Maryam Karimi | Burl's / 2003

variations of gender, desire, and love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Maryam Karimi and Mark Cancelliere (screenplay, based on a story by Bernard Cooper), Maryam Karimi (director) Burl's / 2003 [9 minutes]

 

Bernard Cooper (Chandler Kane Kelly), a young middle school boy, wants a dog, but his rather authoritarian father in the style of the late 1950s or early 1960s doesn’t want a pet messing upon his perfectly carpeted living room floor. The family, Bernard, his mother (Marnie Mosiman), and father (John de Lancie) are dining out at Burl’s (read the Los Angeles Miracle Mile favorite of the period Johnnie’s, where it was filmed) and the boys asks if he can just stop by after to see the dogs.  

    To shift his mind off the idea and perhaps to discuss the problems he’s recently been observing with regard to their long-haired son, he sends out to the streets to get a newspaper. There the boy immediately encounters three drag queens, who in little Bernard’s quick mind represent (as the narrator Mark Hamill explains it) what seems the perfect solution to the feelings he’s been having about gender; here are “boys and girls sliced together.”

     The transvestites (as they were known in the day, played by Danyon Davis, Christian Reeve, and Michael Gutierrez) ooo and ahh about the young boy, one of them remarking “I think he’s just adorable.”

     Soon Bernard is searching out his mother’s closet in search of lipstick, heels, a wig, and a proper frock he might wear. When she discovers him partially in drag, young Bernard and his father, perhaps to keep his mind off of such unmanly thoughts, speed off to the pet shop.

 

     But while Mr. Cooper checks out the beagles, his son’s eyes are captivated by another kind of animal, the terribly handsome young worker in the store, Pete (Jarid Gibbs), stocking the shelves. Following the intense stare of his son’s eyes, the father immediately sees what’s captured his attention and demands the boy come hold the dog. But even then, Bernard cannot keep his eyes off of Pete.

       

     Almost immediately, the boy is dragged off by his now frightened father to a young boy’s wrestling practice at Bernard’s school. Mr. Cooper introduces him to the school’s wrestling coach (Jack Riley). One of the boy wrestlers looks over at the young newcomer with such a mean intensity that Bernard immediately has the urge to go to the bathroom.

     In the locker room Bernard soon after encounters a half-dressed older man (Mookie Barker) who observing the young beauty staring at him, signals him to come closer, Bernard rushing off in the opposite direction.

     Soon after, however, he is sent away on the bus to wrestling class. While waiting for the bus, however, Bernard sees who he believes is Pete stop at the corner and stare at him. It’s clear the boy would ride off with Pete anywhere if he only asked, but he’s been wall trained as boys were in the late 1950s and early 1960s not to catch a ride with strangers, and he turns his glance in the other direction. Indeed, he wonders whether it was his own imagination, thinking of stopping by the pet again to check out to see if Pete is there.

     Soon after, however, he sees what he believes is the same car again, and this time he is clearly ready to catch a ride with Pete, but the man behind the wheel who stops and asks if Bernard would like a ride is not at all the cute pet store worker but the same man from the locker room, the kind of stranger who school boys like Bernard had been warned of in movies such as Boys, Beware. Our young hero immediately speeds back home, telling his mother what happened at the bus stop.

     The incident frees him from having to explore wrestling, and he is rewarded a pet dog in reparation. So everything turns out quite nicely. Except, his father is kept busy, just as he feared, cleaning up after the dog.

     Some of the Letterboxd commentators though the movie was “cute,” if unconvincing. But I would hardly describe a film that shows the late 1950s and early 1960s to be filled (at least in Los Angeles) with adults who each seem to pull the young boy away from his innocence with positive and negative sexual alternatives about which he is far too young to perceive the repercussions as something I might describe as “cute.” If his mother is afraid, as she tells him, that he is too young for a dog, I would argue he is too young for the sexualized society surrounding him. As a young gay boy in the making, he is attracted to and frightened of adults who all seem to be pulling him in directions he hasn’t yet imagined and about whom he has no idea what his contrary reactions might mean.

     Like almost all young gay men, he will one day awaken to suddenly realize what his desires and fears were all about, if he can just steer clear of being channeled by his parents into a cul de sac of normality from which there is no escape.

 

Los Angeles, November 4, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).