Austin Bunn | Campfire / 2023

the lost boys of peter pan

by Douglas Messerli

 

Austin Bunn (screenwriter and director) Campfire / 2023 [17 minutes]

 

One of the many benefits of visually and mentally traveling, as I have done, through so very many thousands of LGBTQ movies, particularly the short cinema works, is that despite the fact that a great number of them were cooked in the living rooms, bedrooms, and dorms of highly imaginative MFA and MA students, they often took me to places where I might never have imagined ever existed, let alone have ever traveled to see in person.

    This defines precisely what Austin Bunn’s film Campfire accomplished, a film which began as imagined documentary of one of the oldest gay campgrounds in the US, the Hillside Campgrounds of New Millford, Pennsylvania, which became gradually a fictional journey to the site by an older married man, Carl (Mark Rowe) who has clearly arrived at a point of some sort of late crisis, and in quiet desperation seeks out a farmhand, Marty, with whom, 30 years earlier, he had a love affair, perhaps even after he married or before he sank bank into the closeted heterosexual world where so many of his kind retreat given the lessons of their upbringing and the rural, sexually unforgiving and forbidding worlds which they inhabit.

    This film, using the actual Millford site as its backdrop, shows us what is now a world of aging trucker, S&M devotees, and ancient hippies—one couple have haunted the place now for years going about daily in the nude. This is not a political film, but one might imagine these elderly, beefy “bears” as being a kind of secret gay world who might possibly have voted for someone like Donald Trump, a fact difficult for the LGBTQ community to digest.

     But, in fact, it’s hard to explain or even characterize this lost queer world, off the map of almost any but those in the know. These men are sociable and kind, willing to embrace nearly anyone who enters their dark green gate, as long as they close it behind them, for it is a sacred world even more apart from the heteronormative limits than someplace like Fire Island. If you are the kind of person to want to share and enjoy this community, you have suddenly found home. And we can only try to imagine what it might have meant, in its halcyon days, to a young farmhand like Carl’s Marty, who kept trying to get his then lover Carl, 30 years before, to visit it with him.

     Carl, a “good ole boy,” American flag posted on the window of his SUV, lies to his daughter that he’s in Roscoe helping a buddy doing engine work. But clearly he’s on an adventure where no one, including his wife, might have imagined that he’s moved on/back to a world that doesn’t at all include them.

      As he checks in, he asks the question that will become the key to his Romantic adventure: “I’m looking for a friend. He used to come here a lot. His name is Marty Cardona.” The desk clerk can obviously not reveal such information, but another of the campers, who has overheard his question, says that everyone knows Marty, and that he’s hosting a party that very night.

      “How will I know where to go?” Carl asks.

      “Oh,” proclaims his new neighbor, “You’ll know.”

 

      The party is clearly the event of the week. And Carl, attempting to fit in, visits the local S&M country boutique, buying himself a leather harness just for the event.

       He moves into his tent, stokes up the heat, and is ready for party night, which everyone seems to be attending. Carl eats a grilled steak, dresses up in the costume he’s purchased and attends Master Marty’s party.

      In between these fictional events, Bunn has posited other true testimonials of people who regularly inhabit the campsite, many of them couples who have been together now for many years, others who give credence to the fact that this was and still is a world which is not only off the map to the normative heterosexual world, but has long been an paradise to men at a time when being gay in the general US world, particularly given their rather straight, masculine seeming identities, was nearly impossible. This camp, they all equally claim was their salvation. Most of them were once married, and have grown children, but found their new lives in this isolated Pennsylvania spot.

    At the party, dressed in his leather halter with a plaid shirt, Carl makes his way through a crowd of dressed up drag queens and S&M performers as he attempts to seek his way back to the boy he knew so long ago. We get glimpses of the beauty every now and then, a stunning Hispanic man who we can well comprehend night have caught the eye of lean farmer, the two developing what Carl describes as a “special relationship.”

     A local, George (George Hoxworth) guides him into the Danteseque landscape to meet his ex-love, Marty, now Master Marty, as they cross through various spaces, all in variations of hot neon-lit colors. Finally reaching the inner sanctum, he meets a graying old man in a jock strap, clearly not the Marty he remembers of even imagined. Neither of them recognizes the other—and obviously this is not Carl’s “Marty.”

     Reeling away from the sight, Carl screams out his horror, letting all the others know just how deluded they are as well. He suddenly realizes he has returned to a world which might have been wonderous years before, but is now an old-aged home for losers, like himself, who haven’t found a proper way out from their closeted lives.

     By the next morning Carl is ready to leave; yet the residents realize that he has misunderstood their world and his own presumptions. Jerry (Brian Keane) is called upon to guide him to the real Marty, a man to whom he, himself, was married. But Marty, the real Marty Cardona, died in a motorcycle accident years ago, and is now memorialized in a small Hillside park where all those who died of old age, AIDs, and other mishaps are celebrated with small stone places, relics, and symbolic gravesites.

