pilgrim’s
progress
by Douglas Messerli
Paul Rudnick (screenplay based on
his stage play), Christopher Ashley (director) Jeffrey / 1995
Like so many young active gay men,
Jeffrey (Steven Weber) absolutely loves sex, as he declares almost
simultaneously with the titles, “I love sex. It’s just one of the truly great
ideas. I mean just the fact that our bodies have this built-in capacity for
joy—ohh, it makes me love the body.” The only problem is that it is 1994, the
culmination of AIDS-related deaths. If in 1992 AIDS had become the number one
cause of death for men in the US aged 25-44 years old, by 1994 it had become
the major cause of death for all US citizens of the same ages.
The film begins with Jeffrey having incredibly good sex—that is until he
announces that the condom he is using has just broken. His sexual partner
suddenly goes into torturous reaction of horror and hysteria. His next date
demands that they “just cuddle, like rabbits or babies.” Another date requires
medical tests to prove that Jeffrey has not been HIV-positive within months,
days, and even hours before their sexual get-together. Another comes wrapped
totally in cellophane. These are just a few of writer Paul Rudnick’s wildly
humorous cartoons that fill the screen with metaphors of the difficulties of
gay men sexually enjoying themselves in the tenth decade of the 20th century.
As the fears grow exponential by the day, the man who evidences that he might
even be oversexed suddenly grows so frustrated that he spins out into another
hemisphere, determining to become celibate.
Many of the critics have argued, as Roger Ebert puts it: “Now Jeffrey
(Steven Weber) finds his sex life so frightening that he decides to swear
off—to become celibate, and find other interests. It's not so much that he
fears becoming HIV-positive himself, although he does; it's that he fears
falling in love with someone who will die.” But to stop his sexual desires, it
seems to me, misses the whole point of Rudnick’s movie—a film that in its
devotion to dialogue and incident, belongs far more to the actor, in this case,
than to director Christopher Ashley’s.
Although the author does put AIDS front and center in this film—who
could not in a gay movie being shot in New York in 1994?—Jeffrey is not
a film about AIDS, not even a comedy about AIDS, which is how it bills itself.
AIDS, which probably transformed the LGBTQ community more than any other event,
even more than Stonewall, is here simply a metaphor for all the things that are
beginning to make gay men like Jeffrey unable to understand their community and
their role in life.
Before
AIDS everything had been so clear. Mythically speaking, gay men were outsiders,
hated or loved, free to behave in a manner that was unthinkable for other men,
the overtly expressiveness of their emotions to admit to disappointment,
joy, and the feelings about others. Unlike most heterosexual men, they
permitted themselves to go on the prowl, to have sex every day, several times
each day if their stamina might let them, along with partying just to have fun.
Work was simply a necessity to pay the rent. Gay men had few other major
responsibilities except to their lovers and friends, free of the restrictions
of husbands and children, and the rows and rows of other activities that forced
heterosexual men to take shelter in their offices and cozy houses. Gay men,
primarily an urban phenomena, lived in apartments and cozy cottages while
heterosexuals were defined by the suburbs and small towns in which gay men
pretended they all lived. The major responsibilities left to gay men, other
than to have fun, was to keep the body fit and dress as best as the pocket book
permitted.
Since Jeffrey is still uninfected and in good health, why not turn his
attention away from sex by focusing on his own body: “no sex, just sweat.”
Joining a gym, the slim-built man asks for some help with lifting the weights.
The man who immediately comes forward is a strikingly beautiful specimen of the
species, Steve Howard (Michael T. Weiss), who so totally wows our hero that he
can hardly speak without going up another octave. Standing with his
well-endowed pants crotch over Jeffrey’s head, Steve encourages the groaning
first time weight-lighter, to pump it, to want it, to keep going, just a little
bit more, further and further until those gay men sitting in the audience might
wish to cover their erections. Just at the moment of his greatest need of
fortitude, Jeffrey meets the man that might possibly make him happy for the
rest of his life.
He escapes from the gym with hardly enough energy left to stumble on to
a visit with his best friends, Sterling (Patrick Stewart) and Darius (Bryan
Batt), a gay couple who have been together for several years and, upon hearing
with shock about the change he plans to make in his life, advise him to settle
down with someone as they have, which certainly is a better and safer way of
having sex. Being a couple, you don’t, even evidently, have to think about sex.
That, in fact, became the solution for thousands of gay men who before
that period would not even have imagined their lives being restrained by
monogamy, but who soon began fighting for marriage which finally resulted in
the official acknowledgment of the rights by the government and society at
large, another significant alteration in the previous world of gay men.
Sterling is an interior decorator who, a bit older than Jeffrey and his
own younger lover, who purposely maintains the stereotypical behavior of his
profession, tittering and camping his way through life, in part, to entertain
others and hide his own fears and sorrows behind a shield of irony and wit that
also will soon become a relic of the past.
