Leon Lopez | Crossroad / 2016

a skinhead’s imaginary revenge

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mark Rovira (screenplay), Leon Lopez (director) Crossroad / 2016 [11 minutes]

 

A British filmmaker of numerous short LGBTQ films, actor and noted writer Leon Lopez’s second film, Crossroad, concerns a married man Liam (Mark Kibo Rovira) who has also been in a relationship with a man, Matt (Calum Ewan Cameron).

    On the particular morning that this short film records, he rises long before his wife, Jade (Katie Collins), and leaves the apartment, purchases a pack of cigarettes, and broods for a while staring over a bridge overlooking the Thames.

     We don’t know what is brewing, but certainly it not something good, particularly when Liam, returning home, moves to the bathroom, shaves off most of his facial hair and then, in a rather startling decision, begins to turn himself into a skinhead.

    When he puts on a black hoodie and reaches for a baseball bat, we realize he has now become a dangerous being, on some sort of inexplicable path to revenge.

      He almost rings the bell of a home, as the film scrambles ahead in time to show us what is about to come. A black man, William (Ashley Campbell) answers the door. Liam enters, pushes the man to the floor and beats him to death with the baseball bat.

      We still have no idea of why he has determined to destroy both the man and, incidentally, himself.

      But soon after, brief flashbacks offer us the missing data. It is clear, while Liam and his friend Matt play pool that there is something special between them, and Jade clearly senses it as well, as she jealously kisses her man, hoping to pull him away from Matt’s influence. But it is clear that she must leave, and the two men will carry out their affair.

     It appears that she may have been quite correct in her fears, and we see her in other clips angrily confronting her husband, although these scenes are performed in mute so we cannot know the precise reasons for her distress. But we can guess that Liam has grown closer to Matt, that as a bisexual person, Liam has perhaps come to prefer his male lover’s company.

     Suddenly, in a later scene we see Matt on the pavement of a street, William having apparently been behind the wheel of a car which has accidently hit him. The bleeding lover clearly dies while Liam kisses him deeply on his bleeding lips.

    Fortunately, Liam does not ring the bell to William’s door, and soon after he tosses the bat away, while he stands at the end of the movie grieving, again on a bridge over the Thames, shouting out in pain, tears running down his face. He is doomed to a relationship with Jade, while we know that his true love has tragically died.

      If Liam returns to Jade, will surely be as a different man than one with whom she went to bed.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Layne Pavoggi and John Duff | Girly / 2018 [music video]

gender defying desires

by Douglas Messerli

 

Layne Pavoggi and John Duff (directors), John Duff (performer) Girly / 2018 [4.25 minutes] [music video]

 

In his very first video, Baltimore singer John Duff, dressed in a pink halter and blue jeans, got “girly,” channeling, as Curtis M. Wong described it in an article if HuffPost, Mariah Carey, Madonna, and Britney Spears.

    That’s not to say that this video makes utter sense. It’s hard to know why Duff and his two drag friends Bianca Del Rio and Mariah Balenciaga show up to a theater to sing out about Duff’s gender defying desires. Evidently, as the girls tell him, his man is cheating on him, which perhaps also explains why in the theater bathroom he battles with the drag queen with whom his boyfriend has evidently taken up.

     Maybe that also explains why Duff himself wants to get “girly”:

 

Only get girly on the weekends,

So I’m out til late up til early -

Oh, Just feeling myself

Uh-oh, I feel worldly

 

A little birdy told me

You get flirty, show me

What you do when you're alone.

Dance like no ones home

 

And we say

Hey hater

Why don't you go and hate on it

I already know you're gonna

(Know you're gonna)

Hate on it

Say what you wanna say say

I'm on it

It run it

And I keep doing what I want

 

I wanna get girly

Let's get girly

Flip out hair

We don't care

Let's get girly

Let's get girly

Flip our hair

We don’t care

    If the song itself is hardly memorable, the dances, choreographed by Dexter Mayfield and Duff are effective, while it’s Duff’s good looks and charm that carries the video into the territory of being worth the watch.

    Although Duff’s own background is in musical theater, his experience on X-Factor, where Simon Cowell and others felt he was just a little too “strange,” left him somewhat reeling. He realized that if he produced his own music he would be required to perform “in a polite, heteronormative manner.”

    As HuffPost quotes him: “I was told so many times that being myself wasn’t going to work [and that] I should play into a more masculine, generic vibe. I’m not going to be intimidated into lying about who I am. I’m gay as hell and I love it.”

     As Wong reminds us, not everyone felt that “Girly” totally succeeded in challenging gender norms. Matthew Rodriguez, writing in Grindr’s digital magazine INTO argued that the song ephemerally embraced femininity while putting on display a conventionally attractive male. And Michael Strangeways, writing the Seattle Gay Scene felt that the video’s message felt “odd,” coming as it did from a “Cute yet quite masculine, gym-toned gay hottie.”

      But Duff has become rather fearless, stating, “I don’t take myself that seriously. I’m not afraid to look stupid or ugly ― I kind of like it. Fluidity is ideal [and] rigid things break easily. I’m not going to dumb myself down to help someone else feel comfortable.”

     And he needn’t have worried since the video was a hit and launched Duff’s career.

 

Los Angeles, January 20, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).