to leave.
But the
young neophyte follows him, apologizing.
“It’s
nothing,” responds the older boy. “I’m drunk. It’s time for me to leave,” the
Thai boy calling after, “Can you just tell me your name?”
There is
no answer. But after several screen seconds wherein we can only imagine the man
has disappeared forever, he returns to gently caress the face and kiss the lips
of his fresh inquisitor.
When come daybreak, our young Thai lad wanders
back to his host, who is now closing up his stand, the friend asks: “Was it fun
inside the park?”
“No one
wanted to play with me,” answers the queer novice.
“Impossible.
How could no one want to play with you?”
All the
Thai boy can say is that he’s hungry. And they head off to a restaurant to eat,
our still curious young visitor asking his friend, “Hey, have you ever been to
Keelung?”
This is a
curious and rather astounding short work that I’d argue makes little sense to
most Westerners, but which I find not only charming in its refreshing honesty
and embracement of both sexual naivete and what many would describe as gay
perversity this short work involves the whole arc of the rainbow.
Yet neither
of these attitudes represented by the Thai visitor and Taiwanese native reject
the denizens of the “secret garden,” but seek to get to know the symbolic “gardeners”—those
men who regularly meet up in this hidden paradise—better. The two boys live at
a personal level while the sexual meetings in the garden are impersonal and not
at all about the friendship and community these two offer.
In this
little unknown gem—destined I’m afraid to be lost since it is not listed on any
gay site or collation and is difficult to find on the internet—manages to
bridge the two worlds, those seeking immediate impersonal gratification and
those who might want to get to know even the names of those fallen angels who
inhabit the nightly paradise just to talk or possibly help to save their lives.
Sorry to
say that most of the viewer reactions to this piece were dismissive on the US
YouTube site where I found the film, mostly judging the nightly visitors to the
garden as sad and lonely beings hooked on the drug of sex; a viewpoint the film
itself resists and, in fact, denies, presuming there can be an open accord
between individual desire and deep social interaction. In a sense this secret
garden, like the one of hidden castle in the famed novel of the same name, in
which the suffering child, Colin Craven, learns to walk, is a special place of
curative powers, wherein the singularity of sexual desire meets up with the hope
of communal integration.
Los Angeles, November 24, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November
2025).
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