Darius plays the air-headed gay boy who, as a dancer in Cats, has
found a delightful job that will keep him employed for most of the rest of his
lifetime and, again true to type, has nary a worry in his empty head—although
in one of Ashley’s many moments of stop-action camera, Darius turns to his
audience to argue the fact that he is as not stupid as they might think, and by
the end of the film becomes the voice of wisdom. Moreover, what this perfect
couple don’t yet make apparent is that despite their would-be protections of
monogamy and wit, Darius is HIV-positive, and before the movie closes will die
of full-blown AIDS and a cerebral hemorrhage. Obviously, we later discover
there was something on his mind.
Hearing of their friend’s meet-up with
Mr. Right, they spend most of the rest of the movie attempting to bring the two
perfect lovers together, mostly without success.
Unable to get any acting roles other
than small parts of just a few lines playing gay characters, Jeffrey continues
to work as a catering waiter, once again meeting up with Steve, who it is now
revealed works primarily as a bartender at a celebrity cowboy and Indian
celebrity gala headed up by Ann Marwood Bartle (Christine Baranski)
where the film’s writer and director get
to play out Steve’s gay fantasy which turns into a musical hoedown with
the catering boys performing choreographic wonderments that suggest Hello,
Dolly!, gay male strippers such as the boys in Montreal’s Stock Bar, and
sexual couplings that might have been played out by the gay disco singers of
the Village People. Didn’t I mention that this movie is also a musical romance?
This time around Jeffrey can’t quite escape Steve’s lasso, agreeing to a dinner
date.
Regretting his decision, Jeffrey turns
to an evangelical-like gathering headed by Debra Moorehouse (Sigourney Weaver)
who as the love evangelist demonstrates how to hate nearly everyone unlike your
beloved self, freeing her congregation from their traditional habits of loving
and forgiving. Despite the fervor of her congregants, it simply doesn’t move
our doubting Thomas, particularly when she begins to suggest that disease is
the result of the absence of love, which quickly comes close to sounding very
much like the traditional evangelical community’s blame of the gay community
for the AIDS that had infected them. Either way, loving or failing to love, it
appears that the LGBT world had it coming.
But even more disconcerting is the fact that Steve has revealed to
Jeffrey that he is HIV-positive, although not yet showing any signs of disease.
But once more the news sends Jeffrey reeling as he leaves a message of Steve’s
answering machine that he can’t meet him for dinner, lying that he has another
catering event, an act which devastates the man who loves Jeffrey most. The
anger Steve feels for Jeffrey’s behavior threatens any chance for either of
their happiness’ for the rest of their lives.
Only more than a third of way through the movie, we are left for nearly
other hour of Rudnick’s and Ashley’s weaving through fascinating variations of
the gay community in the manner of Woody Allen movies, the Saturday Night
Live comic sketches, Leo McCarey’s An Affair to Remember, and Rob
Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally, to which Rudnick’s script tips it hat.
In his attempt to wipe away any footprints of his previous gay life,
Jeffrey seeks out a self-help group, Sexual Compulsives Anonymous, who like AAA
members testify about their behaviors as a first step to their cure. Dave
(Ethan Phillips) who is the first up readily admits to his obsession, the group
responding in unison before he reveals that it’s probably caused by the fact
that he has a constant 24-hour erection and his penis is 14-inches long, the
group responding, “oooooo. Hi, Dave.”
Jeffrey runs into Steve on the street in what appears to be their final
acrimonious meeting, where Steve finally calls him out on his failures to get
together: “I can understand about the HIV thing. It’s not easy. But I don’t
like lying about it. Not anymore.” Jeffrey’s being sorry has no weight for him.
“I can take being sick. I can fucking take dying, but I can’t take this.” Soon
after, he sarcastically provides him with “all the information” that Jeffrey argues
was previously withheld: “I’ve been positive for almost 5 years. I was sick
once. My T-cells are decent. And every once in a while, like 50 times a day, an
hour, I get very tired of being a person with AIDS, a red ribbon. So sometimes
I forget. Sometimes I choose to forget. Sometimes I choose just to be a gay man
with a dick. Can I forget again?”
But Jeffrey’s sad answer says everything, “No.” It is at this point we
almost lose interest in the man who lost his way so completely that we are
fearful that he will ever find his way home.
Wandering off again, increasingly severed from his own world, Jeffrey
meets up with a trio of
thugs who beat and rob him, somewhat
ironically, because he’s a fag. One has to wonder if a celibate
homosexually-inclined human being can truly be described as being gay.
Disconsolate, our dumb Pilgrim enters a
cathedral, gets down on his knees and prays. A priest (Nathan Lane), moves up
beside him, also kneeling, and begins to goose his butt. Startled by the act,
Jeffrey rises as the priest, Father Dan, signals for him to follow, our hero
needing spiritual guidance, following
after. Once he gets him in the chapel, Dan jumps him demanding sex. When
Jeffrey escapes his clutches, claiming he doesn’t understand what’s going on,
Dan makes it clear: “Maybe you didn’t hear me, I’m a Catholic priest. That
falls somewhere in between a chorus boy and florist.” Before long Dan is
showing Jeffrey his confession box wherein the walls are covered with Broadway
musical album covers, his answer to the question of where is God and why He is
allowing evil into the world.
