Michael Landry | Nice to Meet You / 2020

a gay film with only heterosexual kisses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Kyle Clements, Brandon Michael Haynes, and Michael Landry (screenplay), Michael Landry (director) Nice to Meet You / 2020 [11 minutes]

 

If you are interested in seeing what a gay movie looks like with only a formerly heterosexual couple, then you should immediately switch on your computer to watch Michael Landry’s short film, Nice to Meet You from 2021.

    Here the formerly married couple, the Michaels, Sarah (Teri Wyble) and Grayson (Michael King) meet up at Bear’s (Hosea DeMarzino) pub to sign their final divorce papers.

    When Bear, greeting them, exclaims that it has been a long time since he’s seen them, asking if Sarah is pregnant yet, she responds, with the kind of perky, sarcastic delivery that Julia Roberts is famous for: “We actually started sleeping with other people, well one of us has.”

    “Cool, cool,” says Bear, as Sarah orders up a couple of shots of whiskey, Bear vaguely continuing, “My condolences, congratulations….”

     They down their shots, she “for old times sake,” he stating “It feels weird doing this in our old place.”

      As they begin to play pool, she finally makes the first jab, asking “So, how is he?” Grayson hitting back with “You want some foreplay first,” she responding, “Oh, foreplay, you know what that is?”

      Clearly this is not going to be a very pleasant meeting, since it’s is now obvious that Grayson has left Sarah having discovered that he is gay.

       Perhaps the deepest dig of “the dagger,” as Sarah herself describes it, is the question of whether or not the mysterious “he” makes her ex-husband happy. And after several more shots at the pool table and a few more jabs, he casually comments “He does.”

      Much of the oddly off-kilter film consists of remembered moments of the couple’s love life, including sex scenes that usually in a gay film would feature the gay couple.

      In a sense these love scenes both mitigate the anger she feels and also explain it. The heart of her anger might be said to rest in the following early banter:

 

      Sarah: Well, it hasn’t even been a year yet and you have a boyfriend.

      Grayson: And who long was I supposed to wait?

      Sarah: What’s the self-life on misery? I’ll let you know when I find out.

      Grayson: And when will that be?

      Sarah: When I stop feeling like a failure.”

    That is, indeed, the heart of this sad little tale, that just as parents blame themselves for they child “becoming” gay, so too do wives, who felt themselves in temporarily loving company, feel somehow that they are responsible for their husband’s discovery of his sexuality.

     Throughout these essays, I have often blamed the gay husbands who knowing that they were gay convinced themselves that they could resolve their sexual confusion through marriage, or simply not wanting to face their own conflicted feelings bowed to the forces of heterosexual conventionality. But in this film, the gay male who has escaped the hetero marital bonds explains that sometimes the male simply can’t even place themselves properly in their worlds. Grayson tells Sarah:

 

      “My entire life, I felt wrong and broken like I didn’t have a place in this world. And then, this one night I met this brilliant ambitious force of nature.”

     He is speaking of course of Sarah, who made him feel for the first time in his life that he was truly seen, providing him with the thing he had never had, validation.

     What we forget, as Gertrude Stein puts it in The Mother of Us All, “men are selfish,” but they are also “such poor things,” who need the help, sometimes, of women to make them feel alive. As young boys they have often so delimited in their perceptions of the world through their various interchanges of sloppy camaraderie and competition (usually played out formally in sports) that it is only a member of the female gender who can open up other possibilities of behavior to them. At least, so conventionally raised men believe, particularly if they feel sexual and social pulls that are deemed unnatural in their closed-off society.

     As Grayson admits, his ex-wife finally made him feel worthy of love.

     But those other “pulls,” the final realization of who such men really are eventually forces them to make a decision to either pretend to remain in what now becomes a failed marriage—accompanied by lies and cheating as they attempt to find momentary fulfillment with men—or a painful rupture such as has occurred in this short film.

     Yet the devastation for the wife is nicely summarized by Sarah, who admits she is, after all, happy for her husband. “You get to start a new life. I have to start a new life.”

      But here they are, having despite their beautiful memories, anger, resentment, having to sign the divorce agreement in a bar where they once shared happier times.

      And in this movie we see something that films such as Making Love (1982) doesn’t quite fully reveal, how in the freedom of discovering a new self, the divorced husband and his now aggrieved wife also have to say goodbye to someone they truly loved.

 

     It’s just too bad that they couldn’t have introduced themselves to one another at their first encounter with the full truth and honesty that they can at the end of their relationship. But then, there would have been no relationship, no memories of the love that once existed.

 

Los Angeles, November 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).