     Carl slowly takes in the loving care in which these now lost beings have been offered in this strange camping ground. And, finally, his missing love, he realizes has found a home which he could not offer him. Carl unpacks his bag and much of his emotional baggage along with it, to stay on a little bit longer before returning to the closed-off world he has chosen for himself.

     This is a difficult film of fictional memory and actual gay liberation, issues which come together in a way most of us might have not expected. But once more, as in the numerous stories about farm boys and farm hands such as those represented in films like Clay Farmers (A. P. Gonzalez, 1988), Alkali, Iowa (Mark Christoper, 1995), Fishbelly White (Michael Burke, 1998), God’s Country (Francis Lee, 2017), as well as Far West (Pascal-Alex Vincent, 2003), Silver Road (Bill Taylor, 2006), Heartland (Mark Christopher, 2007), Between Us (Daithí Ó. Cinnéide, 2016), It’s Still Your Bed (Tyler Reeve, 2019), Farm Boy (Kahil Haddad, 2019), Magnetic Harvest (Marine Levéel, 2019), Fire at the Lake (Pierre Menahem, 2022), Lie with Me (Olivier Peyon, 2022) and Strange Way of Life (Pedro Almodóvar, 2023) to name just a few, we are made to realize that the so-called Rainbow Community shines on regions of culture which we never might have imagined.

     Urban living is not necessarily the only center of the gay experience. The world’s farmlands are also filled with young and older gay men and women desperate to discover their loves in a queer identity that is often difficult to express in their more isolated neighborhoods of the world, but fully exists nonetheless.

     In this unassuming film issues of ageism and cultural isolation come together to make it clear that you can’t count out anyone from the larger gay community as they struggle to make their love known and remembered. Perhaps our current gay leaders might turn their heads away from their endless struggles to put broader social issues as their major concern and look instead to those individuals which exist behind the screen of political objectives. This film and so many others helped me to perceive that my womb of urban gay protection was not the only or necessary lens in which I might best view the issues of LGBTQ cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

     

Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe | Sunset / 2017

just go. not yet

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gary Jaffe (screenplay), Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe (directors) Sunset / 2017 [16 minutes]

 

It is early morning in the Spring of 1942, and two gay lovers, Arnie Solvik (Ryan Trout) and Peter Green (Niccolo Walsh) lie in bed after having sex.

     But this is no usual morning. Peter has to soon leave his lover for dinner at his parents’ house after which he, having volunteered, is off to war.

     The discussion between them, which sounds very much like a stage play, is a lovingly painful attempt on Arnie’s part to challenge his lover’s decision and a constant reminder on Peter’s part that he is committed to destroying the man who would have all Jews—Peter being Jewish— dead.

      Arnie has already been declared unfit for service by a psychiatrist at the recruitment center, where he explained that he had a tendency to mistake the male reproductive organ for a popsicle stick. Yet, later one, he displays the scar where he was knifed after a man in a washroom at Columbus Circle fucked him and then tried to steal his money, as proof that he is not afraid of fighting. But why, he wonders, does Peter want to fight for a country “that doesn’t want you, for whom you are nothing?”

      The answer is obvious, and the far more naïve and certainly less witty Peter states it over and over again. To Arnie’s insistence that he doesn’t “have to go,” the answer, although in tears, is “but I do.”

       Arnie cannot bear the situation of Peter going home for one last dinner party, a party he cannot possibly attend, even in drag. While for Peter it is a “good night,” Arnie perceives it as a “goodbye” with all possibilities of death and change that come with young soldiers at war.

      And in that anger and hurt for a few moments he plays the grande diva, exaggeratedly telling his lover just to leave since he clearly no longer loves him, insisting that their 4-month relationship has never evolved beyond a crude Central Park pickup. Yet they kiss, and he melts, logic returning:

“Go have dinner with your family.”

      Peter promises that he’ll seek out a clerical job, but Arnie, knowing of his friend’s idealism, announces: “I know what you’ve read—and I’ve read it too. Homer and his heroes. Shakespeare and his band of brothers. Not for one moment can I imagine you going across the sea with a

typewriter in your hands. No, it’s honor for you.”

       They painful conversation continues they way, Arnie half attempting to sway his committed friend while simultaneously realizing that it is just that commitment of values for which he most loves him.

       The discussion of director Katie Ennis and Gary Jaffe’s script must have been one that occurred in the bedrooms of so very man necessarily closeted gay men in the early 1940s, where one or the other and even both had made decisions which they realized would change lives forever, fighting for a cause by serving in the military of a country that was almost as restrictive as that of Germany, or in England’s case perhaps just as restrictive—the important difference being that in US and Britain they had not built concentration camps to imprison and kill Jewish, gay, and Roma individuals. But we might do well to recall that US and British prisons were populated by gay men, sentenced for their homosexuality.

