by Douglas Messerli
Max Rifkind-Barron (screenplay), Yudho Aditya (director) Pipe Dream / 2015 [15 minutes]
Peter Epstein-Takahashi (Eric Tabach) is one of those contemporary boys
you hear about who is lucky to have two dads. Like most of the two-dad, two-mom
kids—at least those presented in such gay films—Peter is heterosexual, and, in
this case, although he is a clumsy, slightly confused kid, he has a girl,
Lucille Stone (Elise Metcalf) who is attracted him and makes an appointment so
that they can meet up, presumably to have sex.
Like most girls, she is far
more experienced than her potential boyfriend and is ready to proceed with sex,
meeting up with him in the bathroom and even texting him: “Can’t wait to
finally unwrap your candy.” Moreover, she has other male admirers, most notably
the handsome jock, Ethan James (Zachary Roozen) who can’t comprehend why she
would be interested in Peter when she could have him; after all he’s running
for Homecoming King. But Lucille makes it quite clear that she’s not at all
interested in Ethan, confiding to Peter that not only does she dislike Ethan
but he has a very small…endowment, or was Peter nervously repeats back, “Ethan
has a small snake?”
Pete’s fathers, Charlie Epstein
(Zachary Steinback) and Charles Takahashi (Vic Chao), perceiving that he’s now
receiving regular texts from his girlfriend, whose name they only vaguely know,
probe him, “Honey, is she your special…,” no Peter insists, they’re not dating,
the other Charles interrupting to say, “Sweetheart, we get it….You want to get
it on, no strings attached?” “That’s fine,” both men concur. The Charlies are
delighted that their son has found a girlfriend, and being liberal gay men they
want him to know that they are completely open to his experimenting with sex—as
long as he wears a condom.
Yet in the very next moment they’re
into their own youthful memories about going bareback in 1985 when leather was
in, Charles recalling, “You tied me down….” Peter is a little grossed out.
Later, they offer him up a gift of an entire
box of gay friendly colored rubbers.
But Peter’s problem is that he
is not at all sure he’s got the proper penis size to put into a condom with a
girl like Lucille. In the silence of his room he enters a gay porn site just to
check out the size of cocks—where, of course, every penis is as large as they
get; not at all reassuring to a young teenager. What’s even worse is Dad Charlie
E enters his room unannounced to bring him a sandwich, backing out immediately
when he sees that what that his son is entertaining himself, but a little
worried now that Peter hasn’t told them everything. “Is there something you
want to discuss?” he asks, perceiving that his son has been visiting a gay porn
site.
Things quickly escalate when Peter gets up the courage to visit a porn
shop where he buys a vacuum pump that is touted as enlarging one’s penis.
Forgetting about his date with Lucille, he sneaks back into his room to try it
out, but at that very moment she shows up at the front door, with one of the
Charlies answering it and sending up to his room, announcing “Peter your nice ‘not
girlfriend’s’ here.”
The poor boy, penis still in
the pump, quickly wraps a blanket around himself and immediately begins to
apologize that he has an exam to study for and a SAT test to prep for and…..
She offers in every case to help. What can he do but insist, twice, that he
works better “alone.” In anger, she turns to go, he following her trying to
explain that she doesn’t understand, she, now downstairs, demanding that he
make her understand. “We planned this, I was supposed to come over,” she
argues.
When she turns to go again, he
calls after her, calling her, to his fathers’ shock, “a slut.” Now by the door,
she opens it, reporting “Your ‘not girlfriend’s’ leaving.”
Charles T calls out “That was
fucked,” the other Charlie scolding his husband to watch his language. And on
they go like any gay couple is likely to do until finally their son demands
they both shut out.
Charlies claims to know what
is going on, explain to his lover that he caught Pete jacking off to gay porn
yesterday. But finally, their son denies he was jacking off, explaining it wasn’t
gay, that it wasn’t even porn. But the friendly fathers again make things
worse, responding “It’s okay. We accept you for you.”
“I’m not gay, okay?”
Fine, they both agree going
back to their magazines.
But Pete, finally getting up
his nerve, begins to stutter: “They’re something, something,” finally just
dropping the blanket to display his cock caught in the vacuum tube from which
he can’t extract his penis. “Can you help me?” They have no answers, hoping
that he has not thrown away the instructions.
What else can her do the next day but find
Lucille, follow her when she attempts to speed away from him, and admit he’s
been an insouciant asshole, and what’s more “I’m just like Ethan.”
She turns back, he
continuing, “It’s true. It’s like the state of Rhode Island, a minni mushroom,
a hangnail…or a breath mint only it doesn’t small so good, it’s tiny.” He
admits that he never thought that someone like her would want to be with
someone like him.
Earlier, in the bathroom,
they had been playing a game of creating ridiculously portentous porn films.
She now replies: “You know, Insouciant Asshole sounds like the most portentous
porn title ever, doesn’t it?” She smiles, walking away, Peter following after.
This cleverly written short
film truly takes us into new LGBTQ territory, where things are no longer
centered at all upon the gay couple, but on the straight son who is facing the
problems of intelligent, well raised straight boys face the world over, an
insecurity of their sexual prowess, and a lack of clues of how to approach the
opposite sex. This is finally a gay film that has truly grown up.
Much like William Brandon
Blinn’s 2012 film Without a Mom, which focuses on a male teen also with
two fathers, the boy coming home heartbroken over just having broken up with
his girlfriend, gay films are finally beginning to move away from the
overwhelming feeling about how the heterosexual world has impacted them and
beginning to perceive how the LGBTQ community impacts the straight world, how
we can be important as fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and trans people to
the cis heterosexual society in which we live. I have always argued that the
straight world needs “us,” the LGBTQ community, perhaps more that we need the
dominating straight patriarchally based societies that have generally failed.
What we offer other than the
important element of sexual “difference” is so very important not only to our
own sense of worth but to what we can give to the world in general. Even if it’s
just helping a young boy remove a vacuum pump from his penis, and rebound into
a world where he doesn’t need to worry about his sexual organ’s size, well that’s
a small start. From our endless wit to our outsized sense of drama, from our almost
inborn feelings of empathy, to our learned experiences of survival we are a
community that now needs to begin to contemplate not just how to tell ourselves
and others who we are, but truly come out of the closets as citizens of the
world who offer perspectives of living most heterosexual people can’t even
imagine. But first we have to begin to identify these, from very smallest as in
this film and Blinn’s earlier fathers/son dilemma, but to the largest of
political and social problems our cultures now face.
Los Angeles, November 21, 2025
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).
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