In the meantime, Darius collapses on the stairwell after the ballet he’s
attended with Sterling and Jeffrey. Things are getting worse.
When taking a run through Central Park, Jeffrey once more meets up with
Steve, who’s evidently the manager of the Pride Day Parade, which Jeffrey has
forgotten about despite the floats and people all about ready for the start. We
imagine now finally this lost fool might come back to the fold, many of his
community having gathered in the same spot. The occasion creates some other
rather comic situations as Olympia Dukakis, playing the mother of a transsexual
female lesbian who asks where they should go for the start of the parade.
Jeffrey is asked to take a group photograph. But instead of having come to his
senses, he seems more lost than ever, telling Steve that he is moving back to
Wisconsin. Steve meanwhile introduces him to his new boyfriend, Sean. The
opportune time for their romance seems to have forever passed.
More than anything, however, what this scene achieves is a magnificent
Arthur J. Bressan-like compilation of clips from the Pride Parade, which in the
context of all the other types we have encountered so far in this movie, makes
it transparently clear just how wonderfully crazy, confused, conflicted, yet
utterly beautiful and ebullient the LGBTQ community is in its messy
amalgamations. I realized more than ever just what a remarkable world we have
created that is so very different from everything else around us. And indeed
these scenes brought tears to my eyes
for its celebration of difference
and waves of anger for many in that same community seeking today to totally
assimilate and smooth out the differences as someone like Jeffrey and so
many other post-AIDS survivors have
attempted to do. Would those who, like Bressan, fought so hard for that
identity and died, in part, because of it, even recognize the LGBTQ+++++ world
of today, the gay and lesbian bars nearly empty or filled with straight girls
and boys, the often self-righteous outrage of some of its members for sexual
excesses and outré demonstrations of public nudity, the continued ostracization
of the effeminate despite the near-universal acceptance of drag behavior, now
performed by as many heterosexuals as homosexuals? It is for some of those very
reasons why I am writing these pages. A great deal of our current acceptance
has come at the cost of our heart and souls, as well as our collective
identity.
Rudnick even in 1993-94 when he produced his play and worked on this
film, clairvoyantly perceived, I would argue, what filmmakers like Bressan,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Bill Sherwood, Jerry Tartaglia, Derek Jarman, David
Wojnarowicz, and many others realized: that sex and gender is at the very heart
of the LGBTQ world, not tangential issues requiring us to imagine we are no
different from heterosexuals. We are different and that’s what makes us
interesting and important in the larger society. Realizing that our difference
has do with our bodies and behavior, does not mean that we need or even can
abandon our intellects or spiritual values. It is a life lived through those
differences that often accounts for our intellectual and spiritual acuity, and
most certainly our empathy for all others.
Finally, that is the lesson of the celibate-in-training Jeffrey learns.
When Darius dies, Sperling is no longer in the mood to hear of Jeffrey’s
sympathies or attempts to ameliorate his suffering. For the moment, Sperling
reveals, he hates Jeffrey for his unspoken betrayal of his own self. As
Sperling argues, “You’re not a part of this. This has nothing to do with you.”
Behaving differently in terms of both sex and gender has been the manner and
matter of his life, if perhaps the cause of his current pain which is also the
source of all his joy and meaning.
Sperling tells Jeffrey that Darius once said: “You are the saddest
person he ever knew.”
Jeffrey, taken aback, asks, “Why did he say that?”
“Because he was sick. Because he had a fatal disease. And he was one
million times happier than you.”
“You loved Darius. You want me to go through that with Steve?”
“Yes.”
It takes a hallucination of Darius
returning to life for Jeffrey to finally comprehend, as Darius puts it, in the
vulgate, “Go dancing. Hate AIDS, Jeffrey, not life. …Think of AIDS like the
guest who won’t leave. The one we all hate. Hey, it’s still our party.”
Jeffrey, finally ready to party again, invites Steve to dinner via a
phone message. He has booked the entire dining room of the Essex Hotel.
Improbably, Steve shows up but, even though he has broken up with his boyfriend,
is still cautious about Jeffrey’s seeming change of heart. Jeffrey must
convince him that he will return the next day after safe sex, that he will risk
his life for love.
I have to admit, I wasn’t convinced by Rudnick’s metaphor of a balloon
which, earlier in the film was explained: when someone lets it loose there is
always another who strives to catch it and protect it from its inevitable
bursting. I more fully believe his assurance that this time he will not leave,
“Because I’m a gay man, and I live in the city. I am not an innocent bystander.
Not anymore.” He has returned to us.
Los Angeles, November 13, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (November 2022).
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