      Finally, it truly is the time of departure. Arnie orders Peter to leave, but at the very moment calls him back for one desperate kiss. When Peter closes the door for the last time, we see Arnie peeking out through is windows. After declaring that he is no Madame Butterfly, we realize that he will wait out the days with the greatest of anticipation, no matter what he will have to face.

        This film smells of greasepaint and stage craft, yet it remains a moving picture (in the emotional sense, if not fully in the more common cinematic meaning) of an issue that has yet to be fully explored.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).

Dominik György | Dotýkání (The Touching) / 2020

the joy of sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dominik György (screenwriter and director) Dotýkání (The Touching) / 2020 [39 minutes]

 

This wonderful Czech Republic short film about brotherly incest begins with a young boy, David (Herman Tajovský) returning home after a difficult day at school, where he is bullied. He gets undressed, crawling into to bed in only his underwear, and he lays back looking a bit like a cherub, waiting for his brother Marek (Krystof Brand) to enter so they can begin what director and writer Dominik György describes as “the touching,” exploratory sexual play which probably includes mutual masturbation. György does not reveal what goes on behind that closed door, so we might imagine as much or little sexual activity as we wish.

     I have long argued throughout these pages that, unless it is an enforced activity, I see no problem at all with brothers exploring one another’s bodies. In fact, it may be the safest way for young boys to explore their sexualities. Incest is taboo primarily because of the fear of the shared gene pool of a brother and sister or a mother and a son being so similar that it often results in mental and physical harm to a child born of such couplings. Whatever flaws exist in the DNA of such partners are simply magnified in the child of familiar sex.

     But two males, two females do not pose this problem in any manner. So what is the harm, particularly in this case of two brothers mutually enjoying sex? Certainly, David is delighted, even excited by their time together, so different from the abuse he receives all day long at school. And Marek is just of the age when boys become desperate to enjoy that pleasurable release of sperm.

     Their father has apparently bolted their house for good, hinting in his occasional telephone calls that he might return at Christmas, while clearly having abandoned the family. David still believes that, like St. Nicholas, he might return, but the resentful Marek knows better. The hard-working mother (Lída Jakubuv) is nearly oblivious of her sons’ activities, arriving home late each day, the time when the two brothers are left alone to explore their bodies.

   Apparently, the father was or is still a sailor, and David has also begun a project with his father of rebuilding a model boat of the Titanic, obviously a symbol of problems to come.

   And in this 39-minute capsule of their life, those problems begin almost immediately, first when the grandmother comes to care for them, and enters the room unbidden with a gift of a cake. She says nothing, but is clearly shaken as she quietly turns and exits without the boys noticing. She does not report what she has witnessed to the mother, but makes clear she will not be returning to care for them.

  Just as of the age of sexual exploration often begins with same-sex watching and touching, soon after most heterosexual boys discover the opposite sex, just as does Marek, who begins joining a female classmate (Mariana Franclová) immediately after classes instead of his now disappointed brother, who quickly witnesses his brother’s new focus.

     At first, since he still need relief, Marek continues the sessions of sexual contact with his brother, but that also is soon cut off. David, frustrated with the turn of events, invites a classmate home and explains and eventually demonstrates the joys of “touching.”

      Yet, he senses that his friend is not at all as open to the joys of sex as was Marek. As the boy returns home to tell his mother, David determines to take his finished Titanic model on a trial run in the nearby lake.

       At that very moment, the irate mother of his friend is on the way to complain to David’s mother about his behavior. Unable to find her son in the house, but noticing the missing model ship, she drives, the angry mother and distraught son in tow, down to the lake only to find David, whose boat has pulled away the ball of twine and sunk, desperately floundering in deep waters, unable to properly swim to shore. She dives in to save him.

     On their drive home, David announces from the back seat, “Dad is not coming back.” He too has painfully grown up.  

     So ends this truly beautifully made black-and-white little masterwork.

     My only complaint was what I perceive as an absolutely unnecessary ending dedication, perhaps added to defend this lovely film from people, like the friend’s mother, for whom any youthful sexual activity is something immediately to be halted:

 

“Dedicated to all child victims of either conscious or unconscious sexual abuse.”

 

     These are not the Menendez brothers, and as far as I can see, there is no sexual abuse involved in the brother’s mutual exploration of sex. This is, rather, a quite beautifully filmed tale of childhood desire, in this case two boys without a father who explore their bodies and the surrounding horror by the adult world of just such natural and innocent acts.

 

Los Angeles, January 21, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (January 2025).