William Branden Blinn | Never or Now / 2013

gentle acts of love and kindness

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gregory Phelan (screenplay), William Branden Blinn (director) Never or Now / 2013 [18 minutes]

 

Alan Driscol (Allen Weiss) is dying in a hospital bed, his wife Annie (Marsha Musial) of a many years beside him trying to gentle explain how their children, except one who is in New Zealand, are all on their way to see him, planning to gather the next morning.

   Beside him are photographs of the two of them, husband and wife, along with other pictures their large family, sons and daughters, their husbands and children.

    From the smart suit and jewelry his wife wears, it is clear that Alan has not only been a good husband but rewarded his family financially as well. Even though he is near death, he is still a handsome man.  

    In short, it appears that he has almost been a model husband. Realizing, as she puts it, “it’s going to be a long night,” Annie quietly explains that she needs to go home to change her clothes and get a pillow so that she can keep vigil with him at his side.

    She begs him not to go anywhere before she returns, obviously pleasing with him not to escape into death while she is away. But as she prepares to leave, she does a rather odd thing which we don’t think much of at the time, but is important for what transpires in this truly queer, highly moving short film. She reaches for his billfold, takes out a couple of twenty dollar bills and folds them, seemingly to take them with her, perhaps, we imagine just to have some cash on hand for her short journey. It’s around 1:30, and she promises to be back by around 5:00.

  For a short while, Alan lays quietly awaiting her return, but eventually he takes up his wallet and withdraws a small piece of paper from it. With difficulty he reaches for the phone and makes a call.

  A short while later, a good-looking young man (Smith Crowe) appears in his room, introducing himself.

   Alan has evidently called a rent boy. And the young man, immediately sizing up the situation, offers him a series of gestures as close to sex as possible, gently holding his hand, and finally, about a half hour before the dying man’s wife is scheduled to return, stripping off his clothes and joining him in bed, where he has propped up a pillow behind Alan so that he might curl up to him on his side.

     As a perceptive IMDb commentator (with the moniker myronlearn) observes, obviously this man has repressed his homosexual feelings through his entire life, and now just as it is about to end, is finally able to permit himself to experience the simple joys of touching a young man’s body, as the rent boy guides the dying man’s hands over his physique. If there was ever a call for the full nudity this film provides, it is in this deeply emotionally tasteful situation.

   The visitor dresses and disappears before the wife returns, observing that the two bills that evidently she has left out on the bed table remain in place, the rent boy having refused any payment. She expresses surprise to that she has left the wallet and the money out, and quietly returns the bills to their original place. Was the wife aware of the man’s life-long desires despite his immense sacrifice his desires to his heterosexual life?

     In the very last scene, we see the young rent boy laying in his own bed with the sound of the hospital heart monitor tracing the rhythms of Alan’s heart before falling into the solid singular note of death.

    Writer and director William Branden Blinn has created over 30 films over the years, almost all of them of great sensitivity and interest; but this is certainly one of his very best, an open-hearted coming together of youth and age, gay man and heterosexual in a final expression of shared love.

Apparently this man chosen family, job, and security all these years over his personal sexual inclinations. Although it is tempting to feel sorry for him, we realize that he has also lived a rich and full life. Perhaps as a bisexual he simply found someone he loved and made a choice that he didn’t regret while remaining forever curious of what he had missed.

     Blinn doesn’t provide any answers, but we perceive that his wife may have known and even approved of his final desires. If so, both she and the gay boy helped him to die with a remarkable gift of open-hearted grace.

 

Los Angeles, December 30, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2025).